I used to have a die-cast UFO interceptor. It had a plastic missile mounted to the front that you could fire.
I haven’t seen that series for at least thirty years.
for me it was about 35, it has re-payed a visit.
I personally always thought it heavily influenced the great computer game UFO:Enemy Unknown, released in the US as X-COM:UFO Defense. A groundbreaking game technically (as far as I know, one of the first to use an “object-oriented” game engine), it had a great creepy retro feel. It’s consistently rated as one of the best computer games of all time.
If you by chance are a fan of the series and have NOT played this game, give it a try (I think you can get a working version even today, maybe from Steam?). And don’t read any spoilers the first time through. 
This is one of the few games that’s made my jaw drop and caused me to stand up from the computer and go tell someone what just happened.
That would be kind of difficult, I do not own a computer and have never played a copmuter game. Kinda weird when I think about how much I love science fiction. But on the other hand, I love Sherlock Holmes, but don’t own a horse-drawn carriage.
Ah, I was perplexed by this, by you are mostly correct.
According to everyone’s favorite, wiki, “UFO” was produced in 1970/1971 (and as usual for British series there was only 26 episodes according to wiki).
Then, when shown on American TV (first run, not the syndicated reruns, which I watched quite often, think they were on channel 9 in NY?) there were plans to make a second series - this petered out, and instead they used the development work on “UFO 2” to produce a different space series, “Space 1999” (which I thought premiered in the late 1970s, but actually ran 1975-1978 - huh.)
Personally, I wonder why they set UFO only 10 years into the future - why not 2000, or 2010? (2001 was already taken at the time).
If they were trying to justify the automobiles, not only did the gull-wing style not become common in 1980 (boxy and boring did), but British traffic still kept left w/ RHD…
Yes! I had the same. Thirty five years for me, though.
I just re-watched the series. Hadn’t seen it since I was probably about seven years old. Oddly, there was one episode I remembered in some detail. Darker than you remembered? In one episode, Straker’s son dies when the plane carrying a drug that could save him gets diverted to look for a UFO. Later, Straker hallucinates that he is actually an actor filming a TV show about invading aliens, and in a screening room he watches the footage of his son dying all over again. That is fucked up; it’s the clip show from hell.
Interesting show, though. Fascinating to see what 1970 thought 1980 would be like. (I wonder if I could do any better predicting 2023.) Thought I saw Straker using a whiteboard at one point. A few familiar faces show up; Lois Maxwell in a couple episodes.
Is there a term for this sort of show, where there is such loving attention to the vehicles and technology? “Gadget porn” seems to apply more to real-world electronics than fictional space ships. Or do we not need a term, since Gerry and Sylvia Anderson seem to have the genre to themselves?
I just saw something that said Anderson died yesterday.