ID4UK

Wing Cmdr. John Reginald ('Reg') and Flt. Lt. Becky Johnson (wife of Phil Johnson) are just two of a wave of Tornado pilots who have already been scrambled to rendezvous with a squadron of Jaguars. But all the Jaguars are annihilated in one foul swoop when they come into contact with an invisible forcefield which protects the craft. UFO fighters emerge and engage the Tornados in a series of dogfights. Becky saves the GLR helicopter, causing a damaged UFO fighter to crash. The Sentry aircraft is low on fuel and makes for Rutland Water reservoir. Nicky and Patrick drive in a jeep to the water in time to save Reg and Max, two downed pilots, from assault by an alien creature.

Word has it that the RAF base at Coningsby has evacuated its remaining Tornados to the Middle-East, the old NATO rendezvous. The Air Chief Marshal has managed to get through to his counterparts in Europe and the US; the idea is to assemble an allied airforce there. Here there are only two Tornados remaining and three pilots. Reg pilots an EFA, the prototype European Fighter Aircraft, not due to go into service until 2000. It's computer navigates through a speech program; it's powerful and has a long range, which might prove useful against the alien aggressors.

While Reg wrestles with the Eurofighter's reluctant computer controls, the UFO fighters are still on their tails. Going with a theory of Patrick's that the aliens may see differently to humans and are targeting the heat signatures of our planes, they climb to a very high altitude and throttle back to nothing. Leaving no heat signature, they manage to evade their pursuers. Splitting with the Tornados Reg heads for the NATO rendezvous. However, his fuel tank has been hit and he has insufficient remaining to reach his goal. Two fighter aircraft intercept him and demand that he identify himself via IFF squawk, otherwise he will be shot down. But the Eurofighter's computer has a negative transponder and cannot do as asked. Identification Friend or Foe is eventually turned on by the slow and annoying voice computer. Reg is instructed to land on an aircraft carrier. There is intelligence that quite a few airforces have collected together at the rendezvous point. There they will regroup and organise an offensive to take back the planet.

In 1996 when the 20th Century Fox feature film Independence Day was being made, producer and co-scriptwriter Dean Devlin was looking for ways to promote the film in the UK. After a set visit in Los Angeles Dirk came home with the rights to proceed with a completely original UK version of events, based on situations created by Devlin and Fox. Independence Day: UK was born, a sixty-minute production created for broadcast on BBC Radio 1 in Dolby Surround.

It centres on the last vestiges of the RAF, with dogfights, plenty of action and intrigue. Although he only plays a small part, and is certainly superfluous to requirements, Mark Goodier is used as a link to the listening public, much like the Orson Welles The War of the Worlds radio broadcast. The idea works well, with the first twenty minutes having a 'live' sound as it would be in the studio. The Dolby surround encoding is introduced once the radio station is destroyed, along with the rest of London, leaving the majority of the action taking place in the skies over Britain. A Battle of Britain for the new age. To create a fully authentic feel to the procedings Dirk recorded the appropriate aircraft noise with the cooperation of the Ministry of Defence, and even had a pilot recorded from inside a cockpit to obtain the correct atmospherics and ambience, with the sounds of control switches also picked up.

Again, all acting performances are very good, this time encapsulating the class and
spirit of the Royal Airforce with calmness under fire, attention to duty and that
quirkiness which is undoubtedly required to get the job done. Colin Baker, Nicky Campbell and Toyah Wilcox, fresh from her radio performance of Peter Pan for Dirk, come across particularly strong. Patrick Moore is obviously suited to this format (he is after all playing himself), but fist-fighting an alien is perhaps pushing credulity a little too far, especially considering his age and shape. This was added as a humorous late change after Dirk was forbidden by Devlin from revealing that the aliens can possess people, a fact

A BBC Radio 1 UFO Watch is being conducted by DJ Nicky Campbell (playing
himself) on board an RAF Sentry Early Warning Aircraft. Also present are Group
Captain Phil Johnson (Colin Baker) and world renouned astronomer Patrick Moore (as
himself). They are monitoring tracking stations around the world after a signal was sent
into space and something came back, detected by Jodrell Bank. As the GLR traffic
helicopter is commandeered to collect some V.I.P.s from Buckingham palace, and
London is gridlocked with vehicles and drivers desperate to reach safety, a huge mass
blocks out the light, one of many fragments from a single object which hover over the
major cirties of the world. A destructive energy weapon erupts from the craft, laying
waste vast areas of London in seconds.

tongue-in-cheek dig at the tough guys of Hollywood movies by Dirk, and the fact that he was forbidden (again by Devlin and Fox) to

have the RAF beat the aliens. In my opinion, all this is typical humour in the face of adversity; it's what the
English are so good at and makes their resolve that much stronger.

Independence Day: UK aired on BBC Radio 1 as a sixty-minute Audio Movie on Sunday 4th August 1996. It was
subsequently released by Polygram's Speaking Volumes (5329634). Feedback was very good on this one; it won the
Talking Business award for best production for the second year running, was the number one Spoken Word cassette in the Bookseller Chart, and most notably reached number sixty-six in the normal album charts - an excellent achievement.

During the original broadcast a few worried phone calls were made to the BBC Duty Office, although not enough to cause a widespread panic! Society as a whole has changed a great deal since the fifties; people are less gullable or more open-minded, even though the threat of terrorism has replaced the Cold War.

To cap then, this is a thoroughly entertaining Audio Movie production, with realistic and intelligent dialogue, and a lot less of a gung-ho attitude than the film. Find a copy of Independence Day: UK, or miss it at your peril.

they were saving for the feature film. Patrick Moore could have been a little more sceptical early on (he scoffs at the idea of artificially generated gravity, only to accept a large grey cloud as a UFO before it has been confirmed. However, his quote from The War Of The Worlds book by H.G. Wells is an excellent touch.

Although this is essentially a serious piece and comes across as such, there are some notable humorous one-liners. After receiving information that the approaching object is potatoe-shaped, Nicky Campbell quips, "An extraterrestrial root vegetable is heading for Earth!" When being told "The wing is flapping!" Baker's character Phil Johnson replies, "Well, it works for the birds." There is the quote used at the head of this review, and probably the best one, "When this is all over and we've defeated these monsters, the Yanks will take the credit for it. You wait and see." This last is an intentional

"The idea for Independence Day: UK came from Twentieth Century Fox's London
office. Matthew Bannister, then Controller of Radio 1, suggested parallels with Orson Welles' famous 1938 radio broadcast of The War Of The Worlds - the one that supposedly panicked America. I ran with both ideas, it was a great opportunity, despite the fact that I thought the film script wasn't that terrific - and we were under strict orders NOT to let the RAF defeat the aliens! The US military had to be the winners! Kind of ironic given events today.

"The RAF were brilliant. Their PR office at the MOD in London enabled us to visit RAF bases at Wallington and Coningsby in Lincolnshire, where Darren Bowen (one of the sound engineers from The Soundhouse) and I recorded Tornados, AWACS aircraft and, memorably, a flight of Swiss Air Force Dassault Mirage fighters taking off. I volunteered for that one. I was about 50 yards away running the DAT machine as the first Mirage fired up its afterburners, and I moved ten feet backwards in a standing position without lifting my feet off the ground!

"The story behind Dannii Minogue's credited Special Alien Effect is that she was
hosting a kid's TV show in 1995 and phoned me up asking if they could do a piece
about our radio extravaganzas (this was in the happy days when we were on Radio 1 and getting lots of exposure with Spidey and Judge Dredd). Although the deal

was not settled on ID4:UK, I knew TV exposure would be good publicity for us, and although I did not have a script I thought that an alien death scene would probably figure in the final programme! How about that for guesswork! So Dannii and the crew came to The Soundhouse and she was charming and a sport (Kylie is too, very easy to work with and they are nice people too), so I hastily cobbled up a set of elements for the effect which included Dannii screaming, chucking a bucket of water over a car and suchlike, which I did manage to mix together and squeeze into the final production, and felt that Dannii should get the credit for!

"Although this is a noticeably shorter project, one hour was the maximum slot Radio 1 could give us. I figured, if it was good enough for Orson Welles it'll be good enough for us!"

In 1996 Dirk formed the company Audio Movies Limited at The Soundhouse, along with partners Paul Deeley and Phil Horne. Their purpose was to further hone the audio cinematic skills displayed on previous projects, and to move into other subject areas as well as the comic books which had proved so successful. The target audience would be primarily the BBC Radio 1 daytime serial slot, but also other radio networks. The name of the company was also a way of spreading the word that Dirk's releases were not old-style radio drama with clinking cups, but rather full-blown movies in all but sight. Ironically, their first job under this banner was an evangelical production of The Gospel of St. Luke, for America. However, after an adaptation of J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan for Radio 4, Dirk set to work on Independence Day: UK, his first foray into
film-related material.

The narrated introduction to this piece pays homage to the 1930s radio production of The War of The Worlds, in which Orson Welles apparently terrified millions of US listeners into uncertainty over whether they were hearing fact or fiction (although the reported hysteria was vastly exaggerated). Independence Day: UK is an updated version of a similar stance, which also ties-in loosely with the Hollywood production of the Independence Day feature film.