Captain Scarlet (character)
Captain Scarlet is the fictional main character in Gerry Anderson's British Supermarionation science-fiction television series Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons and its computer-animated remake, Gerry Anderson's New Captain Scarlet. Well-trusted by the commander-in-chief of Spectrum, Colonel White, Captain Scarlet is the primary agent of the organisation and is assigned the most dangerous and crucial missions, he is a close friend of Captain Blue, his "field partner" and thus with whom he undertakes the majority of his missions, although he is on friendly terms with all other Spectrum agents. A close relationship with Destiny Angel is hinted at several times in the series. Captain Scarlet was killed in the first episode of the series, "The Mysterons," in a car crash brought about by the Mysterons, which resulted in the death of fellow officer Captain Brown. Both men were reconstructed by the aliens, who assigned their exact likenesses of both men to assassinate the World President; the Captain Brown likeness was turned into a walking bomb for this purpose.
When this attempt in New York failed, the Captain Scarlet likeness kidnapped the President from Cloudbase and flew him to England, taking him to the top of the London Car-Vu, a large car park tower. Cornered while holding the President at gunpoint over the city below, the Captain Scarlet likeness was shot by Captain Blue and fell 800 feet to his apparent destruction. However, at the end of the episode it was revealed that Captain Scarlet was returning to life and had become incapable of dying permanently due to the powers of the Mysterons, although the fall had broken the Mysteron programming and returned him to his original personality; this extraordinary ability heals Scarlet of physical injuries within hours, making him indestructible. Captain Scarlet's Mysteronised body, like those of all Mysteron likenesses, is still vulnerable to electricity and impervious to X-rays, he has a "sixth sense" when in the presence of a strong Mysteron influence – he becomes nauseated and suffers a severe headache – but this sense sometimes does not indicate all Mysteron presences in an area.
Though Captain Scarlet "dies" several times in the course of the series – quite violently – he always returns to life. In "Attack on Cloudbase," Captain Scarlet is declared and permanently dead during the course of the battle for Cloudbase. Captain Scarlet, as the main protagonist, is one of the most developed characters in the series, his real name is Paul Metcalfe. He has black hair and blue eyes, speaks with a Mid-Atlantic accent and is said to be from Winchester in Hampshire, England, he was born on 17 December 2036. He is not unfamiliar with gambling and drinking though he has lost his vulnerability to drunkenness. In the episode "Flight 104," Captain Scarlet expresses a preference for steak "with all the trimmings." Captain Scarlet is a competent pilot and can drive any vehicle. He is a qualified astronaut, he is a somewhat stereotypical hero in that he is dependable and always gets the job done although he is not always successful. He does, have a lighter side, he has a rather dry wit and sarcastic sense of humour using this in dialogue with other Spectrum agents.
He can turn his hand to a variety of weapons from guns to electric cables. Captain Scarlet is not shown to have any love interests during the series although previous attractions are indicated at some points, a popular speculation among the fan community of the series is that he has a soft spot for, if not a relationship with, compatriot Rhapsody Angel. Captain Scarlet has a close friendship with Captain Blue, who acts as Captain Scarlet's "field partner." Captain Blue cares about his friend and Captain Scarlet trusts him implicitly, although he is professional enough to use deadly force against him as necessary when Captain Scarlet was controlled by the Mysterons. In the episode "Special Assignment," Captain Blue tries to stop Captain Scarlet's apparent spiral of self-destruction, showing the bond between them. In the episode "Renegade Rocket," both men are prepared to stay in a missile base targeted by the Mysterons and die in a last-ditch attempt to stop its destruction. Captain Scarlet is friends with Lieutenant Green, as demonstrated when he accompanies Captain Scarlet and Captain Blue on certain missions.
However, Captain Scarlet is friendly with all other Cloudbase personnel, he has no particular enemies among those with whom he is associated. Born in Winchester, England, UK, Scarlet's mother was Ann Brightman, a British astrophysicist, while his father, Tom Metcalfe, was an American pilot who joined the International Space Agency; as a boy of ten, Paul watched his father take humankind's first steps on Mars and vowed to follow in his historic footsteps. He stud
Gerry Anderson
Gerry Anderson was an English television and film producer, director and occasional voice artist. He remains famous for his futuristic television programmes his 1960s productions filmed with "Supermarionation". Anderson's first television production was the 1957 Roberta Leigh children's series The Adventures of Twizzle. Supercar and Fireball XL5 followed both series breaking into the US television market in the early 1960s. In the mid-1960s Anderson produced his most successful series, Thunderbirds. Other television productions of the 1960s include the Mysterons. Anderson wrote and produced several feature films whose box office performance was unexceptional. Following a shift towards live action productions in the 1970s, he had a long and successful association with media impresario Lew Grade and Grade's company ITC, continuing until the second series of Space: 1999. After a career lull when a number of new series concepts failed to get off the ground, his career began a new phase in the early 1980s when audience nostalgia for his earlier Supermarionation series led to new Anderson productions being commissioned.
Projects include a 2005 CG remake of Captain Scarlet entitled Gerry Anderson's New Captain Scarlet. Gerald Alexander Abrahams was born in the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson and Obstetric Hospital in Bloomsbury and spent the early years of his life in Kilburn, Neasden, London, he was educated at Kingsgate Infants School in Kilburn and Braintcroft Junior and Senior schools in Neasden, prior to winning a scholarship to Willesden County Grammar School. His parents were Joseph Abrahams. Anderson's Jewish paternal grandfather had the surname Bieloglovski, he settled in London. Anderson's Jewish mother Deborah changed the family name to "Anderson" in 1939. At the start of the Second World War, Gerry Anderson's elder brother, volunteered for service in the Royal Air Force. Lionel wrote letters to his family, in one letter described a US Army Air Forces air base called Thunderbird Field, the name of which stayed in his younger brother's memory. On 16 October 1952, Anderson married Betty Wrightman, they had two daughters and Joy.
Gerry Anderson began his career in photography, earning a traineeship with the British Colonial Film Unit after the war. He developed an interest in film editing and moved on to Gainsborough Pictures, where he gained further experience. In 1947 he was conscripted for national service with the Royal Air Force, he was based at RAF Manston, an airfield near Margate, served part of his time in air traffic control. On one occasion, a Spitfire was coming in to land, it was only about 50 feet above the ground before the runway controller alerted the pilot to the fact the plane's undercarriage hadn't lowered. The pilot climbed away; as this was a moment Anderson always remembered, he found it all too easy to write about aircraft when he devised stories for Thunderbirds. After completing his military service, he returned to Gainsborough, where he worked until the studio was closed in 1950, he worked freelance on a series of feature films. In the mid-1950s, Anderson joined the independent television production company Polytechnic Studios as a director, where he met cameraman Arthur Provis.
After Polytechnic collapsed, Provis, Reg Hill and John Read formed Pentagon Films in 1955. Pentagon was wound up soon after and Anderson and Provis formed a new company, AP Films, for Anderson-Provis Films, with Hill and Read as their partners. Anderson continued his freelance directing work to obtain funds to maintain the fledgling company. AP Films' first television venture was produced for Granada Television. Created by Roberta Leigh, The Adventures of Twizzle was a series for young children about a doll with the ability to'twizzle' his arms and legs to greater lengths, it was Anderson's first work with puppets, the start of his long and successful collaborations with puppeteer Christine Glanville, special effects technician Derek Meddings and composer/arranger Barry Gray. It was Anderson's desire to move into live-action television; the Adventures of Twizzle was followed by another low-budget puppet series with Leigh, Torchy the Battery Boy. Although the APF puppet productions made the Andersons world-famous, Gerry Anderson was always unhappy about working with puppets.
He used them to get attention from and a good reputation with TV networks, hoping to have them serve as a stepping stone to his goal of making live-action film and TV drama. During the production of The Adventures of Twizzle, Anderson started an affair with secretary Sylvia Thamm and left his wife and children. Following his divorce from his first wife, Anderson married Thamm in November 1960. AP Films' third series was the children's western fantasy-adventure series Four Feather Falls. Provis left the partnership. Four Feather Falls was the first Anderson series to use an early version of the so-called Supermarionation process, though this term had yet to be used. Despite APF's success with Four Feather Falls, Granada did not commission another series from them, so Anderson took up the offer to direct a film for Anglo-Amalgamated Studios. Crossroads to Crime was a low-budget B-grade cri
ITC Entertainment
The Incorporated Television Company, or ITC Entertainment as it was referred to in the United States, was a British company involved in production and distribution of television programmes. Television mogul Lew Grade set up the Incorporated Television Programme Company with Prince Littler and Val Parnell in 1954. Designed to be a contractor for the UK's new ITV network, the company failed to win a contract when the Independent Television Authority felt that doing so would give too much control in the entertainment business to the Grade family's companies although the ITA said that ITP were free to make their own programmes which they could sell to the new network companies. ITP put most of the production budget into producing The Adventures of Robin Hood. However, the winner of one of the contracts, the Associated Broadcasting Development Company, had insufficient funds to start broadcasting, so the ITP owners were brought into the consortium and Lew Grade came to dominate it. In 1957, now known as Incorporated Television Company, the company became a subsidiary of the Associated Broadcasting Company –which soon changed its name to Associated Television after threats of legal action from fellow ITV company Associated British Corporation–and produced its own programmes for ATV and for syndication in the United States.
It distributed ATV material outside of the UK. From 1966 to 1982 it was a subsidiary of Associated Communications Corporation after the acquisition of ATV; the initials'ITC' stood for two different things: Independent Television Corporation for sales to the Americas, Incorporated Television Company for sales to the rest of the world. The American Independent Television Corporation was formed in 1958 as a joint venture with Jack Wrather. In September 1958 it purchased Television Programs of America for $11,350,000. Wrather sold his shares to Lew Grade at the end of the decade; the large foreign sales achieved by ITC during the British government's export drives of the 1960s and 1970s led to ACC receiving the Queen's Award for Export on numerous occasions until ITC's association with the broadcaster and success led to the demise of both ATV as a broadcaster and ITC as a production company in 1982. During 1988 The Bell Group, the owners of ITC were taken over by the Bond Corporation. Subsequently, the new owners started an asset-stripping programme.
In November 1988 ITC Entertainment was bought by its management. In 1990, ITC concentrated on low-budget feature films. TV production at ITC would not resume until the company forged a deal with producer David Gerber in 1993. In 1989, ITC Home Video was formed in the United Kingdom, to make use of the many hours of programmes in the archive unseen for years; this short-lived home entertainment division would end in 1991. In the following period, ITC continued to distribute its past library. In 1995, PolyGram purchased the company for $156 million. With Grade once again returning to ITC to act as a consultant until his death in December 1998. On 10 December 1998, Universal Studios' parent, Seagram purchased PolyGram for $10.2 billion. In early January 1999, Carlton Communications bought the ITC television and film library from PolyGram/Seagram for £91 million, which reunited the programme library of ATV and Central Television and doubled the stock of its library division Carlton International, by giving it a total of 15,000 hours of programming.
Carlton chairman Michael Green said:'The ITC library is a jewel in the crown. We can now unite it with the other gems from Britain's film and television heritage in our excellent library.' In 2004, Carlton merged with Granada plc to form ITV plc. ITV Studios continues to release ITC's original output through television and internet streaming repeats, books and DVD and Blu-ray releases. In 2005, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the founding of the company, Network DVD released a DVD box set entitled ITC 50 featuring episodes from eighteen different ITC productions. ITC is best known for being the company behind many successful British cult TV filmed series during the 1960s and 1970s, such as The Saint and Hopkirk, Danger Man, The Baron, Gideon's Way, The Champions, The Prisoner, Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons, Joe 90, Man in a Suitcase, Strange Report, Department S, The Persuaders!, Jason King, The Adventurer, The Protectors, Space 1999, Return of the Saint. It was the production company for The Muppet Show and Julie on Sesame Street which were both made at ATV's Elstree Studios and distributed in the UK by ATV and in the US by ITC.
ITC got its start as a production company when former American producer Hannah Weinstein approached Lew Grade. Weinstein wanted to make a programme called The Adventures of Robin Hood. Weinstein proposed making the series for ITV and marketing it in the United States through an American TV distribution company, Official Films; the series was a big success in both countries, running from 1955 until 1959 on ATV London. Grade realised the potential in overseas sales and colour television, ITC combined high production values with exotic locations and uses of variations on the same successful formula for the majority of its television output. Although most of the ITC series were produced in Britain, ITC worked with Television Programs of America and several series were filmed in America; the earliest ITC series produced in the US was Fury, a Saturday morning live-action series, about a beloved ranch horse, which starred Peter Graves and ran on N
Special effect
Special effects are illusions or visual tricks used in the film, theatre, video game and simulator industries to simulate the imagined events in a story or virtual world. Special effects are traditionally divided into the categories of mechanical effects and optical effects. With the emergence of digital film-making a distinction between special effects and visual effects has grown, with the latter referring to digital post-production while "special effects" referring to mechanical and optical effects. Mechanical effects are accomplished during the live-action shooting; this includes the use of mechanized props, scale models, animatronics and atmospheric effects: creating physical wind, fog, clouds, making a car appear to drive by itself and blowing up a building, etc. Mechanical effects are often incorporated into set design and makeup. For example, a set may be built with break-away doors or walls to enhance a fight scene, or prosthetic makeup can be used to make an actor look like a non-human creature.
Optical effects are techniques in which images or film frames are created photographically, either "in-camera" using multiple exposure, mattes or the Schüfftan process or in post-production using an optical printer. An optical effect might be used to place sets against a different background. Since the 1990s, computer-generated imagery has come to the forefront of special effects technologies, it gives filmmakers greater control, allows many effects to be accomplished more safely and convincingly and—as technology improves—at lower costs. As a result, many optical and mechanical effects techniques have been superseded by CGI. In 1857, Oscar Rejlander created the world's first "special effects" image by combining different sections of 32 negatives into a single image, making a montaged combination print. In 1895, Alfred Clark created what is accepted as the first-ever motion picture special effect. While filming a reenactment of the beheading of Mary, Queen of Scots, Clark instructed an actor to step up to the block in Mary's costume.
As the executioner brought the axe above his head, Clark stopped the camera, had all of the actors freeze, had the person playing Mary step off the set. He placed a Mary dummy in the actor's place, restarted filming, allowed the executioner to bring the axe down, severing the dummy's head. Techniques like these would dominate the production of special effects for a century, it wasn't only the first use of trickery in cinema, it was the first type of photographic trickery, only possible in a motion picture, referred to as the "stop trick". Georges Méliès, an early motion picture pioneer, accidentally discovered the same "stop trick." According to Méliès, his camera jammed. When he screened the film, he found that the "stop trick" had caused a truck to turn into a hearse, pedestrians to change direction, men to turn into women. Méliès, the stage manager at the Theatre Robert-Houdin, was inspired to develop a series of more than 500 short films, between 1914, in the process developing or inventing such techniques as multiple exposures, time-lapse photography and hand painted color.
Because of his ability to manipulate and transform reality with the cinematograph, the prolific Méliès is sometimes referred to as the "Cinemagician." His most famous film, Le Voyage dans la lune, a whimsical parody of Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon, featured a combination of live action and animation, incorporated extensive miniature and matte painting work. From 1910 to 1920, the main innovations in special effects were the improvements on the matte shot by Norman Dawn. With the original matte shot, pieces of cardboard were placed to block the exposure of the film, which would be exposed later. Dawn combined this technique with the "glass shot." Rather than using cardboard to block certain areas of the film exposure, Dawn painted certain areas black to prevent any light from exposing the film. From the exposed film, a single frame is projected onto an easel, where the matte is drawn. By creating the matte from an image directly from the film, it became easy to paint an image with proper respect to scale and perspective.
Dawn's technique became the textbook for matte shots due to the natural images. During the 1920s and 1930s, special effects techniques were improved and refined by the motion picture industry. Many techniques—such as the Schüfftan process—were modifications of illusions from the theater and still photography. Rear projection was a refinement of the use of painted backgrounds in the theater, substituting moving pictures to create moving backgrounds. Lifecasting of faces was imported from traditional maskmaking. Along with makeup advances, fantastic masks could be created; as material science advanced, horror film maskmaking followed closely. Many studios established in-house "special effects" departments, which were responsible for nearly all optical and mechanical aspects of motion-picture trickery; the challenge of simulating spectacle in motion encouraged the development of the use of miniatures. Animation, creating the illusion of motion, was accomplished with drawings and with three-dimensional models.
Naval battles could be depicted with models in studio. Tanks and airplanes could be flown without risk of life and l
Adventure fiction
Adventure fiction is fiction that presents danger, or gives the reader a sense of excitement. In the Introduction to the Encyclopedia of Adventure Fiction, Critic Don D'Ammassa defines the genre as follows:.. An adventure is an event or series of events that happens outside the course of the protagonist's ordinary life accompanied by danger by physical action. Adventure stories always move and the pace of the plot is at least as important as characterization and other elements of a creative work. D'Ammassa argues. Indeed, the standard plot of Medieval romances was a series of adventures. Following a plot framework as old as Heliodorus, so durable as to be still alive in Hollywood movies, a hero would undergo a first set of adventures before he met his lady. A separation would follow, with a second set of adventures leading to a final reunion. Variations kept the genre alive. From the mid-19th century onwards, when mass literacy grew, adventure became a popular subgenre of fiction. Although not exploited to its fullest, adventure has seen many changes over the years – from being constrained to stories of knights in armor to stories of high-tech espionages.
Examples of that period include Sir Walter Scott, Alexandre Dumas, père, Jules Verne, Brontë Sisters, H. Rider Haggard, Victor Hugo, Emilio Salgari, Louis Henri Boussenard, Thomas Mayne Reid, Sax Rohmer, Edgar Wallace, Robert Louis Stevenson. Adventure novels and short stories were popular subjects for American pulp magazines, which dominated American popular fiction between the Progressive Era and the 1950s. Several pulp magazines such as Adventure, Blue Book, Top-Notch, Short Stories specialized in this genre. Notable pulp adventure writers included Edgar Rice Burroughs, Talbot Mundy, Theodore Roscoe, Johnston McCulley, Arthur O. Friel, Harold Lamb, Carl Jacobi, George F. Worts, Georges Surdez, H. Bedford-Jones, J. Allan Dunn. Adventure fiction overlaps with other genres, notably war novels, crime novels, sea stories, spy stories, science fiction and Westerns. Not all books within these genres are adventures. Adventure fiction takes the setting and premise of these other genres, but the fast-paced plot of an adventure focuses on the actions of the hero within the setting.
With a few notable exceptions adventure fiction as a genre has been dominated by male writers, though female writers are now becoming common. Adventure stories written for children began in the 19th century. Early examples include Johann David Wyss' The Swiss Family Robinson, Frederick Marryat's The Children of the New Forest, Harriet Martineau's The Peasant and the Prince; the Victorian era saw the development of the genre, with W. H. G. Kingston, R. M. Ballantyne, G. A. Henty specializing in the production of adventure fiction for boys; this inspired writers who catered to adult audiences to essay such works, such as Robert Louis Stevenson writing Treasure Island for a child readership. In the years after the First World War, writers such as Arthur Ransome developed the adventure genre by setting the adventure in Britain rather than distant countries, while Geoffrey Trease, Rosemary Sutcliff and Esther Forbes brought a new sophistication to the historical adventure novel. Modern writers such as Mildred D. Taylor and Philip Pullman have continued the tradition of the historical adventure.
The modern children's adventure novel sometimes deals with controversial issues like terrorism and warfare in the Third World. Lost world Men's adventure Nautical fiction Picaresque novel Robinsonade Thriller War novel
Synthesizer
A synthesizer or synthesiser is an electronic musical instrument that generates audio signals that may be converted to sound. Synthesizers may imitate traditional musical instruments such as piano, vocals, or natural sounds such as ocean waves, they are played with a musical keyboard, but they can be controlled via a variety of other devices, including music sequencers, instrument controllers, guitar synthesizers, wind controllers, electronic drums. Synthesizers without built-in controllers are called sound modules, are controlled via USB, MIDI or CV/gate using a controller device a MIDI keyboard or other controller. Synthesizers use various methods to generate electronic signals. Among the most popular waveform synthesis techniques are subtractive synthesis, additive synthesis, wavetable synthesis, frequency modulation synthesis, phase distortion synthesis, physical modeling synthesis and sample-based synthesis. Synthesizers were first used in pop music in the 1960s. In the late 1970s, synths were used in progressive rock and disco.
In the 1980s, the invention of the inexpensive Yamaha DX7 synth made digital synthesizers available. 1980s pop and dance music made heavy use of synthesizers. In the 2010s, synthesizers are used in many genres, such as pop, hip hop, metal and dance. Contemporary classical music composers from the 20th and 21st century write compositions for synthesizer; the beginnings of the synthesizer are difficult to trace, as it is difficult to draw a distinction between synthesizers and some early electric or electronic musical instruments. One of the earliest electric musical instruments, the Musical Telegraph, was invented in 1876 by American electrical engineer Elisha Gray, he accidentally discovered the sound generation from a self-vibrating electromechanical circuit, invented a basic single-note oscillator. This instrument used steel reeds with oscillations created by electromagnets transmitted over a telegraph line. Gray built a simple loudspeaker device into models, consisting of a vibrating diaphragm in a magnetic field, to make the oscillator audible.
This instrument was a remote electromechanical musical instrument that used telegraphy and electric buzzers that generated fixed timbre sound. Though it lacked an arbitrary sound-synthesis function, some have erroneously called it the first synthesizer. In 1897 Thaddeus Cahill was granted his first patent for an electronic musical instrument, which by 1901 he had developed into the Telharmonium capable of additive synthesis. Cahill's business was unsuccessful for various reasons, but similar and more compact instruments were subsequently developed, such as electronic and tonewheel organs including the Hammond organ, invented in 1935. In 1906, American engineer Lee de Forest invented the first amplifying vacuum tube, the Audion whose amplification of weak audio signals contributed to advances in sound recording and film, the invention of early electronic musical instruments including the theremin, the ondes martenot, the trautonium. Most of these early instruments used heterodyne circuits to produce audio frequencies, were limited in their synthesis capabilities.
The ondes martenot and trautonium were continuously developed for several decades developing qualities similar to synthesizers. In the 1920s, Arseny Avraamov developed various systems of graphic sonic art, similar graphical sound and tonewheel systems were developed around the world. In 1938, USSR engineer Yevgeny Murzin designed a compositional tool called ANS, one of the earliest real-time additive synthesizers using optoelectronics. Although his idea of reconstructing a sound from its visible image was simple, the instrument was not realized until 20 years in 1958, as Murzin was, "an engineer who worked in areas unrelated to music". In the 1930s and 1940s, the basic elements required for the modern analog subtractive synthesizers — electronic oscillators, audio filters, envelope controllers, various effects units — had appeared and were utilized in several electronic instruments; the earliest polyphonic synthesizers were developed in the United States. The Warbo Formant Orgel developed by Harald Bode in Germany in 1937, was a four-voice key-assignment keyboard with two formant filters and a dynamic envelope controller.
The Hammond Novachord released in 1939, was an electronic keyboard that used twelve sets of top-octave oscillators with octave dividers to generate sound, with vibrato, a resonator filter bank and a dynamic envelope controller. During the three years that Hammond manufactured this model, 1,069 units were shipped, but production was discontinued at the start of World War II. Both instruments were the forerunners of the electronic organs and polyphonic synthesizers. In the 1940s and 1950s, before the popularization of electronic organs and the introductions of combo organs, manufacturers developed various portable monophonic electronic instruments with small keyboards; these small instruments consisted of an electronic oscillator, vibrato effect, passive filters. Most were designed for conventional ensembles, rather than as experimental instruments for electronic music studios, but contributed to the evolution of modern synthesizers; these instruments include the Solovox, Multimonica and Clavioline.
In the late 1940s, Canadian inventor and composer, Hugh Le Caine invented the Electronic Sackbut, a voltage-controlled electronic musical instrument that provided the earliest real-time control of three aspects of sound —corresponding to today's touch-sensitive keyboard and modulation controllers. The controllers were impl
Ed Bishop
George Victor Bishop, known professionally as Ed Bishop, was an American actor based in the United Kingdom. He was known for playing Commander Ed Straker in UFO, Captain Blue in Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons and for voicing Philip Marlowe in a series of BBC Radio adaptations of the Marlowe novels by Raymond Chandler. George Victor Bishop was born on the son of a Manhattan banker, in Brooklyn, New York, he attended Peekskill High School before a brief spell at teacher training college. Bishop served in the United States Army as a disc jockey with the Armed Forces Radio at St. John's in Newfoundland where he was introduced to acting with the St John's Players. After leaving the army, Bishop enrolled at Boston University where he studied business administration but halfway through the course, transferred to drama, much against his parents' wishes. After graduating in Theatre Arts, he won a Fulbright Scholarship to study for two years at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, from which he graduated in 1959.
He adopted the stage name "Ed Bishop" at this time to distinguish himself from George Bishop, an established actor of the time. His first Broadway appearance was as Villebosse in David Merrick's production of Jean Anouilh's The Rehearsal in 1963, though he returned to Britain in 1964. Bishop made his film acting debut as an ambulance driver in Stanley Kubrick's 1962 movie Lolita, he played an American astronaut going to the Moon in the film The Mouse on the Moon and appeared in The Bedford Incident and Battle Beneath the Earth. He had small speaking roles in the James Bond films You Only Live Twice and Diamonds Are Forever, but neither was included in either film's credits, he appeared in a second Kubrick film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which he played the Captain of the Aries 1B Moon shuttle. The role featured dialogue, though this was cut from his scenes. Bishop appeared in various television projects created by producer Gerry Anderson, he provided narration, in addition to the voice of Captain Blue, for Anderson's Supermarionation puppet series, Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons and appeared in Anderson's science-fiction film Doppelgänger.
His most prominent screen role of all was as Commander Ed Straker in Anderson's science-fiction series UFO. Bishop had his dark hair dyed blond for the role, though he wore a blond wig instead. In years, he appeared in films such as Twilight's Last Gleaming, Saturn 3, Silver Dream Racer and The Lords of Discipline. Bishop provided vocal work for the 1974 animated TV series of Star Trek and appeared as Lieutenant Colonel Harrity in the final episode of the British World War II prisoner-of-war drama Colditz. In the 1980s, he made several appearances on The Kenny Everett Television Show, Whoops Apocalypse and had a role in the children's television series Chocky's Children.. On radio, in 1977 and 1978 he played the private eye Philip Marlowe in The BBC Presents: Philip Marlowe, adaptations of Raymond Chandler's stories for the BBC, the last of them, Farewell, My Lovely, produced nearly a decade after the others, as the rights had been unavailable. Bishop continued to act on film, TV and radio in British and other European productions, was a frequent guest at science fiction conventions.
Bishop and fellow Anderson actor Shane Rimmer joked about how their professional paths crossed and termed themselves "Rent-a-yank". They appeared together as NASA operatives in the opening of You Only Live Twice and as United States Navy sailors in The Bedford Incident, as well as the 1983 film of the Harold Robbins novel The Lonely Lady. In 1989, Bishop was reunited with Rimmer and another Anderson actor, Matt Zimmerman, in the BBC Radio 4 adaptation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's A Study In Scarlet. Bishop and Rimmer toured together in theatre shows including Death of a Salesman in the 1990s and appeared in the BBC drama-documentary Hiroshima, one of Bishop's last TV projects. In 2000, Bishop reprised the role of Captain Blue in a trailer for the new Captain Scarlet series, he did not, reprise the role for the actual series, which would not debut until five years later. In 2002, Bishop recorded a commentary for the DVD release of UFO. In 2003, he performed in the Doctor Who audio drama, Full Fathom Five, produced by Big Finish Productions.
Bishop was politically active. Bishop had showed his disapproval of the military-industrial complex when, in 1993, he gatecrashed an arms-trade fair held in Aldershot, Hampshire whilst dressed to resemble Augusto Pinochet. During the Aldershot protest he met photographer Jane Skinner, who became his third wife. Bishop was married three times, he married Hilary Preen in 1962. He married photographer Jane Skinner in 2001, the marriage lasted for only four years until his death in 2005. Bishop died on 8 June 2005 at the age of 72, just three days before his 73rd birthday, five days after the death of one of his UFO co-stars, Michael Billington, he succumbed to a chest infection contracted while undergoing treatment for leukemia. He is buried in the churchyard of the Parish Church of Saint Lawrence in Napton, having lived there for many years, his grey sandstone tombstone has a peace symbol prominently engraved on it. Its design is
