THE future, as Doris Day once noted, is not ours to see. But que sera sera, because according to Defying Gravity, the BBC's new international co-production turkey, nothing much will change anyway. It's set in 2052, and apparently clothes, TV sets, be
er bottles and hairstyles will look exactly the same. Even YouTube, ridiculously, will still be on the go. Or perhaps all the characters are just really, really into retro style.
The only two things the series has bothered to alter are that abortion is illegal again in the US and the space programme is back on. The former creates a problem for an astronaut involved in the latter, one of a team about to embark on a long, ambitious mission to survey seven planets.
The show stars Ron Livingston – best known for dumping Carrie Bradshaw by Post-It note in Sex and the City – as square-jawed astronaut Maddox Donner, who is haunted by having abandoned two colleagues on Mars during a disastrous earlier mission. Here's hoping they were rescued by aliens and return, mad as hell, later in the series.
When not feeling bad about that, he is smouldering sexily at ladies and rescuing a friend who has decided to take his own life in the slowest way possible, by sitting outside the spaceship until his suit runs out of oxygen and playing happily with his small statue of Ganesha. The friend is just as happy to be talked out of it, which enables Donner to feel better and smugly conclude: "Space travel's a fool's game and if that's what I am, so be it." You said it, pally.
It transpires that a mysterious "It" – possibly an alien – is secretly influencing the mission, having reversed Donner's vasectomy (which explains how his one-night-stand got pregnant) and somehow selecting those taking part. Whatever "It" is, "It" clearly enjoys soap operas, since the attractive crew have all either slept with one another or are obviously going to. The first stop's Venus, so maybe "It" is the goddess of lurve.
Incidentally, the astronauts wear special magnetic suits which stop them from floating around within the ship (which is handy for the budget of the show). Uniquely, these suits somehow extend their magical magnetism upwards to the ponytail of one crew member, which hangs neatly down instead of flowing out from her head – now, that really is defying gravity. However, when one couple strip off to have sex, they do start floating.
Sadly neither afterwards says the Earth moved, but the show's actual dialogue is nearly as bad. "You're not gay, are you?" someone is asked. "No, I'm a geologist." Another woman tells the ship's doctor, who is an alcoholic, that he must join the mission because "there's nothing to drink up there. I'm saving your life." Space rehab! It could be the new Priory – someone get Amy Winehouse's people on to it.
But when they're not talking, it's worse, because as well as sharing a producer with Grey's Anatomy, Defying Gravity shares the tendency to include soppy song montages in each episode, where milky music plays over close-ups of people looking wistful.
Poorly written, badly thought out and cheesily produced, this is the kind of thing that gives sci-fi, and indeed soap opera, a bad name. If there's one thing which could make this dopey series worse, it's the news that it has already been cancelled overseas, so the big mystery may never even be solved. Ah, sod "It".
