See What You Started, Charlie Brown...

A pop cultural myth has just turned 65 – a ‘legendary’ figure who existed only in the imagination of a fictional character. It was on 26 October 1959 that readers of the Peanuts newspaper strip were introduced to a character who would never appear in person, but whose yearly no-shows became an event much anticipated by those who followed the adventures of Charlie Brown and friends.

In the Peanuts strip of 26.10.59, Linus is seen writing a letter not to Santa Claus but to the ‘Great Pumpkin’, a Halloween legend whom he imagines will rise up from the Pumpkin patch and deliver toys to all the good children of the world. Over the coming week, he eagerly anticipates the Great Pumpkin’s arrival: one strip sees him suggesting to his sister Lucy that the gang should all go out singing ‘Pumpkin Carols’, whilst in another he waxes lyrical to Charlie Brown about this season of goodwill. The following year it was all played out again, with new variations. By 1966, with the TV special ‘It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown’, Linus’ fixation had arguably become a minor icon of pop culture. The Great Pumpkin was, of course, a delusion, deriving only from the tradition of using pumpkins to carve Halloween Jack-O-Lanterns. As a concept it originated in the mind of Charles Schulz and his creation Linus.

Part of Schulz’ working method was to look for ideas that he could develop across a week or more of daily strips, creating mini-serials with storylines that evolved from day to day. Many such examples involved the sparring relationship between siblings Linus and Lucy Van Pelt. Introduced as a toddler, by the late 50s Linus had become the ‘soul’ of the strip, much given to philosophical and theological ponderings, but also prone to delusional ideas and liable to become a nervous wreck were he ever separated from his famous ‘security blanket’.

On 26 October 1959, Schulz began a mini-serial that would run and run as he explored the many aspects of Linus’ unfounded belief in the Great Pumpkin. It was never explained how or where Linus conceived of the idea: it emerged fully formed in his child’s imagination, and he expressed surprise when others failed to share in his belief.

Linus introduces Lucy to the concept of the Great Pumpkin (26.10.59)

By the second year of the saga, Linus had convinced Charlie Brown to spend Halloween in the pumpkin patch, to await the Great Pumpkin’s arrival. This strip laid out one fundamental tenet of Linus’ Halloween credo, namely that the Great Pumpkin would appear only in a pumpkin patch he deemed to be ‘sincere’: a ‘small, homey’ kind of pumpkin patch as opposed to a large, commercial endeavour. On this occasion, Linus faints at the sight of what he imagines to be the Great Pumpkin (it is, in fact, Snoopy), and goes away contented, wishing the Great Pumpkin a safe journey. But in future years he and others were to be eternally disappointed. Charlie Brown’s sister Sally is especially put out when she too spends the night in the pumpkin patch, thereby missing all the fun of Halloween.

When I first read the Peanuts strips in the late 1960s, I was intrigued by the emphasis placed on Halloween, and the tradition of ‘trick or treat’ which was, at that time, unheard of in England. The practice of ‘guising’ – children in costume going from door to door in hope of receiving food or coins – was popular in Scotland and Ireland and is recorded as far back as 1895, but ‘trick or treat’ was certainly not a part of my childhood growing up in England. That’s not to say that we didn’t have Halloween traditions. Apple-bobbing was familiar to me, and I can remember Blue Peter making paper lanterns and suchlike. Our mother grew up in rural Ireland in the early 20th century and was familiar with many Halloween traditions including the carved Jack-o-Lantern, traditionally a turnip.

I know. A turnip. Baldrick would have been in his element. As to pumpkins, great or otherwise, you couldn’t even get hold of them, certainly not in the prodigious quantities one sees today. Back in the 60s and early 70s, you could certainly buy a certain amount of Halloween merchandise, mostly in the form of papier maché monster masks. But for English children, Halloween was eclipsed by bonfire night, and the big push in seasonal merchandising was very much aimed at the Guy Fawkes crowd. In place of trick or treat, we had ‘penny for the Guy’, with the stuffed effigy of Fawkes, destined for the top of the bonfire, being wheeled around the streets in an old pram by children hopeful of earning some small change with which to buy fireworks.

Banning the sale of fireworks to under-18s provided an incentive to merchandisers to shift focus away from Guy Fawkes, and the past thirty years has seen a veritable glut of seasonal promotions aimed at Halloween revellers: I’ve seen everything from chocolates to electric guitars given a seasonal promotional spin with spooky overtones. We’ve also seen the acceptance of a new Halloween iconography, strongly featuring the colours orange and black (and to a lesser extent, purple). As a designer, I began to notice this trend as it emerged a couple of decades ago. Now, any and every product aimed at children is liable to be given a ghoulish makeover, with Halloween merchandise hitting the shelves from mid September onwards. It is also practically impossible to set foot in any pub – particularly those aimed at a family clientele – without being asssulted on all sides by ghosts, skeletons, huge spiders, vampires and all the other impedimenta of horror movie cliché. Shop windows – even those of relatively restrained enterprises such as accountants and jewellers – are also similarly bedecked. Yet this is only a relatively recent development.

My diary entry for Monday 31 October 1988 makes mention of ‘silly things in pub – decorations, masks etc.’ This was the first time I’d seen anything like this, and is an early indicator of the growing trend towards Halloween décor in public places. The pumpkin iconography had not yet developed to the extent we see today, but pumpkins themselves were slowly becoming easier to obtain; and one now started to see groups of kids in horror garb going from door to door doing trick or treat.

The question I wanted to address in this blog was simple: how much, if indeed any of this focus on Halloween – trick or treat in particular – can be laid at the doorstep of Charlie Brown? The Peanuts strip had been a regular feature of the Daily Sketch (latterly the Daily Mail) since the 1950s, and from the early 70s onwards, character merchandising had seen the iconography extend into such arenas as greetings cards and gifts. But not Pumpkin cards. The Charlie Brown Halloween special was first broadcast by the BBC, with no regard for seasonal continuity, in February 1976, with similarly mistimed repeats in September 1982 and December 1984. The latter two broadcasts may have helped to promote the idea of trick or treat in the minds of young viewers, but other US imports (including an entire film franchise) have played their part in popularising American seasonal traditions at the expense of our own.

Over in America, the merchandising and gifting industries needed no inspiration from Linus, Charlie Brown or the mythical Great Pumpkin. Schulz must have thought it a great joke to portray Linus addressing ‘Pumpkin cards’ but Halloween cards had been around for decades, having originated in the 1890s. Trick or treat, however, was a much more recent arrival, evolving from the earlier practise of ‘guising’ and emerging initially in central Canada, before spreading across the United States during the 1930s (the earliest recorded example was in 1917). The Peanuts strip certainly played its part in promoting the tradition, with the earliest references occurring in 1951, before Linus was even conceived; but rather than Charlie Brown, Wikipedia cites the film ET as having done the heavy lifting of introducing the trick or treat concept to a generation of British children. 

Charlie Brown goes trick or treating, but typically, he's a day late (01.11.51)

Linus’ misplaced faith in the Great Pumpkin has been the subject of various existential and theological interpretations. In one of the earliest strips, he reproaches himself for having been ‘the victim of false doctine.’ There was a lot to play with here, as Schulz quickly recognised. Yet the inspiration for the first Great Pumpkin serial was simply the humour to be derived from a child’s confusing the traditions of Halloween with those of Christmas. Year after year saw Linus return to the pumpkin patch in the hope that his sincerity would be repaid. Was Schulz secretly hoping to persuade real life children to take up this fake tradition? Or was he encouraging us to examine the way we buy unquestioningly into systems of belief? Had the internet been available in Linus’ day, he would have had no trouble recruiting converts to his cause. There are a lot more unlikely things online today than a flying, anthropomorphic pumpkin with a sack of toys, and people seem prepared to believe in them.

Maybe the Great Pumpkin is among us already. If so, he’ll have to be orange, occupy a privileged position, and have the power of convincing the media to believe in his false doctrine. He may not arrive in time for Halloween, but I’d advise anyone in the USA to check their pumpkin patch on the night of November 5th...

Two Plums and a Bell...

 

Adam Faith manhandles a knocked-off 'one armed bandit' in Budgie, 1971

If you think the title of this post sounds a bit rude, you clearly don’t remember the iconic era of mechanical fruit machines, otherwise known as one-armed bandits, that were once to be found in pubs, clubs and arcades not just in Britain but, as Nicholas Parsons used to say, ‘around the world.’ They’re long gone, of course, replaced by modern, electronic versions replete with features including ‘nudge’, ‘hold’ and a baffling array of other options.

‘Play our fruit machines’ said a notice on the display screen in a local pub. The machines in question were, of course, electronic, and the example I could see in a nearby alcove didn’t even have any of the ‘classic’ fruit iconography. This set me thinking: where and how did it all get started? The idea of a gambling machine that pays out on a range of pre-determined combinations is simple enough, but why choose fruit for the winning lines and who made that decision? I decided to look into it in as much depth as the internet will allow…

First thing I learned is that the term ‘fruit machine’ is specifically British. Elsewhere, such devices are known by the more prosaic name of ‘slot machines.’ Everyone who has ever played or merely watched another player pumping their small change into one of them will be familiar with the fruity iconography employed on the spinning drums: an orange, a lemon, a couple of cherries, a plum, and a watermelon (always sliced so as to display its red interior). In addition, there were a range of other symbols including a bell, and a graphic that simply had the word ‘BAR’ inside a black rectangle. To earn a payout, the spinning drums had to stop at a matching line of three identical icons, or various pre-set combinations, eg two bells and a ‘bar’, in orientations specified by the machine’s mechanics (or, latterly, electronics).

The first such machines, built by the Sittman and Pitt company of Brooklyn, New York, were much more overt about their gambling origins, and featured spinning drums decorated not with fruit, but with 50 different playing card faces across five drums. The machines were in essence a form of mechanised poker, with a ‘winning hand’ paying out not in cash but credits for beer, cigarettes and so on. The odds were improved in favour of the ‘house’ by removing two cards from the full deck, and the drums in the machine could also be rearranged to reduce the likelihood of a winning line. 

Sittman and Pitt’s machine appeared in 1891, but around the same time, Charles Fey of San Francisco had come up with a simpler, three-drum system, with symbols of horseshoes, diamonds, hearts and a Liberty Bell, the latter giving its name to the machine and explaining why the image of a golden bell continued to feature on slot machines for decades to come. Unlike the poker-based machine, Fey’s were able to pay out in nickel increments, up to a maximum of 50 cents, for which the player had to score three Liberty Bells in a row. The machines became hugely popular very quickly, and other manufacturers also adopted the Liberty Bell image. 

So where did the fruit come in? In fact, the explanation is both simple, and logical. An early variant of the machine payed out in fruit-flavoured chewing gum, with a choice of lemon, cherry, orange or plum. The Liberty Bell was retained, along with an image of a stick – or ‘bar’ – of Bell-Fruit Gum. The new symbols proved very popular, and had the added advantage of distancing the machines from their poker derivation. Other manufacturers jumped on the bandwagon and, somewhere along the way, a watermelon was added to the list of fruity iconography. The machines were not popular with the state courts in the USA, with two test cases finding that a mint vending machine was in fact a gambling device. But there was no holding back their popularity and it didn’t take long for the machines – now dispensing hard cash as opposed to chewing gum – to conquer the world.

Mechanical machines held sway until the 1960s, when the first electro-mechanical variants began to appear. I can still remember seeing the first such examples here in Britain, towards the end of the decade. But when visiting amusement arcades (almost always at the seaside) I still favoured the traditional ‘one-armed bandit’. There was something more appealing about cranking a handle and hearing the drums spinning inside the machine, a kind of visceral quality that the electronic versions lacked. Back in the 60s, we played for pennies, and no more considered it a form of gambling than we did the penny falls machines in those same seaside arcades. Later, the machines were uprated to accept 5p and 10p coins, which meant that you could end up spending a lot more, but the jackpot payouts were accordingly more attractive. Who could resist the sight and sound of all those shiny coins being disgorged into the chrome-plated hopper at the bottom of the machine?

It was believed – rightly or wrongly I can’t be sure – that the mechanical fruit machines could be ‘primed’ somehow by giving the lever a special sort of jerk. In reality, the only jerks were the ones who kept pumping in their shiny shillings. But those machines had a very definite appeal, and even when the payout was in mere copper coins, you couldn’t help feeling like a king when all that cash was dropped in your lap.

The new electro-mechanical machines were much bigger than their predecessors, and a lot more flashy, with most examples including animated light displays and even music. New features like ‘nudge’ and ‘hold’ were easy enough to grasp, but before long a bewildering range of options was on offer to the player, all of them, to my mind, detracting from the brilliant simplicity of simply pulling a handle and letting fate (or the devious machinations of the machine’s owners) take its course.

I always felt – correctly, as it turns out – that the electronic machines must be easier to ‘fix’ to increase the odds against jackpot payouts. As Wikipedia’s article on the subject has it, ‘the odds of losing symbols appearing on the payline became disproportionate to their actual frequency on the physical reel’ as a result of electronics incorporated into the design. It was often believed that the old mechanical machines could be rigged to avoid jackpot paylines, and I’m sure this was the case; but once electronics arrived on the scene, it was no longer a mere game of chance: the system was actively working against you.

When microprocessors entered the arena of gaming machines, the odds against winning became even higher. Makers could now assign specific probabilities to every symbol on every reel, goading players into parting with still more money after a near miss when the machine stopped just short of a winning line. In the 1980s, machines began to incorporate a system that directed coins into one of two reservoirs – one as payment for the owner, the other as potential prize money. As the prize money reservoir filled up, the odds on winning increased. This explains the phenomenon of watching a loser pumping money into a machine for ages, only for the next player to step up and immediately score a winning line. By the same token, with the prize money depleted, the odds against a jackpot were considerably higher.

Today’s machines no longer make use of mechanical components, and now employ as many as five reels within a computerised display. If you’re ever tempted by one of these devices, think again – the odds against winning can be as high as 300 million to one. You’ve got more chance of winning the lottery or being hit by an asteroid.

There was one form of gaming machine that it was possible to defeat, by sheer brain power. In the 1980s, our local pub introduced a quiz machine that payed out handsomely if you could make it through the various stages towards the jackpot level. A group of us – all ex-grammar school boys, with plenty of trivial and general knowledge at our disposal – took on the machine and began to score jackpots of over £30 a time. My diary for 1986 records that on one evening, a team of five of us walked away with £6 each. Someone must have tumbled, because the machine was soon removed, later to be replaced by a new variant based on the TV game Blockbusters, which was ‘much harder’ according to the diary. In a fair game of cash for answers, it was all too easy to beat the system and I’m sure we weren’t the only ones cashing in. One night, the machine even ran out of money! But as far as any other gaming machine goes, there is only ever one guaranteed winner – the company who supplies it!

The Last TV21

 

No, that's not the cover – this is an early draft that I rejected before publication

It came out ten years ago this autumn, and was never an officially sanctioned edition, but for some fans, the one and only edition of TV21 that I edited is now considered as ‘canon’. It’s included on DVD collections of the comic’s original run, which is gratifying... if somewhat surprising.

It all started at the kitchen table of Tim Beddows. We were kicking around ideas for items we could include in a packaged DVD release of the documentary Filmed in Supermarionation, which Network had commissioned from producer Stephen La Riviere. Tim wanted a big, deluxe packaging job, and I’d been considering some kind of limited edition model of a Thunderbird craft, but such an item would have proved prohibitively expensive. As a sort of wild idea, I threw out the notion of doing our own edition of TV21. Somewhat to my surprise, Tim immediately liked it. But if we were going to do it, I’d have to do it myself – there could be no farming it out to a publisher or other content creator.

I didn’t mind this at all. I’d been making my own editions of TV21 since the late 1960s, when a tiny reproduction of the first ever cover in that week’s edition prompted me to have a go at imagining what the actual comic might have been like. This home made endeavour does not survive, but the second edition does, and was included on the ‘Shades Page’ of the 2014 edition.

I knew from the outset that I couldn’t possibly produce a complete, 24-page TV21 comic single-handed, and aside from one or two contacts, I had little or no idea where to look to solicit contributions. In the end, I was able to contact John Freeman, who spread the word via his Downthetubes website, and I also knew David Lloyd, who put word out amongst the comic fraternity. Within a fairly short time, I was receiving emails from comic creators around the world.

One thing I was certain of was that we needed some original TV21 contributors on board. I’d previously commissioned Mike Noble to paint a cover for a DVD release of Fireball XL5, but Mike was in poor health and although I made an approach, he was sadly unable to contribute anything. I had better luck with John M. Burns, whose TV21 pages had been confined to the black and white adventure strips Catch or Kill and Front Page. While I ended up including the latter in our edition, I wanted John Burns in full colour. He agreed to produce a double page spread, on condition that the script was written by a known author. I was more than capable of writing any kind of Gerry Anderson comic strip, but John didn’t know this and my name carried no clout in the serious world of comics. For this reason, I asked John Freeman to write the script (he also wrote Agent 21 for us). His Lady Penelope story was one of only two in the whole comic that were entirely self-contained (the other being Project SWORD). I think John Freeman also wrote our Joe 90 strip, and I solicited futher contributions from comics expert Shaqui le Vesconte (Project SWORD and Captain Scarlet). The rest was down to me.

John Burns' Lady Penelope spread before the captions were added (I now own the original)

I can see from my records that this work didn’t really get started until June 2014 – a perilously tight deadline for an October production date. As well as John Burns, our ‘originals’ line-up included Martin Asbury – not a bona fide TV21 artist, but well known for his contributions to Look-in, Countdown and many others – and Gerry Embleton. I was particularly pleased to have Gerry on the project, as his artwork had been included in one of the first books I ever owned – the Fireball XL5 annual published in 1963. He had been a semi-regular on TV21, filling in for his brother Ron during his occasional breaks from the Stingray strip, and I also knew his work from the nursery comic Robin, not to mention illustrations for various bubble gum card sets during the 60s and early 70s. Gerry was given Stingray to illustrate, from a script written by myself.

One of the concepts I came up with was to have the stories revisiting pilot episodes of the various series, although in the end this was only carried through to the Thunderbirds strip, which saw a MkII Fireflash being hijacked by the Hood. British artist Martin Baines drew and coloured this strip in his customary detailed style. I’d sort of hoped he might have restyled the Fireflash, but he drew it faithful to the original. It had to be updated somehow, so we changed its colour scheme to red. For the record, my original Captain Scarlet story, which saw an assassination attempt taking place at a rebuilt London Car-Vu, ended up as a separate comic, illustrated by Paul McCaffrey, that was produced to accompany our blu-ray release of the series.

By early June, I had enough artists signed up to set the ball rolling, and on the 5^th of the month, I sent out a short briefing document. In it, I made it clear that the intention was to replicate the look and feel of the original as closely as possible, and although welcoming digital art, I specfically mentioned that we did not want 3d illustrations, and asked that the digital artists might endeavour to give their work as much of an ‘analogue’ feel as possible. I also stipulated that the artwork should not bleed off the pages, a trend in modern comics that I’ve never liked, and which would have been totally alien to the TV21 asethetic.

The Secret Service, which never appeared in TV21, was one of my favourite pages from the comic.
Artwork by 'Baretti'.

The old guard stuck with tradtion, and I received large artwork boards from Messrs. Embleton and Asbury, with John Burns’ sumptuous Lady Penelope strip arriving in a cardboard roll. This caused me some problems (and cost me a parking fine) when I needed to get it scanned, eventually using a bureau in Derby that had an oversized scanner on the premises. Also supplying original art was noted cutaway specialist Graham Bleathman who, for reasons I don’t remember, provided a painting of the Martian probe rocket and transporter from the Thunderbirds episode Day of Disaster.

I knew that all this artwork would take time to create, and in the meantime I faced the not inconsiderable task of artworking the huge reprint of Stephen La Riviere’s book that was to accompany the box set. In doing this, I had the pick of hundreds of interesting stills, many of them very rare. Having seen the book in its original form, I elected to use, as far as possible, shots that had not been seen too many times before.

Back on the comic, the first pieces of artwork were beginning to arrive. The very first to turn up was Martin Asbury’s Captain Scarlet, in black indian ink on Bristol board, for which he apologised in advance, not having had recourse to such techniques for many years. I scanned the artwork in sections and joined it all together: those scans are dated 21.07.14. Next to meet the deadline was Martin Baines, whose Thunderbirds pages are dated 30.07.14, just under two months from the original brief. John Burns’ Lady Penelope was with me by the end of August, with others continuing to trickle through during the first weeks of September. And don’t forget that looming production deadline. September 5th was the art deadline I’d specified on the brief, and in the end few of the artists actually made it. Production wise, we had a bit of leeway, as the comic wouldn’t take long to print, and in the event was the very last item of the box set to reach the printer. But what those artists all failed to realise as they overshot the deadline was that even after receipt of their pages, I still had to add all the balloons and lettering myself. In the case of Martin Asbury, I also had to add colour to his black line work, a not inconsiderable task.

Somehow, in the midst of all this, I found myself drawing a strip, something I had originally planned not to do. However, with two pages going spare, and time on my hands while I waited for more artwork to arrive, I set myself the task of drawing Zero-X in the style of TV21’s art editor Jim Watson, whose distinctive if idiosyncratic work had featured on the original strip during 1968. This endeavour earned me a friendly, telephonic lesson in comic art from John Burns when he saw the results. There was no point trying to explain that I’d been trying to do a pastiche of Watson’s work. I very nearly omitted the credit from my pages (in a kind of homage to Countdown, I’d included art credits for all the contributors). Either way, my pages were completed by 3rd September, some way ahead of the remaining ‘real’ artists.

The last to arrive was Gerry Embleton’s Stingray. He’d had an accident with a bottle of ink and had to redraw one frame (I still have the damaged original somewhere). While Burns’ Lady Penelope was dramatically coloured, and high in contrast, I felt the Stingray panels were a little anaemic by comparison. I suppose I could have corrected this in Photoshop (I did with a couple of other pages) but in the end decided to leave them unmolested. I mean, this was Gerry Embleton, after all!

Gerry Embleton's Stingray before the addition of captions.

Gerry was soon to become the Peter Cushing to my Morecambe and Wise: on several occasions I answered telephone calls from an international number (Switzerland) to find him on the phone, politely asking when he might expect to be paid. Network’s accounts department were never exactly speedy when settling invoices, but in Gerry’s case seemed to be particularly tardy. I even suggested paying him myself and getting the company to reimburse me, but fortunately it was settled withour recourse to such action.

On the editorial side, I became Colonel White – not difficult, as I already had the right colour hair. I included a few in-jokes such as references to Mars Press and a Mysteron plot to plant false information in the pages of TV21. This was, in fact, a dig at the editorial team who had overseen the slow dismantling of the comic’s format in 1969, including a Captain Scarlet storyline that did away with the Mysterons entirely. The comic was by this time in the hands of a syndicate called Martspress, so you can probably see what I did there. Our Front Page strip (a late addition to the line-up) allowed me to develop this idea somewhat.

Design wise, I created a new masthead that was in essence a combination of the ‘Spectrum era’ TV21 and the comic’s belated return to newspaper covers in 1969. For the editorial sections, I used the same fonts that had been seen in the original TV21, with particular emphasis on two weights of a Grotesque variant that fairly screamed ‘1960s TV21’ when you put them into any page layout.

Although the comic was intended as a one-off, I allowed for the (admittedly slim) possibility of a continuation, by running all but one of the strips as the opening episodes in what could have become an ongoing continuity. In fact, many of these storylines were developed through a series of covers we included in the box set as a folding postcard. I’m not sure if many people entirely understood these additional covers, as I’ve seen some of them online purporting to be from the real run of TV21. Evidently, I'd made them too realistic!

'Issue 249', one of a series of continuation covers I created as postcards for the box set.

By the first week of October 2014, I finally had all the content together and a fully artworked comic ready to be sent to the printers. I’d decided to try and print on a vintage style paper, but was given bad advice by the printers: what we ended up with was plain, uncoated paper that lent a dull, matt appearance to the colours and was a bit of a disappointment when I got to see a copy. By contrast, the proof pages had been shiny and brilliant. TV21 itself was printed on a type of paper that has now completely disappeared. It was a far cry from the ubiquitous shiny stock that is used on all modern comics and which I wished to avoid, but neither was it plain uncoated pulp stock. In retrospect, I should have simply opted for a glossy paper, and would take care to use improved stock on all our other comic projects.

The final TV21 credits read as follows: p.2 Zoony the Lazoon/ Lew Stringer; p.3 Agent 21/ Brian Williamson; pp. 4-5 Stingray/ Gerry Embleton; p.6 adverts; p.7 The Secret Service/ ‘Baretti’; pp.8-9 Thunderbirds/ Martin Baines; p.10 Supercar/ Jim Hansen & Bambos Georgiou; p.11 Joe 90/ Mike Collins; pp.12-13 Lady Penelope/ John M. Burns; pp. 14-15 Project Sword (text)/ Paul McCaffrey; pp 16-17 Captain Scarlet/ Martin Asbury; p.18 cutaway, Graham Bleathman; p.19 Fireball XL5/ Mike Collins; pp.20-21 Zero-X/ Martin Cater; p. 22 Front Page/ Mark Wheatley; pp. 23-24, editorial. All in all, it was a unique and remarkable opportunity to work alongside such a stellar line-up of comic creators, and while it was definitely a one-off, there would be further comic creations from Network in the years to come.

Having proved the concept, as it were, I had no difficulty in persuading Tim to include comics in our other Supermarionation box sets. He had, after all, seen and laughed at some of my childhood creations (the Department S comic strip that I drew aged nine had to be seen to be believed). Now we had the chance to do it properly. There was a comic each for the box sets of Captain Scarlet and Joe 90, excellently artworked by Paul McCaffrey (now a 2000AD contributor), and comics to accompany the blu ray box sets of Supercar, Fireball XL5 and Stingray. For Supercar, I returned to the ‘Beakercar’ story I’d set up in the 2014 TV21, and got a whole comic out of it in what I felt was a faithful representation of the TV series. I also contributed art to this endeavour, pencilling the faces of all the characters, with the final pages inked by Bambos Georgiou. For Fireball XL5 I tried to be innovative: I’d developed a means of creating comics from photo-montage – a far cry from traditional ‘photo comics’ as it involved a considerable effort in Photoshop to combine numerous elements into the finished frames. This technique was showcased in an online comic Lightning 5, published in David Lloyd’s Aces Weekly between 2019 and 2020 (the comic itself being a visual homage to Supermarionation). I now applied the same methods to Fireball XL5, chopping up frame grabs and recombining them to produce something that looked, at a glance, like a photonovelisation of an actual episode. I deemed it a success and repeated the technique for a sumptuous Stingray comic which had originally been earmarked for long time Anderson comic artist Steve Kyte. When he had to pull out of the project, I went for the photo-montage look again, creating what I modestly believe to be the most faithful recreation of Stingray outside the TV series itself.

Joe 90: a page from Network's comic illustrated by Paul McCaffrey

Whether fans understood what I did on those projects is something I’ve often wondered. Did they simply glance at them and dismiss them as simple photo-stories of the kind produced in various annuals over the years? Unfortunately, the box sets were produced in such limited editions that none of the comics – TV21 included – was ever seen outside of a few thousand individuals. If I got no traction, no recognition, indeed nothing back from any of them, it was hardly surprising.

What I did achieve was to add another digit to the complete run of the original TV21, which ended at issue 242. I can still remember my disappointment at what became of TV21 in September 1969, with football covers and barely any of the Gerry Anderson series left on board. Issue 243 was, in essence, me resolving my own long-standing issues with the whole later era of the comic, and I was pleased when I realised that fans were now treating it as bona fide to the extent of including it in pdf collections, while the football-focused revamp has been ignored.

There have been other Anderson comic efforts in recent years, proving that there will be interest and commercial viability in such projects for the forseeable future. At time of writing, a number of Supermarionation series are available to stream on ITVX where it is to be hoped they will be connecting with new fans as well as old.

For me, creating Gerry Anderson comics and design content was a job I dreamed about in childhood, and I consider it a privilege to have been able to make my own small contribution to the genre, not just in the form of comics, but in the often elaborate packaging that accompanied Network’s releases. Having spent a lifetime with those series, I've developed an understanding of their asethetic and a deep appreciation of the extraordinary creativity that went into them.

If TV21 No. 243 turns out to be the last hoorah of a beloved title – and it most certainly will be the last to include work from the original artists – then I'd like to think the comic went out on a positive note. It wasn't motivated by greed – we did it for the enjoyment of fans at our own cost, and never sought to capitalise on the comic by selling it outside the box set – and I think it was true to the spirit of the original. For me, it was an interesting and unique experience, squaring a circle that I'd set in motion years earlier with my own comic creations. In a school essay of many decades ago I imagined myself, at some point in the future, creating comics for a living. If nothing else, I can claim to have done it at least once...

Where it all started: my own take on TV21 issue 2, copied (using a magnifying glass) from a tiny reproduction in a 1969 edition.

Z Cars and I

I had a strange relationship with Z Cars. Loved it, then found it boring, rediscovered it, liked it, read it, hunted down old episodes and ultimately found it boring again. This all took place across the space of sixty years, so let me unpack things a little.

I was much too young to understand Z Cars when it began in January 1962, not yet having reached my first birthday. My earliest memories of the series are of seeing it on Sunday afternoons, probably around 1963 or 64. The BBC had begun repeating telerecordings of earlier episodes on Sunday 23 September 1962 with the episode Found Abandoned (first broadcast on Tuesday 3 April of that year), with the repeat going out at 2.30pm. My recollection is of seeing it rather later in the afternoon, and by the spring of 1964, episodes had been moved to around 4.30, beginning on Sunday 19 April with the episode No Malice at 16.40. During this time, fans of the show were able to catch it twice a week, with brand new episodes at 8pm on Wednesday evenings running alongside the weekend repeats. The repeats were aimed at shift workers who had been unable to see the series in its intended slot, but it also meant that young children like myself were able to watch a programme that, strictly speaking, was not entirely suitable for those of such tender years.

That didn’t make any difference to me. Although I was far too young to follow the storylines, I was still able to enjoy the series’ visuals, especially the patrol cars. MkII Ford Zephyrs had been in use for the first 31 episodes, with the newer MkIIIs introduced at the commencement of series 2 in September 1962. I’m certain I remember seeing both types of Z Car, which means I must have seen some of the first series repeats. Almost nothing of these broadcasts remains in my memory save for an episode in which Z Victor One broke down or crashed and had to be towed back to the station.

I have clearer recollections of the title sequence, because I always wanted a ‘flat ‘at’ like those worn by the Z Car crews as seen in the second and third title sequences. I never got a bona fide Z Cars hat (although such an outfit was produced by Berwick Toys) and I had to make do with a bus conductor’s peaked cap. I seem to remember wearing this hat and gripping my Merit toy steering wheel whilst watching the exciting opening titles of Z Cars on those Sunday afternoons…

As to those title sequences… well, everyone remembers the music from Z Cars, even people who’ve never seen an episode. It was released on record and became a chart hit at the time, and supporters of Everton and Watford football clubs would have heard it played at their home games as both sides adopted it as their theme tune. I knew the music very well, both in its original incarnation from the TV series, as arranged by husband and wife Fritz Spiegl and Bridget Fry, and as Johnny Keating’s commercially released version, which featured a ‘jazzed up’ middle section. The original is still the best – Spiegl and Fry went for a militaristic arrangement featuring fife and rolling snare drums. In later years, it was tinkered with to no good effect, with some particularly awful ‘modernised’ arrangements appearing in the 1970s. I hated these and still do. In fact, the ‘new music’ was one of a number of aspects that helped to put me off the series in later years.

The original main titles featured the Ford Zephyr patrol car – no police officers were seen – and the sequence became something of a classic. When the MkIII cars were brought in at the beginning of series 2, a new title sequence was shot featuring these vehicles in real life and model form (the models were employed for a short animated section). These titles are by far the rarest, and endured for only one series (to date, I’ve been able to find only two examples on YouTube). For the third series in September 1963, yet another set of titles was produced which would see the show through to its demise in December 1965.

Was I still watching at this point in time? I think I was more interested in playing games of International Rescue by late 1965. In any case, I’d hardly been ‘watching’ the series in the accepted sense, merely looking at it and taking an interest whenever the cars appeared. Or, indeed, those flat ‘ats…

Aside from my bus conductor’s cap, I had a couple of other items of Z Cars merchandise bought for me, in the shape of a die-cast model of the Ford Zephyr MkIII, produced by Tri-Ang toys for their ‘Spot-On’ range of vehicles, and packaged with Z Cars graphics and the BBC tv logo. In addition, I had a battery-operated Ford Zephyr MkII motorway patrol car, and its Corgi die-cast equivalent. Neither of the latter two was marketed under the Z Cars banner, but the association must have boosted sales. Also on the merchandising front, Z Cars Annuals were produced by the ever-reliable World Distributors, with the first appearing in time for Christmas 1963. This edition is interesting in that it had been prepared with the original crime car crews featuring in the stories. The trouble was that, some time before the annual was ready to go to print, Jeremy Kemp’s character Bob Steele – controversially depicted as a wife-beater – left the series, to be replaced by the more affable PC David Graham, portrayed by Colin Welland. The artwork was hastily patched up to alter all appearances of Steele to Graham. This made no sense in the final analysis, as Steele’s wife Janey now had to be renamed Janey Graham when no such character appeared in the series! The annuals were typical of World Distributors’ production values, heavy on text stories, but with a few more strips than was the norm. Colour overlays of garish magenta, blue and yellow were added to the line artwork, but they were poorly done and in many cases would have been better omitted. One or two very basic photo pages were included in most editions.

Bob Steele (Jeremy Kemp) has his face patched to look like, er, Bernie Winters –
sorry, I mean Colin Welland – in a panel from the first Z Cars Annual.

I remember spotting a Z Cars Annual in our mum’s mail order catalogue in the autumn of 1965, but I wouldn’t get my hands on a copy of it until the 1970s. When I did, I made the discovery that the catalogue illustration had been a mock-up, with the colours and graphics on the final printed version looking somewhat different. 

The series itself was finished by this time. Barlow and Watt had been spun off into the CID-oriented Softly Softly, which focused on the work of regional crime squads as opposed to crime patrol crews. But in early 1967, in search of a new twice-weekly soap to replace the ailing football serial United!, the BBC chose to revive Z Cars in this new format.

The new ‘soap-style’ Z Cars made its debut on Monday 6 March 1967 (one day before my 6th birthday), with only Jock Weir and Bert Lynch remaining from the original cast. Lynch was now promoted to the rank of Sergeant, and placed in charge of the new Panda car patrols, while Jock remained on the crime cars. The cars themselves got a facelift, with the introduction of new MkIV Zephyrs, but from now on, only one actual 'Z Car' would feature in the stories, with the focus shifting towards the Panda patrols, themselves a means of mobilising the traditional ‘beat bobby’. Another new addition to the show was John Slater as Det. Sgt. Stone, a character who remained with the series until October 1974. Of all the Z Cars actors, it was Stone who became the most familiar to me, which is curious as I didn’t make a point of watching the series much at this time. Nevertheless, as time passed I would become well acquainted with the Z Car crew of Quilley and Skinner, who became the ‘Fancy and Jock’ of the 1970s.

Z Cars returns as a twice-weekly serial, March 1967

World Distributors never revived their Z Cars Annuals, and the only item of merchandising I’ve ever come across from the 1970s era was a ‘Talking Z Victor One’, which bore no resemblance to any of the vehicles seen on screen. Dinky Toys offered a Ford Zodiac MkIV in white motorway patrol livery, and a little later brought out a blue and white Ford Escort patrol car.

This later model reflected a change that had come about on screen and on the streets, with the introduction of the new, smaller Panda cars, so called for their original black and white livery, initiated when one division purchased black and white vehicles and swapped door panels and bonnets. By the early 70s, pale blue and white had been adopted as the colour scheme for such vehicles across the UK, and Z Cars followed suit, with the larger crime cars gradually phased out of the series. This, for me, was a retrograde step: Ford Zephyrs were cool cars with a certain amount of prestige, but the Panda cars tended to be cheaper models: Ford Anglias and Escorts and Hillman Imps. Once the Panda patrols came to the fore, the series no longer deserved its original title, as the old Z Victor cars were no longer in use. Ironically, when Ford set out to revamp its Zephyr/Zodiac range in 1961, they did so under the title of ‘Project Panda’!

1970s Z Cars became drab and suburban, a world away from the gritty feel of the original series. The twice-a-week soap-style production had really taken its toll. Once contemporary, relevant and challenging, Z Cars now became dull and run of the mill, with scripts and direction reflecting this change in values. When the classic theme was replaced by a new arrangement that sounded about as cutting edge as a daytime cookery show, any interest I may still have held for the series went out of the window. Another aspect that set 70s Z Cars apart from its earlier incarnation was a tendency for the stories to take place in daylight. A lot of the 60s stories were set at night, and looked moodily atmospheric in black and white. Now the series assumed a kind of dull, overcast aesthetic. It just wasn't the same any more.

But I wasn’t done with Z Cars just yet. In fact, I was really only getting started. Around 1973, I began to refocus my interest on the earlier series. This all came about when I discovered a Z Cars Annual at the school Christmas bazaar. The last of the World Distributors run (and still the hardest to find), this 1966 edition contained some well-drawn and convincingly written stories, including characters like Charlie Barlow who had by that time departed to Wyvern for Softly Softly. Not long after this, I discovered that there had been paperback novelisations of Z Cars back in the 1960s, when I chanced upon one of them at a second hand bookstall.  Z Cars Again was, as its title suggested, the second such publication, and a mere few minutes after sifting it out of a box, I turned up its predecessor. These books had originally appeared under the Mayflower imprint, but the copies I found were produced for the charity Oxfam, with superior, if austere cover designs. The books novelised various TV scripts, including the first episode, Four of a Kind, and I found them entertaining and surprisingly humorous in places. There were plenty of references to the characters ‘suppin’ too much ale’, eating chips in the cars, and coming up against tearaways who were generically referred to as ‘young toughies’. I later discovered another Z Cars novel, this time an original story, Barlow on Trial, and a couple of true crime books penned by series advisor ex-Detective Sgt William Prendergast. Much later, I chanced upon a copy of Longman books’ collection of Z Cars scripts, produced as a resource for schools, and illustrated with telesnaps of the featured episodes. Of all the Z Cars publications, this one is easily the most interesting, and still turns up now and then on eBay at quite reasonable prices.

Despite my rekindled enthusiasm for the original Z Cars, I couldn’t bring myself to take any interest in the contemporary episodes, although I did get to see odd examples during this era. Simultaneously, I was also ignoring Softly, Softly, which at least preserved some of the original Z Cars DNA in the form of Barlow and Watt (until Barlow was spun off into his own separate series). I did, however, cut the two detectives some slack by tuning into their investigation into the murder spree of Jack the Ripper (1973) and its superior follow-up series, Second Verdict (1976).

A rare opportunity arose to watch an early Z Cars when the BBC repeated John Hopkins’ Police Work in the summer of 1976. The episode, which ended the second series with a bang, saw Fancy and Jock threatened by an unhinged character with a sawn-off shotgun when sent to summon him as a witness. Although the episode is still extant in the BBC’s archive, it remains frustratingly elusive online, and is at the top of my watch list should it ever resurface. It also featured the rare ‘transitional’ title sequence, as mentioned earlier.

I finally caved in and returned to contemporary Z Cars in 1977. By this time, the two episodes a week format had been dropped (rightly so) and the series reverted to its original 50-minute length. I enjoyed most of the series, and stayed with it into its final year of 1978. In recognition of the fact that this series was to be the last, the producers finally ditched the modernised theme music and reverted to the original Spiegl/Fry arrangement, albeit in re-recorded form. The show was still in its time-honoured Wednesday evening slot, but debuted in late June, which hardly speaks volumes about the BBC’s confidence in their product. A Nationwide feature prefaced its return on 28 June with the episode Driver. Original cast member Joseph Brady appeared, albeit as a different character. Lynch had long ago been promoted to Inspector and Quilley was now a Sergeant. John Collin returned as DS Haggar, and regulars PC Render (Alan O’Keefe) and DS Bowker (Brian Grellis) were still on board. My diary records that the episode Quilley on the Spot was the ‘best yet’ (of this particular series).

Z Cars finally came to an end with the episode Pressure (20.09.78), written by series creator Troy Kennedy Martin. Despite its historic significance, I remember this as a dull episode, enlivened only by the comedic reappearance of original cast actors Brian Blessed, Joe Brady, Colin Welland and Jeremy Kemp in cameo roles.

March 1971: a bearded Sgt Stone returns to Z Cars after a 13-week absence while actor John Slater received treatment for a congential heart defect. In his absence, he was covered by DS Haggar (John Collin). From now on, the two Sergeants would have to rub along together...

With the programme now consigned to history, would the BBC recognise its importance and embark on a repeat run? Not a chance. The 20th anniversary was marked in January 1982 with a single Sunday afternoon broadcast of Hide – And Go Seek, offering the chance to see a young John Thaw during his brief tenure on the show. Another episode, Happy Families, was dusted off for a 1986 season commemorating sixty years of the BBC, but this unfortunately became the Corporation’s default episode whenever another repeat was deemed necessary (its reselection almost certainly a result of having been subject to rights clearance).

A glimmer of hope for Z Cars fans emerged during the early 90s with the release of the first four episodes from 1962 on a VHS tape around the time of the 30th anniversary. Sadly, no further releases were forthcoming. It was left, somewhat ironically, to ITV to compile and broadcast the first serious retrospective documentary on the series, Z Cars – Where Are They Now, shown to mark the show’s fortieth anniversary in 2002. The BBC played catch-up with the short documentary series Call the Cops (2008), an episode of which examined Z Cars, but not in any great depth. A couple of vintage editions were shown at the same time and, to date, these screenings mark the series’ last ever appearance on BBC television.

Since then, episodes have been appearing on YouTube, from a variety of sources. Some of these uploads have been rendered worthless by the addition of a distracting union jack watermark, but there are enough clean copies to be going on with. Quality is variable, usually on the poor end of the scale, but all are watchable. For fans of the series’ original and best iteration this may yet be the only chance to see it.

Ten years ago, a handful of 1970s episodes made it onto DVD, but these clearly did not sell in any great number. I got volume one and found it so boring I have yet to watch it all the way through. The releasing company should have done its research better – while there is still a lot of interest in the original series, the same does not apply to its later incarnations. A release of 1962 episodes would have done much better.

The news that Talking Pictures TV was to commence repeats of Z Cars was tempered by the realisation that they were starting in the 70s, at what was arguably the programme’s nadir. Of the episodes shown at time of writing, only Absence (originally broadcast on 07.01.74) showed any promise, with an unusual amount of location work. The others have been dull and beset by the soap-style writing and production values that characterised this era. It’s to be hoped that the channel can move swiftly onwards (or rather, backwards) to the early 60s, but as I understand it, the problem here is one of rights clearance. The 1973-74 episodes we’re getting to see were probably cleared for a DVD release that never happened, but the channel does appear to have the 60s era in its sights, so we may still get to see Fancy and Jock in action in Z Victor One.

One way or another, I've been a fan of Z Cars for over sixty years. Whilst it disappointed in its later years, it is rightly remembered for the ground-breaking drama it once was. The real life police didn't much care for the way they were depicted on screen, but times were changing, and the cosy world of Dixon of Dock Green was no longer relevant. Z Cars was the first police series in Britain to aim at a semblance of reality, but you can take a good idea too far. Reality for many people is drab and pedestrian, which is what Z Cars became. If anyone from TPTV is reading this, take heed. Skip the 70s and go back to the 60s. Proper music, black and white, Barlow, Watt, Fancy & Jock. That's how Z Cars should be remembered...

Location Spotting: Cooling Towers

 

I’m always interested in locations from film and television. Many years ago, I trailed around the suburbs of Manchester trying to find locations from the 1963 film Billy Liar only to discover, much later, that they’d been shot in Bradford. But back then, I didn't have the internet to assist me...

Locations are always easier to track down when they include a landmark of some kind – by which I mean large, prominent buildings or other distinctive features in the landscape. Since childhood, I’ve nutured a curious fascination for coal-fired power stations, having been impressed at an early age by the shape and proportions of the cooling towers that were usually associated with such places. Within the past month, Britain’s last coal-fired generating station at Ratcliffe on Soar, Nottinghamshire, was closed for good, and the past twenty years have seen the decommissioning and demolition of stations the length and breadth of the British Isles. Save for a few stragglers – such as the five towers of Willington Power Station in Derbyshire – the many cooling towers that once dominated the landscape have long since gone to dust.

So if I ever spot a power station on an old piece of film or television, I’m keen to find out where it was. Last week, in Z Cars – currently being repeated on Talking Pictures TV – we got some good shots of two good examples in North London. There were a good many power stations dotted across the London suburbs over the years, so identification is not always easy. One of the two stations, however, I recognised, as it can also be seen in John Betjeman’s film Metro-land, shot a year before the Z Cars episode in 1972. This facility, located in Neasden, can easily be identified by the distinctive shape of its twin cooling towers (these structures showed a surprising amount of variation in their appearance). Neasden was already mothballed by the time the Z Cars episode was filmed, having been decomissioned in 1968. 

 

Neasden power station as seen in Z Cars, Absence (above) and Metro-Land (below)

The Z Cars episode included shots of another power station, still in operation, and located close to a canal. This one proved somewhat harder to identify. As the shots from the episode show, the station had three cooling towers and two smokestacks emerging from a large, brick built boiler house. Its canalside location helped in tracking it down, as did proximity to Neasden. I considered, but ruled out Brimsdown in Essex (too many cooling towers and of the wrong design) and West Ham power station (towers in the wrong configfuration), but after a bit of Googling, I found an image that matched almost exactly to one of the shots in the episode. The station in question was at Acton Lane, Willesden – not far from Neasden and conveniently close to the BBC studios at Shepherds’ Bush. The plant remained in operation until 1983, and its location can be seen clearly on this section from a London A-Z map of the same era.

It’s surprising to realise exactly how many power stations once served the major urban and industrial areas of the UK. Googling for images reveals numerous examples, all variations on the same basic design and layout, with plants often comprising half a dozen or more cooling towers. In more recent times, cooling towers have been demonised as iconography of fossil fuel power generation, with picture editors on news and documentary programmes using shots of the structures to illustrate the issue of global warming. In fact, nothing but steam ever emerged from cooling towers, which were used, as their name suggests, to cool the water from the steam turbines before recyling it back into the plant. The harmful carbon emissions from power stations came only from the tall smokestacks. But cooling towers, with their vast size and grimy weathering, made a better visual scapegoat.

In fact, I’ve always found them intriguing structures, and having lived in the vicinity of a few examples, would often be impressed by the effect of different lighting conditions, especially when the plants were running at full capacity and sending up vast columns of steam. I’m sure most people considered them blots on the landscape, but those who lived in close proximity to such stations have often developed a sentimental attachment to the towers and are sad to see them go.

And of course, modern thinking tells us that coal-fired power generation was a bad thing. That may be so, but where would we have been without it? One only has to think back to the days of miners’ strikes and the resulting power cuts to appreciate the monumental importance those stations played in everyday life.

There’s no point in looking out for power stations in today’s Britain, unless you happen to be travelling along the A50 trunk road, where you’ll still see the examples I mentioned earlier. So the best place to spot them is in vintage film and television...

Acton Lane (Willesden) power station as seen in Z Cars above, and in a Flickr image taken from the same spot, evidently a few years later (note the same tree is still visible)

Anything Can Happen in the Last Sixty Years

 

Stingray: A Personal Memoir

‘Stand by for Action!’ It was sixty years ago this week that young viewers were alerted by the barking voice of Commander Shore and the thundering drumbeat that ushered in the very first episode of Gerry and Sylvia Anderson’s Stingray. Viewers in the London ITV region got there first, on Sunday 4 October. Up here in the Midlands, we had to wait until Tuesday. Assuming we were actually watching…

This blog is primarily about pop cultural events and icons that I can remember. Yet I have no recollection whatsoever of the debut of Stingray. I was already a fan of Fireball XL5 – I’d had the annual bought for me the previous Christmas, and the series had scarcely been off the screen in all that time. Now here was a new Supermarionation show, bigger, more dynamic, more explosive than ever. Surely it arrived in a blaze of publicity? If so, I was utterly oblivious.

Here in the Midlands, Stingray was scheduled at the slightly unusual time of 7.00pm. Fireball had also been broadcast in this timeslot, which, when it debuted in March 1963, was a little after my bedtime. One of my earliest memories is of being brought downstairs to see the programme, possibly on its first screening. After its initial run, Fireball was moved to the more child-friendly slot of 5.25pm, at which hour I have much clearer recollections. By 1964, I was certainly stopping up until seven or seven thirty, as I can remember some of the programmes that occupied this time slot on ITV. So there’s no reason to suppose I was not allowed to see Stingray at this time. As I wrote in my last entry, I have many quite clear memories of television from the autumn of 1964: but my recollections of Stingray begin in 1965.

In my memory, Stingray was always on earlier, at a time when it was still light outside. This means that I’m remembering the broadcasts from spring 1965 onwards. That’s not to say I hadn’t seen it sooner – but I just don’t associate it with being on at 7pm. Batman, yes. Thunderbirds, certainly. Just not Stingray. But while Fireball saw out the whole of its first broadcast in the 7pm slot, Stingray would be brought forward to 5.25pm as of 03.02.65. Coincidentally or not, this move came a week after the launch of the TV21 comic, itself launched via a TV ad campaign. Viewers who hadn’t already seen Stingray in its later slot would have been introduced to the series with its all-time dud episode The Cool Caveman!

My earliest recollection of a specific episode is Raptures of the Deep, and it was definitely light outside, which dates that memory to its second broadcast on Wednesday 25 August 1965 – mere weeks before the arrival of Thunderbirds.

For much of 1965, Stingray was, for me, one of the main events on television. Toys had arrived in our local shops by early in the year, and I saw the very desirable battery-operated Stingray model from Lincoln International demonstrated in our favourite toy shop Osbornes’ – but I didn’t want it. Why not? Well, for one thing, I was never a huge fan of battery-operated toys, but I think the real reason is more simple: Stingray went underwater, and I wanted a toy you could play with in the bath. Fortunately, another manufacturer, Plaston, had what I wanted: a soft vinyl Stingray toy that was ideal for bathtime adventures. I already had their Supercar toy, and the Plaston Stingray was duly added to the toybox. I can still remember getting it, on an afternoon in 1965. Today, of this highly collectable toy, only the ‘ratemaster’ propellor remains.

Other Stingray toys that found their way into my hands included a wooden jigsaw of Marineville (still extant as of 2024); a die-cast cap gun, which came from a toyshop close to our grandparents’ home; and a smaller Stingray model, again intended for aquatic operation, that was driven by a rubber band. I saw, but was not bought, that year’s Stingray Annual, which was displayed on the wall of our local newsagents, and I also had the 33rpm ‘Mini-Album’ Into Action With Troy Tempest. This was an oddity: a record that spoke directly to you, the listener. I felt a bit uneasy being ordered about by Commander Shore, who wanted me to do impersonations of Troy Tempest and Phones. “Let’s hear you try to talk just like him,” he instructed, in a voice that meant business.

One of the most ludicrous items of Stingray merchandise was the so-called ‘scan shoes’: elasticated slippers decorated with the heads of Troy Tempest and Phones. These were on display in the window of Lichfield’s ‘Model Shop’ toy retailer when we went in to get the Plaston model, and even at the age of four, I found them utterly ridiculous.

Aside from playing with my plastic models in the bath, there was another kind of Stingray game I made up. This involved filling a plastic seaside bucket with water, then flinging it up the garden while shouting ‘stand by for action!’ The resulting watery explosion was meant to replicate the one we saw on the opening titles, and this particular game – which we called ‘Action Buckets’ – became a favourite of my brother and myself. I’m not sure our mum was quite so keen. She did, however, display some ingenuity when I asked for a pair of hydrophones like those worn by Stingray’s co-pilot, Phones. You couldn’t get them in the shops, and we had no real headphones in the house. As a substitute, our mum sliced a used Jif lemon squeezer in half, added two lollypop sticks for aerials, and connected the two resulting ‘hydrophones’ with a piece of knicker elastic. It was a proper Blue Peter job, but the idea was, as far as I’m aware, completely original. Those Jif phones lasted for decades: years later I would still come across them whilst sifting through the junk in our loft.

The summer of 1965 was really the high watermark for Stingray toys, and in my memory it was bright, sunny weather – exactly like the blue summery sky in the Marineville jigsaw I had bought for me during those months. Like any spell of summer weather, it couldn’t last. When Thunderbirds exploded onto ITV in the autumn, all of Gerry Anderson’s earlier work was instantly eclipsed, and Stingray suddenly seemed like yesterday’s news. It had been ‘tomorrow’s news today’ as the main feature in the TV21 comic when it launched back in January, but TV21 was primarily conceived as a promotional vehicle for the coming Thunderbirds: its first dozen issues included covers featuring exciting new hardware from the work in progress, and a weekly strip introduced readers to the characters of Lady Penelope and Parker. Stingray may have had the lion’s share of TV21 covers during 1965, but from January 66 onwards, Thunderbirds was the main event.

In truth, Stingray’s days were numbered from the moment that AP Films began work on its successor. Journalists who called the studio wanting to know more about Troy Tempest and co were disappointed to learn that their creators weren’t really interested in promoting the series, and aside from ongoing merchandising deals, Stingray quickly dropped off the PR radar.

On television, it was a different matter. Here in the Midlands, Stingray was barely off the air from its October 1964 debut right through to June 1966, with the series ending randomly on the repeated episode Rescue From the Skies. After a seven-month gap, it was back, in February 1967, with The Big Gun (the episode order was all over the place during these broadcasts). Following a ludicrously misplaced screening of A Christmas to Remember on the first of August (!) this extended run came to an end the following week with yet another outing for The Big Gun.

I can remember these 1967 broadcasts, but mainly for a meterological reason: we were watching an episode some time around the end of April, when I looked up the garden and noticed it was snowing! I’d like to report that the episode we were watching had been Pink Ice (repeated on 27.04.67) but sadly this doesn’t quite match up with Met Office records.

In truth, I was getting a little tired of Stingray by this time, and I’m not sure we even bothered with it some weeks. The series was off the air completely during 1968 and for all but the last two weeks of 1969, when another repeat run commenced on Thursday afternoons. These repeats ran all the way through to September 1970, when the show was replaced by Fireball XL5. One particular episode from this run remains as a clear memory – Invisible Enemy, broadcast on 07.05.70 – and again, it’s for a weather-related reason, the afternoon in question having been notably thundery.

Troy and co were put on (pink) ice by ATV for the whole of 1971 and 72, and when they returned, it was in the recently introduced summer morning schedule, beginning with the pilot episode on 24.07.73. My brother recorded the next episode, The Ghost Ship (26.07.73) on cassette, and the same summer we also committed the episode Deep Heat to open-reel tape (30.08.73).

Stingray is, of course, famous for being the first British-made TV series to be shot entirely in colour: yet for all this time, we’d been watching in black and white. I wouldn’t get to see the series in colour until the summer of 1975, and ironically, it was the very last episode, Aquanaut of the Year. Episodes were being stripped into the Saturday morning kid-fest Tiswas, without any mention in the TV Times, and by the time I got wise to the fact, the series was all but over. It was back the following summer, when we managed to see another handful of episodes, but I would have to wait until 1982, and a full repeat run on ITV before I could claim to have seen the whole series as originally intended.

Compared with other Gerry Anderson series, Stingray got a bit of a raw deal – barely a year in the spotlight before being eclipsed by Thunderbirds. Supercar and Fireball XL5 both ran for a good eighteen months or more before being relegated to second base by their successors. I would argue that Stingray did appreciably better when revived by the BBC in the early 90s. The young viewers who tuned into these broadcasts had been primed by an earlier rerun of Thunderbirds (1991-92) which must have had the strange effect of making Stingray look like its successor. This was the first time either series had been nationally networked, and a ‘second generation’ of merchandising soon began to appear in the shops.

My own small contribution to the history of Stingray came towards the end of the Network DVD label in 2022, when the series was finally subjected to a long-overdue remaster and released in High Definition. I have to say the remastering work was a disappointment to me, with some episodes lacking in density and contrast, and displaying variable colour values (it was done, comparatively speaking, on the cheap), but it was still a big improvement on the old masters that had been doing the rounds since the advent of DVD. I was told to big up the set – and ended up cramming a whole pile of collectable goodies into the double-boxed ‘Super Deluxe’ edition, designed as an instant collectable, which sold out quite quickly (at time of writing, this edition is unavailable anywhere online, with the merely ‘deluxe’ complete box set listed at prices ranging from £150 to £300.)

Will Stingray endure into the future? Will any of these series, in an era when CGI and AI are capable of creating similar asethetics without the sweat and toil expended by Gerry Anderson’s creative team? I think they will. AI/CGI will never equal any of the ‘real world’ practical effects from the golden age of film and television production. Real light falling on real 3d objects is a phenomenon that no computer will ever convincingly recreate. As future audiences grow jaded with this kind of slick technology, they will, one hopes, rediscover the unique magic that was Supermarionation.

I may never watch Stingray again – I’ve seen the series so many times that, in the words of Commander Sam Shore, “I know every rusty old cannonball in it.” But it’s there for whenever I feel the memory needs topping up. And – thanks to the encouragement of Commander Shore on that 1965 Mini-Album – I can now recite whole swathes of dialogue in the voices of the original characters. You should hear me do Marina...

A collection of Stingray goodies as illustrated in the 'Merchandising Guide' included with Network's Super Deluxe edition blu ray.