'Jolly good show, old boy'... Thunderbirds turns 55

 

Sobering as it is to report, I shall do so anyway: Thunderbirds, the iconic puppet series that many of us grew up watching, reaches its 55^th anniversary today, September 30th. Meaning that if you can remember those first broadcasts, you’ll be around the 60 mark, if not older.

Five and half decades is a long time, and over the years, Thunderbirds has become so much a part of the morass of popular culture that it’s hard to conceive of a time before it existed, or even remember how it felt to encounter the series as something unseen and unknown. If I try hard enough, I can just about remember...

Even by 1965 standards, the build-up to Thunderbirds, in the weeks approaching its debut, was fairly heavy duty. The readership of TV Century 21 comic (of which I was not yet a member) had been seeing sneak previews of the series for months, with early issues featuring cover photographs of hardware such as Fireflash and the Sidewinder. No actual Thunderbird machines were shown as yet – that would have been too much of a spoiler – but Lady Penelope had stolen a march on her International Rescue colleagues with a whole pre-Thunderbirds raft of escapades, illustrated by ex-Dan Dare collaborator Eric Eden.

I didn’t start getting TV21 on a regular basis until the autumn of 1967, but it was still Lady Penelope who served as my entree to Thunderbirds. A short time before the series came to television, her ladyship was ‘interviewed’ on ATV Today, the regional nightly news magazine seen by viewers in the ITV Midlands region. Pieces of this film resurfaced within the past few years, but even before they emerged, I retained very strong memories of this first look at Thunderbirds. I also recall a feeling of mild dread when Lady P,  asked to sum up the new series, described it as ‘Stingray, Fireball and Supercar all rolled into one’. Fireball and Stingray were both favourites of mine, but I had unpleasant memories of Supercar, mostly on account of its goggle-eyed, caricatured villain, Masterspy. Would this baldy nemesis be a part of the new series, I wondered? I even advised our mum that we should ‘turn over after Tingha and Tucker’ (anticipating a 4.55 screening time) just to be on the safe side. Was Masterspy really that bad? Was it worth missing out on a whole new series just because of one bad bald guy?

Any such qualms were set aside minutes later when the interview paused to give us our first look at this brand-new series. The launch sequence for Thunderbird 2 was one of the clips chosen, and damned exciting it looked too... like a super-duper version of the slide in our local playground, with the added bonus of terminating in the futuristic control cabin of an extraodinary, gadget-laden machine. This begged any number of questions: who was the guy going down the slide, and what was the machine? A second clip, culled from The Perils of Penelope, showed us FAB 1 in action – and any car equipped with armaments was just asking to be delivered to our local toy shop in time for Christmas...

Such was the pervasive influence of Thunderbirds across the UK media that word of the series even reached households not in possession of a television set. I know this to be a fact, because one of my friends from down the street, a lad a couple of years older than myself, came up to our house to watch Thunderbirds because his parents (both teachers) didn’t own a television. I can clearly remember us sitting down in front of our old GEC 405-line receiver, at 7pm on Thursday 30 September 1965... yes, seven pm. This was a novelty in itself. Supermarionation series were usually placed in the 5.25 slot preceding the ITN News, although I could dimly remember seeing Fireball XL5 in this mid-evening slot a few years earlier. It all served to add to the excitement – Thunderbirds must be good if it was being shown at seven o’clock...

Even today, the opening countdown, with its fast pull-back on the hero craft still evokes a memory of seeing it all for the first time... those chords... the dramatic voice (Jeff Tracy, as we would soon discover)... and those vehicles. Then, before you could take it all in properly, came the genius moment: the fast-cut preview of tonight’s episode. I’d never seen this done before, and in all probability it hadn’t been attempted, certainly not in such a driving, dynamic fashion. Seeing all that action condensed into just twenty seconds of screen time, you couldn’t possibly turn off or turn over: you were hooked.

And right there, amongst the first shots in that opening sequence, was the bald villain I’d been half dreading – only this time, his eyes lit up! Curiously, this didn’t bother me at all, and although the Hood was the first character we met in that episode, I instantly dismissed any reservations I’d had about Masterspy being part of the new series. In retrospect, an exotic temple in the middle of the jungle seems a strange place for Thunderbirds to start, but this establishing scene was almost certainly part of the extra 25 minutes that had been added to the original, short-form pilot at the behest of Lew Grade. None of which mattered at the time, if it even does now. What mattered was that we were getting a whole hour of futuristic puppet action where before we’d had just twenty-five minutes.

My first really clear recollection of that original broadcast is the establishing shot of Fireflash on the tarmac at London airport. I was already a big fan of aeroplanes: I’d never seen a real one, but there were several in the toybox, and now here was the most exciting plane I’d ever seen. I’m not sure that it didn’t even eclipse the Thunderbird machines: it’s probably the best designed vehicle in the whole series.

Even before that first episode was over, I was hooked on Thunderbirds... the music, the hardware, the characters, everything. Lady Penelope had been almost right – it really was all the preceding series bundled up together, but with one important difference – it was much better. We didn't know it at the time, but Gerry Anderson had peaked. This was simply the most extraordinary thing I’d ever seen on television. One might even echo the words of London Airport Commander Norman when he congratulates Scott on International Rescue’s first successful operation: ‘Jolly good show, old boy.’

* * *

Before the end of Thunderbirds’ first run on television, in March 1966, our dad set up his reel-to-reel tape recorder to capture part of a soundtrack on audio tape. A whole episode would have used up more tape than we had available, so he chose to record the first five or ten minutes of the episode, plus the closing credits: this would mean that, if nothing else, we would have recordings of the music (although by this time I already owned the Century 21 Mini-Album Thunderbird One, bought as a gift at my fifth birthday a few weeks earlier). The episode selected for the recording was the last in the series – Security Hazard – and the recording, which survives to this day, offers up a couple of surprises.

Firstly, the opening credits. On its first broadcast, on Thursday 31 March 1966, Security Hazard cut straight from the episode preview sequence into the episode itself – there was no Thunderbirds theme (the recording of which was half the point of my dad’s endeavours). The tape ran right through with no pauses or edits, and the surviving audio proves the point. The tape was stopped after around five minutes’ worth of the episode, just before the first ‘flashback’ sequence, but our dad started it up again right at the end, hoping to capture the famous theme. But again, disappointment – the programme was unceremoniously faded out on the second credit, and went straight into a commercial with no annoucements or continuity of any kind. For those who think the phenomenon of ‘messing with the end credits’ is a recent invention, here is evidence that broadcasters were doing similar things as far back as the mid-1960s.

The series may have ended, but as a cultural phenomenon, Thunderbirds was only just beginning. In part 2 of this article, I’ll look back to some of the merchandise I and many other fans enjoyed during the series’ first year on air.

1999 @ 45

 

Part Two: ‘Brian Blessed’s Fizzy Drinks Machine’

By early 1976, reports were reaching the newspapers that a new series of Space:1999 was in the pipeline, or perhaps under the lunar surface, for change was, apparently, afoot. The first thing I knew of this second series was that Main Mission, the hub of activities on Moonbase Alpha, was being relocated underground. I’d found the expansive Main Mission set one of the visual attractions of series one, a far cry from the somewhat cramped conditions on board the starship Enterprise, and a world away from the cosy control rooms of UFO. It looked big, impressive, cinematic. But it was all going to change. The other major, and unwelcome change was the loss from the cast of Barry Morse, whose portrayal of Professor Bergman had wrung some genuine warmth and humanity from scripts where characterisation of any kind was always thin on the ground.

Perhaps the most unusual aspect of the series 2 announcement was that it happened at all – no former Gerry Anderson production had run to a bona fide second series: only Thunderbirds had endured beyond its original production run, spawning two feature films and a handful of extra episodes. Given what happened on Space:1999, it was perhaps just as well. Aside from the core characters, and the Eagle spaceships, series 2 was as unlike series one as series one had been to UFO (indeed, Space:1999 series one evolved out of a proposed second series of UFO).

When series 2 eventually rolled around, on Saturday 4 September 1976 (exactly a year to the day since its predecessor had gone to air), I was able to see the extent of the changes. Until this point, I’d had only a vague idea of the differences that were in store, but now it was all too apparent. No Bergman, no Kano, no Paul Morrow... a gloomy, clausatrophobic control room in place of the airy Main Mission... Eagles with bits stuck on the sides... pointless new coloured jackets... and did I mention the music? No, and with good reason. It was all different. And not in a good way.

For some people – especially the unimaginative execs in charge of ITC New York who apparently demanded most of these creative changes – different means better. Not in the case of Space:1999. For all its faults, series one had achieved a cool, futuristic aesthetic, clearly influenced by 2001, but managing to step clear of its shadow. The sometimes unorthodox scripts were more like ‘proper’ (ie literary) science fiction than anything Gerry Anderson had produced up to that point, and despite a tendency to dabble in the realm of psychedelic fantasy as opposed to actual science, had managed to keep on the right side of the line that divides quality sci-fi from trash, and there were some thoughtful moments of philosophy that almost came up to the level of Star Trek season one.

Even Star Trek had succumbed to the gravitational influence of populism, and its second and third seasons found room for some ill-judged attempts at either comedy or basic pulp science fiction, two elements which Space:1999 embraced far too thoroughly in its second series. It failed to impress even my 15-year-old self, with my diary entry for episode one referring to the Alphans blowing up ‘Brian Blessed’s fizzy drinks machine.’ Suddenly, a series that had been dark, ominous and chilly had become brash, colourful and cartoon-like. Never mind that a shape-shifting alien had joined the crew... and wasn’t that the bloke out of The Protectors playing... er... the bloke out of The Protectors in outer space? Most of the blame for this catalogue of crap can be laid squarely at the doorstep of Fred Freiberger, who had wrought the same populist makeover when he was brought in as producer on Star Trek’s third season. Freiberger, writing under a pseudonym (who wouldn’t) also managed to turn in the worst episode of this dire season in the form of The Rules of Luton. Yes, Luton, yes, the town in Bedfordshire, with the football team once beloved of Eric Morecambe. Apparently, Frieberger had seen the sign on the M1 and thought it sounded a bit like an alien world. Which it may well be, but I’d like to bet it doesn’t run to talking trees... 

'Sorry, wrong series...' some of the Space:1999 publications that appeared alongside series 2 had a distinctly series one flavour to the contents...

The second year’s Space:1999 annual had arrived somewhat sooner than its predecessor, and my diary records that I acquired a copy during a trip to Birmingham on Tuesday 17 August 1976. ‘Is good’, the diary reads (many of my diary entries appear to have been written by Manuel out of Fawlty Towers...) Despite its publication date, mere weeks ahead of series two, the second annual remained firmly in series one territory. It was also something of an improvement on the first, which showed signs of having been put together in a bit of a hurry, and the artwork was better (albeit not by much). Also arriving in booksellers at the same time (and bought on the same shopping trip) were some further novelisations, Alien Seed and Android Planet, two original novelisations based on the series one format. Within weeks, a completely new set of series 2 novelisations would begin to appear, with dire cover designs that completely ignored the series graphics in favour of a ‘generic 1970s paperback’ approach.

By mid autumn of 1976, Space:1999 had become, even in my barely-formed opinion, mostly worthless trash. ATV clearly thought so too: the new series was rolled out initally on Saturday teatimes where it failed to compete against Dr. Who (in my own TV universe, the obverse happened, and it was the clash of Space... and Who that finally brought an end to my six years as a loyal viewer of the good Doctor). Late in October, Space:1999 was kicked firmly into kids’ TV land, with a 4.50 slot on Thursday evenings, commencing with, surprise, surprise, The Rules of Luton. This meant that viewers in the midlands got two episodes of Space:1999 in the space of a week, where one was more than sufficient... ATV didn’t even bother to complete its first run, with a handful of episodes held over until late summer of 1977, where they went out at a slightly more grown-up hour.

Before that, we got what I took to be a sneak preview of a new Gerry Anderson series. Indeed, if memory serves, it had been flagged up thus in press mentions sometime earlier in the year. The series (so I believed), was apparently to be titled The Day After Tomorrow, and took its format more or less wholesale from Irwin Allen’s Lost in Space: two families on board a spaceship pass through a black hole, presumably en route to Space:1999-style escapades on the other side. What set this production apart from every other Anderson endeavour was the fact that it had been bought by the BBC. The full background to Into Infinity is well documented elsewhere, so I won’t dwell on it here, other than to say that, back in 1976, I took it to be first glimpse of a work in progress, and was fully expecting a series to appear further down the line. Whatever the circumstances of its production, or its production values – it looks like a 1999 knock-off thrown together during a lunch break on the former production – I refuse to believe that Gerry Anderson ever pointed a film camera at a subject, especially an outer space subject, without expecting to get a series out of it. For my money, Into Infinity was meant as a series pilot.

Even today, I find it hard to articulate my disappointment at Space:1999 series two. Not only was it a travesty as a piece of self-styled space opera, it brought an end to a near unbroken run of TV success for Gerry Anderson and his team, and instead of exiting on a high, they went out on a stinker. The 1999 crew dispersed at the end of production on series two, and when Gerry finally returned to television in the early 80s, it would be with the disappointing, lazily-conceived Thunderbirds/Captain Scarlet mash-up, Terrahawks. Puppets were back, but instead of full-body marionettes they were, uh, ‘super macromation’… that’s Muppets to you, squire...

Perhaps a lesson had been learned: if you’re going to do risible adventures in outer space, do them with puppets – it’s cheaper.