Unaired Pilots Marathon
Saturday 10 February 2024, 11:15am - 9:30pm
Lecture Theatre 2
The episodes they didn't want you to see!
What if Kirk wasn’t the captain of the Enterprise?
What if Richard E Grant played the Ninth Doctor?
What if Superman was actually a dog?
Join the Geek Society on Saturday the 10th of February in Lecture Theatre 2 as we explore the wacky and unusual world of pilot episodes!
Pilot episodes are created to test the feasibility of a new show before it’s commissioned for a full series. If the episode goes down well and a series is commissioned, the pilot becomes episode 1 and the producers hope that no-one notices the slightly lower budget, but that’s not always the case…
Sometimes these pilot episodes lead nowhere, leaving orphaned episodes of forgotten shows like The Adventures of Superpup, which retells the Superman story with anthropomorphic animals, or Gerry Anderson’s The Investigator, which follows two crime-solving children who have been shrunk by a benevolent alien to the size of marionettes.
And if a full series is commissioned but with substantial changes, the pilot episode offers a glimpse of what the show might have been, like the hour-long Sherlock pilot featuring a much shorter-haired Benedict Cumberbatch, the Blackadder pilot with a different Baldrick, or the pilot of Doctor Who in which the Doctor is too unlikeable.
It is from these strange relics of television history that we draw our latest marathon – uncanny versions of shows we love and obscure shows that never came to be…
Everyone’s welcome to come along, and none of these stories require any prior knowledge. Join us for the whole marathon, or just drop in for your favourites!
11:30 – The Adventures of Superpup (1958)
12:00 – Doctor Who: An Unearthly Child [Pilot] (1963)
12:35 – Star Trek: The Cage (1965)
14:20 – Gerry Anderson’s The Investigator (1973)
14:55 – The Muppets Valentine Show (1974)
15:25 – The Muppet Show: Sex and Violence (1975)
16:10 – K9 & Company: A Girl’s Best Friend (1981)
17:10 – The Black Adder [Pilot] (1982)
17:50 – Sesame Street: Snuffy’s Parents Get a Divorce [scene recreation] (1992)
18:00 – Star Trek Voyager: Caretaker [Geneviève Bujold scene recreation] (1994)
18:45 – Doctor Who: Scream of the Shalka (2003)
20:15 – Sherlock: A Study in Pink [Pilot] (2009)
So grab your alternate reality hat and get ready for a wild ride to a parallel world in which Doctor Who is a cartoon and The Muppet Show is hosted by Nigel the orchestra conductor instead of Kermit the Frog…