The Strangerers is a British television comedy-drama science fiction series written by Rob Grant (best known as co-creator of Red Dwarf) and was broadcast on Sky One between 15 February and 11 April 2000.
A single series was made with a total of nine episodes (the first being one hour in length and the rest 30 minutes each). The show ended on a cliffhanger but despite this it ended up being cancelled and a second series was never produced. It has not been released on DVD, nor repeated since its original run.
Background
The show was conceived as Sky One's first original comedy series, developed in the wake of the channel losing the broadcasting rights to
Friends, which had moved to Channel 4. Sky invested £300,000 per episode and granted the creators full creative autonomy. Creator and writer Rob Grant initially pitched the show to the
BBC, but they declined, having recently acquired the rights to broadcast the similar American sci-fi sitcom
3rd Rock from the Sun.
Plot
The story centres on two alien agents, Cadet
Errol Flynn and Pseudo-Cadet
David Niven. They are incredibly advanced and evolved vegetables on a fact finding mission to
Earth, where they take on human form. Their supervisor is accidentally
Decapitation shortly after arrival, leaving the cadets to fend for themselves. Through the course of the series the aliens discover the intricacies of basic needs, like the
eating, the
sleeping and how to purchase things, usually doing so in their own idiosyncratic manner.
Their exact whereabouts on Earth is something of a mystery. The society in which they find themselves bears some resemblance to both Great Britain and America, and there are hints that a Totalitarianism is in charge. There are also parodying those in A Clockwork Orange. Two agents and their apparently commander try to capture the aliens. The aliens repeatedly escape, but not without suffering occasional injuries themselves.
Cast
Episodes
International broadcasts
The show was picked up by Australian television subscription service
Foxtel and broadcast on The Comedy Channel, who described it as "silly and very funny".
See also
-
2000 in British television
External links
