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I remember a live action show - late 70's early 80's - about children who use a hollowed out asteroid to make a ship. I think they were in a future school and running away to maybe looking for parents. I remember they had a computer they rigged up to fly the asteroid. It’s definitely a UK show.

The set I remember was cave looking with a flat floor and the computer in the middle on the floor with wires leading off. It was very low budget.

I've googled every variation I can think of and gone through the various wiki lists to no avail. I did not find anything close in searches.

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  • After your searches did you find anything that was close but want it? How come the children were alone? Was this a cartoon? How come they were looking for their parents? Can you remember any specific plot elements? If you remember anything else you can edit your question to include those details.
    – TheLethalCarrot ♦
    Aug 1, 2020 at 17:00
  • You could improve this question by going through the checklists here and editing in any relevant info you can think to add.
    – Valorum
    Aug 1, 2020 at 17:05
  • Any chance it's Escape from Jupiter? Australian but shown on British TV at some point
    – Will Crawford
    Aug 1, 2020 at 19:57
  • Just wondering, you were specifically asking about a TV show, and I put in a lot of effort to find the TV show for you, and even a scene with the set and props you described. Why have you accepted an answer which did not find the TV show you wanted? I'm pretty new here so just let me know if I did something wrong.
    – zero-cool
    Aug 2, 2020 at 20:33
  • @zero-cool You did nothing wrong, if I was the OP I too would have accepted your answer. Note that the OP too is new though but acceptance is entirely down to the OP. My guess is the OP accepted the first "correct" answer; the other answer is correct it just didn't find the TV show so it's not entirely correct but still correct in a sense.
    – TheLethalCarrot ♦
    Aug 3, 2020 at 10:38

3 Answers 3

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This sounds very like the Nicholas Fisk book, Starstormers.

The TL;DR is that a group of kids are left in a board school on Earth, while their parents go off to a colony somewhere in another solar system. For reasons I can't remember, they decide that they're going to join their parents, and they do so by building their own spaceship out of an asteroid.

On the one hand, this is a book, rather than a TV show. On the other, I'm almost certain that there was a TV adaptation of it at some point, which would have been in the early 80s. On the gripping hand, my google-fu is weak right now, and I can't find any trace of that show.

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  • This sounds like a good match. I’ve found reference to there being a TV show adaptation but not any information about it.
    – TheLethalCarrot ♦
    Aug 1, 2020 at 21:25
  • Ah. Apparently it was a Jackanory adaptation, according to this site: timworthington.org/2018/04/07/out-in-the-dark
    – andrewsi
    Aug 1, 2020 at 21:28
  • I don't know if that will make it easier to find, or harder...
    – andrewsi
    Aug 1, 2020 at 21:28
  • I'm surprised they featured it on Jackanory. These days we'd call it "YA" rather than "kids", because some of the themes are pretty dark. The first book is mostly OK, but the second book features mass slavery, the third book has near death from decompression, and the fourth book goes extremely bloody. (The same guy also wrote Futuretrack 5 which found its way into our school library in spite of up-front sex and violence.)
    – Graham
    Aug 2, 2020 at 9:45
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    @Anentropic Yes, that's the third book, Catfang. The cat's reflexes turn out to be sharp enough that it can track enemy ships, by standing on a wobble board and tracking a ping-pong ball target. There was some handwavey bit about the cat eating a chip from the computer, which is kind of irrelevant for anyone who's seen a cat chasing things. The laser turrets were called "pows", by the way - Tsu stole them from their parents' base before they had to make a run for it. And I'm impressed I can remember all this, well over 30 years later! :)
    – Graham
    Aug 3, 2020 at 10:28
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It sounds like you are referring to an adaptation of Nicholas Fisk's book series Star Stormers, which aired as part of the British children's educational TV show: The Book Tower. They seem to have created an adaptation of the first book in the Star Stormers series, which aired as a number of small segments spread out through The Book Tower episodes. You can view the episode containing the final Star Stormers segment here:

As noted by user andrewsi, Star Stormers, the book series, centered around:

a group of kids are left in a board school on Earth, while their parents go off to a colony somewhere in another solar system... They decide that they're going to join their parents, and they do so by building their own spaceship out of an asteroid.

This seems to fit what you have described. Furthermore, in the episode I linked to, at 16:27, you can see the flat floored cave set you described and the computer in the middle on the floor with wires leading off.

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  • I'm very impressed you managed to find the show! (And also somewhat relieved to know that I didn't imagine the thing.)
    – andrewsi
    Aug 2, 2020 at 16:46
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This sounds like it might be Aquila (1997 - 1998). It isn’t an exact match at all but two boys find the spaceship in a cave in the ground after digging through into it.

The two boys are on a weekend away with their mothers where they do some digging for treasure at a local moor. As Geoff is digging, he falls into a cavern followed cautiously by Tom. It is there they find the skeleton of a Roman Centurion, standing beside a large red object which looks like a giant boulder. One of the boys notices a hollowed out area in this 'boulder' which turns out to be a two-seat cockpit. The craft, which is called 'Aquila', soon turns out to be something more advanced than Roman technology, and by pressing the numerous coloured buttons in the cockpit the boys learn more about this strange craft and take off upwards into the sky.

Wikipedia, Aquila

You can watch a very low quality version of the first episode, “The Eagle has Landed”, on YouTube:

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