Alternative 3 - Reception

Reception

Within minutes of the programme ending, Anglia Television was flooded with telephone calls demanding more information. Callers were told the programme was a hoax. The Times on 21 June reported that "Independent television companies last night received hundreds of protest calls after an Anglia program, Alternative 3, gave alarming facts about changes in the Earth’s atmosphere. It was a hoax, originally intended for April 1st." It also pointed out that several of the characters in the programme were played by well known actors.

Nick Austin, who was editorial director of Sphere Books when Watkins' adaptation was commissioned and published, writes that the book was the "best chance I’d ever be likely to get to participate in a hoax of truly Guy Grand proportions — the best thing of its kind since Orson Welles' War of the Worlds radio broadcast."

Austin writes that he was both delighted and disturbed by the Alternative 3 controversy, and adds that the reasons "a clever hoax, openly admitted to be such by its creators, should continue to exercise the fascination it so obviously does the best part of a generation after its first appearance is beyond my feeble powers of analysis and explanation."

An article by Loy Lawhon reports that "everyone involved with the Alternative 3 documentary admits that it was fiction(.)"

One unsourced account reports that the producers of Alternative 3 "announced that the entire thing had been a joke."

A more detailed explanation of the hoax is featured in a study of conspiracy theory subculture and literature, Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America (2003), wherein Michael Barkun devotes a few pages to Alternative 3.

Barkun writes that "Alternative 3 was clearly a hoax — and not only because it was intended for broadcast on April Fools Day. The interviews with supposed scientists, astronauts, and others were far too dramatically polished to have been spontaneous, and in any case, the episode's closing credits named the actors who took the roles of interviewees and correspondents. Though artfully produced, the show's counterfeit documentary style could scarcely have been expected to fool many. As an Anglia TV spokeseman put it, 'We felt viewers would be fairly sophisticated about it.'"

Barkun notes that television and newspapers were "swamped" with inquiries about Alternative 3 and that Anglia Television's sale of the book rights to Leslie Watkins caused the tale to spread far beyond the United Kingdom.