Back in 1975, the year 1999 seemed a long time in the future. While American television science fiction had tended to paint a rosy picture of what was just around the corner for us, the British take on the genre was always more circumspect, taking the attitude that mankind wasn’t quite up to being able to safeguard itself from the dangers of the burgeoning technology it had created.

Indeed, the issue of nuclear waste from power stations was just coming into focus – it was a more innocent time before the Three Mile Island and Chernobyl disasters.  However, step forward Gerry and Sylvia Anderson, renowned from their visions of the future, and the success of their previous live-action SF TV series, UFO. The solution to storage of a dangerous compound with a half-life of thousands of years was to pack it off to the moon.  And that’s when the problems begin in Space: 1999, which is being released by Network on Blu-ray this October.

I used to hate history at school. It was never made relevant to my modern world. So, when I find a book that has several chapters that make the past relevant to the global situation we find ourselves in today, the fact that I am actually able to digest the information, and enjoy doing so, is a credit to the writer concerned.

The author in question is David Icke. But hold on there, before you surf off to somewhere else, let me say that less than four years ago I would have had the same reaction you probably just had – a rolling of the eyes, a shaking of the head, and swiftly moving on. Why would I have that reaction? Well, he’s a nutter, isn’t he?  Thinks he’s the son of ‘God’. Believes the Queen’s a lizard. He predicted an escalation of massive natural disasters, and a slow and methodical move towards global government. It’s at that point you should, if you’ve been paying attention, realise in the last scenario he’s been spot-on.  So, there’s something to investigate here ...