Inspector Spacetime/Trivia

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• Adored by the Network: Considered BTV's flagship show for decades. Sadly, the network has a long and storied history of being chronically short on funds, and suffering from decade-long internal power struggles. The whole "Internal Investigation of the Inspector" plot-arc had to be in part a comment on this, which probably contributed to the whole relationship souring at the end of the original run.
• Cast Incest: The actor who played Inspector Spacetime's son in said episode is Landlord's real life father (It Makes Sense in Context) and is now in a real life relationship with the Fifth Inspector's actress.
• Credits Gag: Until the Tenth Inspector era, Marius Goring continued to appear in the credits as "The Best Inspector." Most fans thought this was an in-joke referring to the actor's enormous popularity, but in fact it was a term of Goring's contract.
• Enforced Method Acting: Rumour has it that actress Carla May Studebaker was encouraged by the producer to take a cocktail of tranquilizers to help her get into the dreamy, otherworldly, aloof character of Susannah Overseer. This also made her challenging to work with--she was famous for falling asleep in the middle of scenes--which may have contributed to the character being written out of the show.
• Executive Meddling:
  • In the 1960s, Owen Pantwhistle, BTV's Vice President, Dramatic Television and Puppetry, was responsible for several bizarre decisions, including the idea for the monsters in Third Inspector episode "The Kittens". Due to a traumatic childhood experience that he refuses to talk about to this day, Pantwhistle insisted that the titular kittens would become the show's most terrifying monsters. Instead, the episode proved to be an extremely effective Nightmare Retardant and is widely hailed as the cutest episode of Inspector Spacetime ever.
  • In 1966, Pantwhistle decided the show needed more sex appeal and instructed the producers to add a sexy female Associate for the remaining episodes of the series. The resultant contrived transformation of the Associate Peter into Petula drew protests from media watchdogs the Civic Eyes and Ears Council.
  • In the 1970s, after the CEEC's public campaign against the Fourth Inspector's grimmer atmosphere, BTV reassigned then-producer Brian Clemens to the crime-action drama 'The Professionals' and ordered his replacement to return to the lighter space adventures of earlier series and to find a new head writer.
  • Following the strangeness of the Chapman era, the producers attempted to make the scripts "less weird" and simply made them horrible instead.
  • Sean Pantwhistle, the successor to his father, Owen, on the 1992 TV movie, issued an order to "inject some hip-hop urban flavour" into the relaunch, specifically mandating that the Inspector rap. While the younger Pantwhistle's increasingly odd demands and tense sixteen-hour standoff with the Metropolitan Police are the stuff of legends, the tie-in "Inspector Jamz" compilation album helped promote the careers of The Criminal Minds and The Brotherhood.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Just as That Ripoff has achieved unexpected popularity in South Korea, Inspector Spacetime has enjoyed a cult following in Sarkhan for decades.
• Hey, It's That Guy!
  • Troy Skeleton appeared in most episodes of the first four Inspectors, usually as a Blorgon, Cicuit-Chap, or other alien. He appeared on screen in "The Three Inspectors", "The Lethal Murderer", and "The Might of Zorl".
  • Alan Moore, who wrote several Inspector Spacetime comic stories for CCC (Creation and Concept Comics) Publications early in his career, recently appeared as the Chief Inspector in an episode penned by his friend Neil Gaiman (who appeared as the Detective).
  • Tim Curry plays Blackbeard in the Tenth Inspector episode "The Zombie Navy".
• Missing Episode: Numerous examples over the show's long history:
  • In the 1960s, like the BBC during the same period, BTV had a habit of reusing videotapes to save money. This is why so many 1962-1968 episodes of Inspector Spacetime are missing.
  • Several episodes were lost when the master tapes fell down a well in a freak bowling accident, including parts of "Solar System 16", "Journey to the Familiar," and "The Story Creators". Later, the same freak accident befell tapes of the infamous "Peter/Petula" episodes, leading some fans to theorize that the episodes were, in fact, "pushed".
  • "Ashata" was left incomplete after a thunderstorm and resulting fire destroyed all the sets. The episode was never completed or aired, though a few scenes did appear in the Clip Show episode "Memories of Tomorrow". The rumour that one of BTV's police dramas opportunistically used the sets to depict an arson investigation is sadly just that.
    • Steve Carrell's Inspector would feature in a remake for radio years later, alongside Maureen O'Brien as Susannah Overseer.
  • "The 1981 Inspector Spacetime Holiday Special": After its broadcast's critical reception, the creator took a hammer and smashed all copies at BTV studios, though this did not prevent his knighthood being revoked.
  • "The Missing Episode" from The Mary Sue Predicaments is not an example, as it never really existed. It was "made" both as a tie-in for the Cosmic Retcon crossover arc between IS and Peacemist and because every single extra showed up tired and emotional on the sole day of filming. However, the production numbers and DVD releases for Season One include a spot for the episode, and if you click on the episode title, a motionless image of a Snarling Lion slowly creeps into the screen.
• Old Shame: Christopher Lee, the Second Inspector, is a mild example. While not actively disliking the show, he has always expressed bemusement at society's ongoing fascination with a "rather silly little" character he was hastily conscripted to play forty years ago, and that he took mostly because it offered a steady paycheck for a few years. He has joked that he's grateful to the extent that at least it has kept him from being typecast as "that chap who used to be Dracula."
• The Problem with Pen Island: In the early years of the World Wide Web, the inspectorspacetime.com URL was owned by Ukrainian marathoner Irina Nikolaevna Spector and used to host her pace time calculator programs. Ms. Spector finally sold the URL to BTV in 2009 when she added social networking features to her site. Adding the ability for users to post their own pace times, she then moved the "I.N. Spector's Pace Time" page to its current location at pacetimesexchange.com.
• Typecasting:
  • Leslie French abruptly departed from the role as the First Inspector at the beginning of the fourth series after a dispute over typecasting with BTV.
  • Christopher Obi was credited under his screen name Daniel Landlord when he debuted as the Tenth Inspector but after finishing his tenure decided to revert to his given name to prevent being too closely associated with the role.
• What Could Have Been: In the later seasons, new script editor Roger Giles decided that the Inspector was still 'too mysterious' and planned to reveal much of his background and personal information, including his family history, his exact age, his medical exam results, his favourite kind of filling, his name it's Chet, and his shoe-size. This became known as the "Giles Counter-Plot". The show's cancellation prevented this, thankfully, and much of the information that was planned to be revealed was made non-canonical by later Expanded Universe works, which means his name isn't Chet.
  • A lot of fans think that Richard Ayoade would have made a pretty awesome Ninth Inspector if not for Boogatron Media wanting a bigger name to restart the franchise.