A for Andromeda is a British television science fiction drama serial first made and broadcast by the BBC in seven parts in 1961.

[1] Written by cosmologist Fred Hoyle, in conjunction with author and television producer John Elliot, it concerns a group of scientists who detect a radio signal from another galaxy that contains instructions for the design of an advanced computer.

The opening titles of each episode are prefaced by a television interview in which Professor Ernst Reinhart (Esmond Knight) looks back on the events of the serial.

Great Britain, 1970 – a new radio telescope, designed by the young scientists John Fleming (Peter Halliday) and Dennis Bridger (Frank Windsor) under the supervision of Professor Reinhart (Esmond Knight), has been built at Bouldershaw Fell.

Bridger meanwhile, has sold out to an international conglomerate called Intel, represented by the sinister Kaufmann (John Hollis).

Bridger is confronted by Ministry of Defence agent Judy Adamson (Patricia Kneale); fleeing he tumbles over a cliff to his death.

His warnings are not heeded, however, and Christine, mesmerised by Cyclops and by the machine, is compelled to grasp the two terminals – she falls to the floor, killed by a massive electric shock.

He is horrified to discover that the Government has made a trade deal with Kaufmann and Intel for the rights to a new enzyme that Andromeda has developed that heals injured cells.

Fred Hoyle was an astronomer best known for his work on the understanding of the creation of the elements through stellar nucleosynthesis, for developing the steady state theory of the universe and for coining the term "Big Bang" for the steady state theory's rival dynamic evolving model of the universe.

[3] James contacted John Elliot, the assistant head of the BBC Script Department, who was interested in making a science fiction serial.

[3] Elliot, along with James and BBC script editor Donald Bull, met with Hoyle who outlined a potential story for an eight-part serial; this was what would eventually become A for Andromeda.

Hoyle drew his inspiration for the serial from the work of astronomer Frank Drake who at that time had begun "Project Ozma", one of the first experiments in the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI).

[4] In late June 1960, the BBC made an offer of 250 guineas to Hoyle for the idea, which would be dramatised for television, as a serial in seven 30-minute parts, by John Elliot.

While searching for a suitable candidate, co-producer and director Michael Hayes met an agent who suggested Julie Christie, then a student at the Central School of Speech and Drama, recommending her as "the new Bardot".

[10] Because the serial was set in the near future, both Hoyle[11] and Michael Hayes[8] felt that women would occupy more progressive roles in the years to come.

"[8] A late change to the script was changing the sex of the biologist character, George Dawnay, to Madeline Dawnay; writing to Mary Morris offering her the part, Hayes said, "don't be put off by the fact that the lady appears to smoke a pipe half way through and give vent to some rather strange utterances.

[12] Location filming took place in July 1961 around London, including at IBM's offices on Wigmore Street, and in the vicinity of Tenby in Pembrokeshire, Wales where the Manorbier Army Base stood in for the Thorness research centre.

[13] The army assisted the production by providing a helicopter for scenes of personnel arriving at Thorness and for aerial shots of the base and environs.

When it is backed by the authority of a scientist with the international reputation of Fred Hoyle, it ranks as a major television event".

[20] Not so impressed was L. Marsland Gander in The Daily Telegraph who wrote, "As a devotee of Prof. Hoyle and a keen student of disembodied intelligence I felt impatient...

Fraser of Dornock, Scotland, wrote to the BBC's correspondence programme Points of View, saying, "Enough surely has been seen of Prof. Fleming's overacted hysterical outbursts".

Bartlett of Watford, who wrote to inform readers that the reference to DNA (then newly discovered) was not a fictional substance but really existed.

In 2005, a 16mm film print of the sixth episode, "The Face of the Tiger", was donated to the BBC archives by a private collector; this copy is missing the pre-credits sequence of Reinhart's interview.

A complete set of off-air photographs, known as tele-snaps, were taken of all seven episodes and were held in the collection of Michael Hayes prior to his death.

The cast includes Nicoletta Rizzi as Andromeda, Paola Pitagora as Judy Adamson, Luigi Vannucchi as Fleming, and Tino Carraro as Reinhart.

[30] The prospect of novelising A for Andromeda arose early in the serial's production when Souvenir Press contacted the BBC in May 1961 indicating their interest in publishing a tie-in novel.

Hoyle and Elliot published the novel A for Andromeda in 1962 at a time when the fundamental importance of the biological information encoded in DNA was just starting to be understood.

In the real world of today, whole genomes can actually be built from chemically synthesized DNA sequences, and when inserted into a receptive cellular environment can be brought to life to create a novel organism (see for example Hutchinson et al.[32]).

[33] A for Andromeda was reconstructed using tele-snaps with on-screen captions to describe the plot set to a soundtrack of music from the serial.

Extra features included a commentary on the surviving material by Michael Hayes, Peter Halliday and Frank Windsor; a specially made making-of documentary, Andromeda Memories; an excerpt from Points of View as well as a photo gallery, PDFs of the shooting scripts and the Radio Times articles and detailed production notes by television historian Andrew Pixley.