The story keyed into serious anxieties about the future, but the idea of playing with these in a pretend documentary raised alarms. “Everybody in Anglia Television was wetting themselves with fear,” Ambrose remembers. But Anglia’s founding executive director was one of the great British movie moguls, Sir John Woolf, who’d produced the likes of Ava Gardner and Humphrey Bogart. And he “just loved it, because he knew exactly what the impact would be, and he just overruled everybody and said: ‘Go ahead!’”
To give the show gravitas, they approached Brinton, who was warned by friends not to get involved, given that he was trying to become a Conservative MP. Brinton ignored them, played the earnest anchorman absolutely straight – and won his election regardless. Brian Eno was commissioned to write an eerie piece of music. The production designer Terry Ackland-Snow, who had worked on Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, ingeniously evoked signs of life under the Martian landscape by dragging a nail under sand. They acquired footage from Nasa and added sensational fake astronaut voiceovers – a mix of fact and fiction that Ambrose wryly concedes was “completely nefarious”.
The show was meant to be broadcast on April Fools’ Day, but fatefully, it had to be moved back, and went out on 20 June. Ambrose says he “intended to cause a flap” – and he did. While those end credits did begin with a dateline saying “April 1st”, many people took the show seriously. ITV was hit by a barrage of calls from viewers – some protesting, others seeking reassurance the programme was fiction. The Scottish Daily Record headlined the row “TV TERROR!” Ackland-Snow had an incensed Jehovah’s Witness knock on his door to tell him he should be ashamed of himself.
lternative 3 was broadcast simultaneously in Canada, Iceland, New Zealand and Australia – but not in the US. ABC wanted to network it, but was forbidden by broadcasting rules. It was initially visible only to those Americans whose TVs picked up Canadian programming. However, 1978 brought a spin-off book. Ambrose was too busy to write it, but with his blessing, a journalist called Leslie Watkins was brought in. Watkins wove in more 1970s nightmares – drawing on revelations about CIA attempts at brainwashing to suggest that Alternative 3 involved “adjusting” batches of humans to turn them into slaves. It also suggested that the claim the documentary was a hoax was a cover story.
And so Ambrose’s fiction escaped its British origins to take up residence in the strange dreamscape of American conspiracy theory
