Transmission and audience reaction
Moonbase 3 was promoted by the
Radio Times on the week of broadcast with a two-page article by Mike Bygrave, titled "The Facts of Life on the Moon", that interviewed James Burke about his ideas of life on the moon and also spoke to star Donald Houston, dresser Leslie Hallam and costume designer Dee Kelly about their experiences making the show.
[20] Broadcast on Sunday nights at 7:25pm on
BBC One, audience reaction to the series was disappointing with the debut episode garnering under 6 million viewers and ratings slipping as low as 2 million in subsequent weeks before stabilising at 4 million.
[2] A BBC Audience Research report slated the series as "banal, predictable and slow". Reviewing "Departure and Arrival" in
The Observer,
Clive James described the plot as "the
Yangtze Incident plus liquid oxygen".
Archive status
As was normal procedure at the BBC at the time, the original
PAL master tapes of the series were wiped some time after broadcast and, for many years,
Moonbase 3 was believed to be lost forever. However, in 1993,
NTSC copies of all six episodes were found in co-producer Fox's archives and returned to the BBC. The series was subsequently released on
VHS videotape over three volumes in 1994 by BBC Video and on
DVD in 2002 by Second Sight.
Legacy
Terrance Dicks has felt that
Moonbase 3 was ultimately a failure: "The trouble was we built a too restrictive format for ourselves" and that the series "lacked a sense of wonder and outrageousness". Academic Peter Wright has said about
Moonbase 3 that its "appeal to realism resulted in a disquieting sense of claustrophobia and isolation that undermined the optimism of its premise and captured the general mood of insularity felt (and often desired) in Britain in the early 1970s"
Moonbase 3, although not directly influential, can be seen as an antecedent of similar realistic, near-future, British space series such as
Star Cops and
Space Island One.
