Thunderbird Sixty – part 3

 

3: End of the Road

By Christmas of 1967, Thunderbirds was last year’s news. The strip in TV21, now given an insane slant by writer Scott Goodall, would endure even beyond the comic’s demise in 1969, but on television it had, for the moment, run its course. For young viewers like me, it was Captain Scarlet all the way, and the new series meant a new range of toys in the shops. The first of these had appeared by Christmas, in the form of a nicely realised friction-drive model of the Angel Interceptor aircraft. TV21 promoted the new toys in a series of half page black and white ads, and it’s interesting to note how ‘The Angels’ were marketed as a separate entity from Captain Scarlet, with their own logo. Even so, the marketing campaign was small beer compared with the full colour advertisements that had helped to sell the range of Thunderbirds toys.

But we weren’t done with Thunderbirds just yet. The Andersons still had one more shot left in their locker. Stung by the disappointing response to the first feature film, they somehow convinced United Artists to do it all over again, and thus it was that, in July 1968, Thunderbird Six limped its way into the cinemas. The phenomenon of the ‘summer blockbuster’ was unknown in the late 60s, so the July release date was clearly timed to coincide with the long school summer holiday (although the film had received its BBFC classification back in January). In fact, it was released as a 'Sunday double bill', with Thunderbird Six playing in the afternoon while a brace of Bonds took over in the evening.

In the pages of TV21, the new film got scarcely a mention. There would be no photo-strip this time around, and aside from a couple of modest black and white quarter page blocks, there was no other publicity for the new venture. Away from the comic, a life-sized FAB1 toured the country accompanied by a real life Lady Penelope: in a nice bit of unpaid publicity from the rival TV network, the vehicle even made an appearance on BBC1’s Blue Peter.

For me, the film was a bit of a disappointment. Any chance to see Thunderbirds in colour in the cinema couldn’t be missed, of course, and the finale was as explosive as anything else in the Anderson canon. The featured vehicle, Skyship One, was a nice design, but we’d come to the cinema to see a brand new Thunderbird in action, and the final revelation of the Tiger Moth came as a giant let-down, clearly intended to amuse adult viewers. The rest of the film was little more than an innocuous travelogue showcasing some typically gimmicky Anderson ideas, with an unimaginative hijack plot bolted on. Thunderbird 6 was another box office failure. As a movie, it was sheer self indulgence. Thunderbirds deserved better.

By this time, the TV21 Thunderbirds strip was still in the very capable hands of Frank Bellamy, who managed to combine a bravura style with faithful depictions of the characters and hardware. The scripts, originally from Alan Fennell, and latterly from Scott Goodall, began to bear less and less resemblance to the series, with bizarre super-villains who seemed drafted in from the Marvel universe. The strip reached a nadir in the spring of 1968 with a storyline that began with the apparent murder of Brains, went on to depict the destruction of Thunderbirds 2 and 3, and culminated with the Hood attempting to saw the top off Tracy Island!

Despite this farrago of nonsense, the strip remained one of TV21’s most popular features. Equally insane, if not more so, was the Zero-X strip, which saw its characters subjected to endless ‘bodyshock’ storylines: one saw them turned into bald-headed, white skinned, red-veined mutants, whilst another had them taken over by malevolent cylopean leaves that attached themselves to their victims’ faces. Yet another adventure saw them melted into puddles of blue liquid. TV21 was beginning to look not unlike a horror comic… When the ailing title was combined with its sibling paper Joe 90, Thunderbirds was one of only two Anderson strips to survive the makeover. It would later resurface in Countdown, competently illustrated by Don Harley, who had covered during Frank Bellamy's brief absence from the TV21 strip in the autumn of 1966.

Thunderbirds as it appeared in the first issue of Countdown, February 20, 1971

In the ATV Midlands region, the series was still on air, and had more or less taken up residence in a Friday teatime slot, where it was to be found throughout the whole of 1969 and 1970. It was back again in 1971 for what must have been its fourth or fifth run. 18 episodes were shown before Land of the Giants took over the slot in June. TV now became a Thunderbirds-free zone until a handful of episodes turned up on Saturday mornings in early 1973. 

All this time, I'd been watching in black and white, so it was a revelation finally to see episodes in colour. For me, this didn't happen until 1975, when Lord Parker’s ‘Oliday was shown at Easter, and Richochet at Christmas. The series would not return to TV until 1981 – at least not here in the Midlands. Yorkshire Television, however, showed a batch of episodes in 1979, VHS dupes of which found their way to me the following year: they were low resolution and the colours were smeary, but it was better than nothing.

Also better than nothing were the few Thunderbirds episodes that had found their way onto the 8mm home movie format, albeit in heavily truncated form, and with captions instead of soundtracks. It's unclear when these films were originally released: the box artwork has the series copyright date of 1965, which fans (and the internet) have assumed to be the release date of the films themselves. This is highly unlikely, especially in light of the fact that at least one episode (Attack of the Alligators!) wasn't even broadcast until 1966. Either way, the films were still being sold in the mid 70s, making them some of the last items of original Thunderbirds merchandise to be available in the shops. I acquired an 8mm projector in 1977 and soon got hold of the 8-minute black and white versions of Day of Disaster and Thirty Minutes After Noon. The absolute last fling for Thunderbirds merchandising was Dinky's venerable Thunderbird 2 which finally dropped out of the catalogue in 1979.

Three of the Arrow Thunderbirds home movies, in 1-reel and 50ft editions

By 1980, I felt like nobody else still cared about Thunderbirds. I’d had one friend at school who wasn’t ashamed to admit he still liked the series, but I’d lost contact with him, and Thunderbirds fandom at this point in time seemed to consist of myself and Tim Beddows. We soon made contact with others, though, and spring of 1980 saw a kind of ad hoc international convention take place in our living room, attended by Starlog’s David Hirsch, Theo De Klerk and a couple of other ‘uber fans’ (there was no other kind at that time).

1981 saw the series return to British television with what appeared to be brand-new 35mm prints. Here in the Midlands, the repeats began on Sunday 30 August, at 1.00pm, and I was now able to record episodes on VHS tape.  The series continued until Christmas, in its 'official' broadcast order, with Thunderbird Six making an unwelcome intrusion into the run on Sunday 20 September. The repeats resumed on Sunday 12 September 1982, beginning with Desperate Intruder, and running all the way through to Christmas, with Give or Take a Million appearing on Sunday 12 December. My diary records that it snowed all day – thanks, Brains!

By early 1983, when the oprhaned episode Path of Destruction finally made it onto air, I now had a complete set of Thunderbirds on VHS tape, so it no longer mattered whether ITV chose to repeat it again or not. In the event, they didn’t, and while the 1980s would see the gradual emergence of an organised fan network devoted to the work of Gerry Anderson, there were no further sightings of Thunderbirds on the small screen as the ITV regions ploughed through the other Supermarionation series, covering everything bar Supercar and The Secret Service.

I could hardly have anticipated what came next. In September 1991 a repeat run began on BBC2 of all places. For viewers like me, Thunderbirds had been inextricably linked with ITV for the past twenty five years and to see it on BBC was almost a form of culture shock. It also meant that the series was shown without advert breaks for the first time in its history* and, more importantly, was being nationally networked. With an average of over six million viewers tuning in every week, there was clear potential for a new range of toys and other licenced products, and when the Matchbox Tracy Island appeared on the market, it became the season’s must-have toy. As a fan, I welcomed this new range of merchandise, but couldn’t keep up with the releases as every week seemed to bring rafts of new toys to the shelves of our local Woolworth’s. Many years later, during a house move, I sold on all of my remaining 1990s Thunderbirds toys – somehow, they lacked the charm of the 1960s originals, and the packaging was unappealing.

The idea of a full-scale revival of the series began to gain ground, and, inevitably, a movie resulted. I’ve never bothered with this worthless endeavour that saw the asethetically pleasing vehicles of the 1960s given a ‘twenty first century’ makeover (the new FAB1 must qualify as one of the most hideous reimaginings of a hero vehicle in the entire genre of sci-fi/fantasy). Later still came a TV revival, Thunderbirds Are Go, of which I watched a solitary episode out of curiosity. I was puzzled by the ‘plastic-haired’ appearance of the CGI characters and disappointed by the theme tune which reiterated the first phrase of Barry Gray’s original like a stuck record.

Over the years, Thunderbirds became a lightning rod for misguided creativity. Gerry Anderson had sold all his interests in the series back in the 1970s and since then had been forced to sit back and spectate as other hands made a travesty of his original concept. Thunderbirds 2068 was a pointless manga revamp of the format, but the wooden spoon for the worst production ever to sully the brand goes to 1994’s Turbocharged Thunderbirds, which mashed up the original footage into a gimmicky teenage format that saw the characters presented as ‘virtual lifeforms’ on another planet. Garbage doesn’t even begin to describe it.

There can surely be no point or merit in further attempting to revive Thunderbirds. The original can and should be left to stand alone for what it was – an artefact of its era and the apotheosis of the Andersons' unique film production technique. There have, of course, been more recent and accurate revivals of Supermarionation, but nothing will ever be equal to the original.

Thunderbirds is readily available to watch in HD on ITVX and on ITV’s YouTube channel. Though dated in many respects, the series stands alone, even amongst Gerry Anderson's repertoire. Thunderbirds was where it all came together: the perfect format, with a cast of warm, believable characters and imaginatively conceived hardware.

Watching Thunderbirds back in the 1960s and 70s, I'd hardly have imagined it would still be remembered so many years later. Being made in colour certainly helped to 'future proof' the series, and whilst its aesthetics are very much those of the 1960s, the fact of its being made with puppets and models makes it look a lot less dated than live action productions of the same era, while its real world physical effects really set it apart in an era of ubiquitous CGI.

I've no doubt that Thunderbirds will continue to be celebrated even when it reaches its centenary, in the TV21 year of 2065... and beyond?

[* To be pedantic, some of the ITV morning repeats in the 1970s were broadcast advert-free, including the YTV batch from 1979. The original commercial break captions subsequently became extremely rare] 

Thunderbird Sixty – part 2

 

2: Thunderbirds Toys – for Girls and Boys

Last time, I looked at the first weeks of Thunderbirds and how young fans of the series (like myself) acted out our own adventures with toys, with existing toys often standing in for the International Rescue vehicles in our imaginations (well, mine at least). My original ‘Thunderbird One’ was played by a friction-drive Gloster Javelin (with realistic sparking engine), which you can see pictured below. It took a few months before any bona fide Thunderbirds toys appeared in the shops, but once the floodgates opened, there was no stopping them.

It wasn’t just the International Rescue vehicles that I wanted to own: my favourite piece of hardware from the series was the Fireflash airliner – arguably a better and more realistic design than any of the Thunderbird craft themselves. Back in 1965, no toy manufacturer would dream of releasing a model of a vehicle that appeared in only a handful of TV episodes, and although our dad valiantly searched the shops that Christmas, no Fireflash toy was to be had (I wonder how many other kids of my age also wanted one?) As a substitute, I received a battery-operated model of the coolest real world aircraft currently available – the ill-fated TSR-2. In real life, the TSR-2 project had been cancelled (by Harold Wilson) by the time I got my hands on the toy, and I knew nothing of its intended purpose (it carried a nuclear payload). Decades later I saw an actual example at RAF Cosford where I'd gone, ironically, to look at a Gerry Anderson exhibition...

Thunderbirds 'stand-ins': Left, Gloster Javelin (Thunderbird One), right, TSR2 (Fireflash)

Apart from the vehicles themselves, the next most essential toy to own was a Thunderbirds outfit. This was available as a complete costume, comprising top, trousers and over-the-shoulder sash/belt, plus, of course, the famous cap. I don’t know whether our toy shop had sold out or whether the price of the complete boxed outfit was too steep, but I ended up with just the cap and the sash, which I had to wear over my ordinary clothes. The cap, being made of black felt, wasn’t exactly true to the series, and was replaced in the autumn of 1966 by a cardboard version given away with TV21 comic (issue 90, dateline October 8 2066). I wore it until I was old enough not to want to play Thunderbirds in the back garden any more, by which time it was held together with sellotape.

A near complete set of Thunderbirds dolls (minus TIn Tin), as seen on an auction site last year. The set realised £2,100

Spring 1966 had seen the very successful UK launch of Hasbro's GI Joe, rebranded as Action Man for the British market. Many adults were sceptical about a doll for boys, but the new toy was an immediate success, and inspired a range of Thunderbirds characters made in a similar manner, which arrived in toy shops later in the year. All the regular characters were available, and the likenesses were some of the best ever created for action figures. Unfortunately, they were nowhere near as robust as Action Man, being constructed of soft, flimsy plastic and held together internally by staples and elastic. When the staples rusted, your Thunderbirds doll fell to pieces. They were also incredibly hard to find in toy shops – all the Tracy brothers sold out almost immediately. A classmate turned up at school with Scott Tracy, but by the time I got down to the toy shop next weekend, only John Tracy remained. The less popular dolls (including, amazingly, Parker), could still be found in toy shops two or three years later.

1966 was the true 'Thunderbirds Christmas'. J.Rosenthal's range of toys had by now been rebranded 'Century 21', and dozens of other manufacturers had licenced products on the market. TV21 regularly featured whole page colour advertisements promoting the Century 21 range of 'Thunderbirds toys – for girls and boys.' These ads were to be found regularly in the comic (example above), with their last appearance coming in issue 131 in May 1967.

Sound Only Selected

Unless you’d taped episode soundtracks for yourself, the only way to revisit Thunderbirds when not on air was on vinyl. Century 21 records had launched in October of 1965, and amongst its first batch of releases was the Mini-album ‘Introducing Thunderbirds’. I had this bought for me, but didn’t think a lot of it – rather than an episode soundtrack, it was merely Jeff Tracy demonstrating the Thunderbird vehicles (or rather, their sounds) to Lady Penelope and Parker. What the record desperately lacked was music. Music was, of course, an essential part of the series, and I always made sure to hum some Barry Gray themes as I flew my Thunderbirds toys around the living room. 

The Century 21 'Mini Albums' are launched in TV21, issue 41, 30 October 2065. This was also the first photo of Thunderbird One to appear in the comic.

Much better record releases were to come – at my birthday in 1966 I was bought the ‘Thunderbird One’ EP, which condensed the pilot episode into a very effective twenty-minute narrative. My brother had the ‘FAB’ record bought for him at the same time, on which could be heard the decidedly iffy vocals of Lady P and Parker warbling a Barry Gray ditty about the Abominable Snowman.

Thunderbirds continued to be a big deal as far as I was concerned. Autumn 1966 saw new episodes appear in a two-part format, along with re-edited versions of the first series, now shown over consecutive evenings, Batman fashion. The series joined TV21 comic in January 1966, and by the end of the year had found its way onto the big screen. I was taken to Birmingham to see the film, my first experience of Thunderbirds in colour. I still recall hearing a child in a nearby seat telling his parents ‘that’s Thunderbird One’ as Zero-X Lift Body One emerged from its hangar. The fool!

Century 21 toys' Zero-X (1967)

Zero-X provided the last of the Century 21 Thunderbirds toys, but it took nearly a year to reach the toyshops and was eventually released alongside the short-lived range of 'Project SWORD' vehicles. As you can see above, Zero-X was one of the most realistic toys ever produced by Century 21. The main body and MEV were independently powered, by batteries, with coloured flashing tail lights at the rear, activated from a walkie-talkie style controller. My brother and myself both received the toy as a present that Christmas and mine remains more or less intact, and boxed to this day. Although it hadn't been run for more than half a century, the motorised MEV, when loaded with batteries, whizzed away across the floor like it was escaping from a hoard of Rock Snakes...

Thunderbirds continued on British television for much of the 1960s, although it was banished for twelve months in 1968 when the ITA decided that ATV had been giving undue prominence to the Anderson productions in the children’s schedules. It also made a difference where you lived: we were in the ATV region, and as financial backers of the series, they kept Thunderbirds on air almost continually from 1969 through to 1971. From November 69, those with colour televisions could see it as it was meant to be seen (I wouldn’t get to see a colour episode myself until 1975).

In part three, I'll look at the 'afterlife' of the series...

Thunderbird Sixty

TV21 counts down to Thunderbirds, December 1965

1: Early Days - 1965-66

You’ll need to be in your mid-sixties or older to remember seeing Thunderbirds the first time around. I was four and a half when the series burst onto our screens in September 1965 in a blaze of publicity, of which I retain some distant recollection. Over the next few blogs, I'm going to look back on some sixty-year-old recollections of how we experienced Thunderbirds for the first time.

The promotional trails began maybe a week or so before the series went on air. I vividly recall watching these with my mum – the Thunderbird 2 launch sequence was shown, along with a clip from the episode The Perils of Penelope showing Parker rescuing Lady P from a locked room using rockets in the back of FAB1. I’m sure other clips must have been shown as well, but these were the ones that most impressed themselves on my imagination. Lady Penelope herself was interviewed, on our local news magazine programme ATV Today: I remember very clearly how she described the new series as being ‘like Stingray, Fireball and Supercar all rolled into one.’ As a sales pitch, that rather put me off: I had bad memories of being scared of Supercar – or, more specifically, the series’ bald-headed bad guy Masterspy. Thunderbirds had its own bald baddie, and he turned up in the first episode – but even with his glowing eyes, the Hood never bothered me.

The Hood should, in theory, have been the first character we saw on screen when Thunderbirds made its TV debut on the last day of September 1965 – but I remember that premiere broadcast of Trapped in the Sky somewhat differently. In my recollection, the first scene showed the Fireflash airliner on the tarmac at London Airport. I don’t remember the establishing scenes in the Hood’s temple at all. That’s not to say they were missing – but script editor Alan Pattillo’s diary made reference to the first episode being ‘hacked to ribbons’ when it was shown on ITV London two days later, so maybe they were. I always felt it was an odd choice to start the series by introducing viewers to the bad guy. Anyway, we’ll never know for certain unless someone, somewhere has kept an off-air audio recording.

We did actually record part of the soundtrack of a Thunderbirds episode from that first run. On Friday 25 March 1966, our dad had purchased a Fidelity open-reel tape recorder, and the following Thursday, he taped parts of that evening’s episode – which also happened to be the last in the original series, Security Hazard. That tape confirms that ATV’s presentation of Thunderbirds was less than reverential – the opening titles were hacked off after the episode preview section, depriving viewers of the Thunderbirds theme. Likewise, the end credits were faded out early (over the caption of Thunderbird 2) and the continuity went straight into a commercial. This was somewhat ironic given that our dad had set up the recorder specifically to capture the music on tape.

Returning to that first broadcast, we find ourselves on the evening of Thursday 30 September 1965. It was 7.00pm – for some reason, ATV decided that the Gerry Anderson series deserved to be shown in this ‘family viewing’ slot and the first runs of Fireball XL5 and about half of Stingray had been scheduled the same way. It wasn’t just our family who sat down to watch Trapped in the Sky – we were joined by a lad from down the street, whose parents didn’t hold with television (they were teachers). Not having a TV set, I’m not sure how he even knew about Thunderbirds, but he was there on that first evening and on many weeks to come, and would be back when Batman began in the spring of 1966.

Thunderbirds was an immediate hit with me. I particularly liked the episode Pit of Peril and when it was repeated the following year, recorded my own version of it on our dad’s tape machine, with me doing all the voices. But how did we play at Thunderbirds in those early weeks on air, when toys had yet to arrive in the shops? Simple – we used our imaginations.

I had a box full of plastic aircraft, of which the most futuristic looking was the delta-winged Gloster Javelin. It looked nothing like Thunderbird One, but that didn’t matter – in my imagination it became the International Rescue scout craft. I’m not sure if I had a substitute for Thunderbird 2, but it didn’t really matter – TB1 was my favourite, and Scott Tracy was my favourite of the Tracy brothers (where everyone else tended to prefer Virgil). Century 21 Toys – or rather, J. Rosenthal Ltd – were already on the case, however, and at the beginning of 1966, a friction-drive Thunderbird One arrived in the toyshops. It had a blue plastic fuselage, but we were watching in black and white  so that hardly mattered. What did matter to me (aged almost five) were the toy's red plastic wheels. Thunderbird One didn’t have wheels! Especially not under the nose cone. This bothered me so much that I managed to get our dad to hack them off with a Stanley knife. The toy soon lost its brittle plastic tailplanes, broken in action, and was replaced a short while later by a grey version which I subsequently  customised into a more, ahem, ‘realistic’ model...

Rosenthal's Thunderbird One is announced in TV21. A year later it would cost two shillings less!

Thunderbird 2 was a much more successful toy, and, just like it did on TV, the toy took rather longer to reach the shops than Thunderbird One: indeed, it was beaten to the punch by Thunderbirds Three and Five which arrived in toyshops during March 1966, whereas TB2 wasn't announced until early June, when a half page ad in TV21 alerted readers to 'stand by' for the new release, which would be on 'limited sale in the shops'. This, together with the extended production timeline suggests problems behind the scenes. With its folding legs and detachable pod, TB2 was by far the most complex of the Thunderbirds toys to go on sale, and batches were made in both Hong Kong and the UK.

Being another friction-drive model, TB2 of course had wheels, but this time they were integrated more successfully into the design and the toy was a good representation of the ‘real’ thing. The un-numbered pod (I got our mum to rub on a numeral from a sheet of Letraset) contained a green plastic jeep. Thunderbird Four would have been a better pod vehicle, but a few months later a Smiths Crisps promotion allowed one to send away for snap-together model kits of the International Rescue craft. As luck would have it, their Thunderbird Four scaled perfectly with the Century 21 model of TB2.

The same but different: JR21's Thunderbird 2– on the left, made in England, on the right, made in Hong Kong.

The TB2 toys came in two slightly different versions (above), according to whether they were manufactured in England or Hong Kong. Mine had white plastic feet on the fold-out legs, and pierced foil inside the rear engine nacelles. My brother’s example was a slightly darker green, had red plastic feet and a grey plastic grid inside the nacelles. It also had the Mole in the pod, which was a distinct improvement on the jeep.

Although it had been released in March '66, I didn’t get Thunderbird 3 until a visit to the Ideal Home Exhibition at Birmingham’s Bingley Hall much later in the year. Until then, my games of Thunderbirds in toys made use of a 'JR21' X60 space rocket which, with its three booster nacelles, made a passable stand-in. The toy, which came on a blue roadgoing trailer, retailed at 8/11d. There was a giant-sized TB3 exhibit at the Ideal Home Exhibition, which you could go inside if you were prepared to wait ages in a queue. We didn’t wait, and all I saw of the interior were a few flashing lights. Thunderbird 5, modified from a flying saucer toy and only slightly resembling the real thing, came at Christmas 1966, and I had to wait for my sixth birthday to get Thunderbird Four. 

This, then, was how Thunderbirds left its impression on those of us who saw it first time around. I’m sure my experience must have been typical. Whether it was a good impression is less certain: the endless explosions and destruction certainly found their way into my childhood games and drawings. I recall smashing up a perfectly good plastic garage in the course of a game of Thunderbirds, and my drawing books became pages of scribbled explosions. I didn’t grow up wanting to plant bombs in airliners or steal the secrets of atomic power stations, but the series certainly seemed to foster an appetite for scenes of explosive destruction. And what of the friend from down the street whose parents didn’t own a television? He went on to become a barrister in London, whereas I ended up designing advertisements and DVD sleeves. That’s where too much television will get you…

In the next part, I'll revisit some of those early Thunderbirds toys in more detail.

A tabletop of Thunderbirds toys that have survived from childhood: Clockwise from bottom left: 'Repeater' water pistol; Lincoln International snap-together motorised TB4; battery operated TB5; friction drive TB2 (UK version); friction drive TB3; TB2 (Hong Kong version); TB3 'conversion'; Dinky FAB 1; friction drive TB1 'conversion'; battery operated TB4; dart gun. Centre: cap gun, hat, head of John Tracy doll, half a 'Mole' and, er, The Mighty Atom (okay, it was really a toy for cats...)

ITV@70

 

               

I wasn’t watching ITV yesterday (Monday 22 September), so I didn’t notice if the channel chose to mark its seventieth anniversary in any way, even if was just the ‘and finally’ item on the evening news. Somehow, I doubt it. Ten years ago, I seem to recall a similar lack of celebration when the channel turned sixty. At the Network label, we put out a lavish box set in celebration of the sixtieth anniversary (for which I did the artwork), but I suspect that the people responsible for on air promos and content at the station aren’t really focused on the past, and events of seven decades ago must seem positively prehistoric and beyond the lifespan of even their extended families.

It was a different story back in 1976, when the network celebrated its 21st anniversary. The TV Times included a ‘souvenir supplement’ reproducing its first ever cover (above), and a selection of others providing a timeline of memorable programming. On the night itself, Eamonn Andrews hosted a two-hour celebration ITV – This is Your Life, the contents of which can well be imagined. My diary mentions the inclusion of clips from The Prisoner, Thunderbirds and even The Adventures of Twizzle (which may account for how a solitary episode came to survive in the archive). Viewers in the ATV region were also getting to see The Prisoner on late night repeats, although, ironically, I wasn’t allowed to stop up to watch on this particular week, as the episode had been pushed back half an hour to make room for ‘The Independent Broadcasting Authority Banquet’. Quite why the network chose to televise a black tie junket for its executives and members of Parliament I can’t imagine. It certainly can’t have attracted many viewers.

You might have imagined that the anniversary provided an excuse to present a season of vintage programmes, in much the same way as the BBC had done back in the summer of '76 with its own ‘Festival Forty’. But the BBC had a channel to spare, whereas at ITV, such a celebratory season would have played havoc with scheduling and wasn’t likely to prove popular with advertisers. As a general rule, ITV has never really gone in for this kind of commemorative scheduling: if viewers wanted older programmes, they had to seek them out in the afternoons and late-night slots where occasional vintage items acted as filler for much of the 1970s.

In 1980, ITV’s quarter century was commemorated in print with a lavish coffee table book, produced in association with Michael Joseph. Imagine such a publication appearing today, when the only piece of vintage television that’s regularly enshrined in print is Dr. Who. The TV Times once again acknowledged the occasion with a silver jubilee edition, although the evening itself was marked only by a forty five-minute celebration, hidden away at 11.30pm. My diary recorded the fact of ITV’s 25th anniversary, but I didn’t bother with this self-congratulatory programme. The main event of the evening was The French Connection over on BBC1. The TV Times did rather better, with a nostalgic item at the back of the issue, including yet another reproduction of that 1955 Lucille Ball cover and the schedule for the channel’s first evening of broadcasting. Remarkably, we find something called Crossroads scheduled at 7.30, but this was a discussion forum – the infamous motel still lay nine years in the future. The early evening included ‘Flickwiz’, described as ‘a magazine programme for boys and girls’, but with a logo that, in print, could be interpreted somewhat differently…

My archive of TV Times pdfs fizzles out around 1983, so I can’t report on what, if anything, might have appeared at the time of ITV’s subsequent anniversaries. By the time the channel turned 50, in 2005, it was a ‘do it yourself’ celebration, as Tim Beddows pulled out numerous items from his personal archive to present one of his legendary film shows (for an audience of one!). The day’s programme, recorded in my diary, comprised The Persuaders (Someone Waiting); Return of the Saint (The Nightmare Man); The Adventurer (which broke down); The Saint (The Lawless Lady); Man in a Suitcase (Castle in the Clouds) and finally, Gideon’s Way (The Wall), all projected from 16mm or 35mm film prints. It wasn’t all ITV, though: we also found room for a ‘musical interlude from the BBC circa 1930s/40s’, an edition of Noel Gordon’s Lunchbox, and a vintage advertising film about the benefits of electricity which will no doubt resurface on Talking Pictures’ Footage Detectives sometime, if it hasn’t already (where would they be without Tim’s film archive?)

So there it is – ITV has been going for seventy years, if anyone cares. Without it, we’d never have had The Prisoner, The Sweeney, The Avengers, anything from Gerry Anderson and countless other classic series that have acquired the status of icons. These days, apart from Robert Peston and Tom Bradby, I barely bother with the channel, or indeed much else from contemporary television.

Back in 2015, I’m not sure if I’d have given ITV another decade, but it’s still here, with an extended presence as a streaming service, not to mention four freeview/satellite channels and a YouTube channel. Where they’ll be in another ten years is anybody’s guess, as the television viewing experience continues to fragment into ever increasing subscription services. If there’s still anything resembling today’s scheduled broadcast television around in 2035, I’ll be very surprised… assuming I’m even here to see it.

1999 @ 50

 

I’d known about Space:1999 for months. Paperback novelisations had begun appearing in bookshops well before the series got anywhere near a TV screen. The TV Times had mentioned it a year earlier, publishing a photo of Martin Landau and Barbara Bain and calling the series Space 99 (a better title if you ask me). The BBC’s Horizon had included clips in a film about the special effects industry, How on Earth Did They Do That, broadcast on 23 December 1974. I knew something was on its way from Gerry Anderson, I just didn’t know when to expect it.

Finally, on September 4, 1975, it arrived, promoted as part of ITV’s ‘Big Season’ of autumn programmes. Viewers in the ATV Midlands region, of whom I was one, got to see it first, at 7.00pm that evening, along with the Yorkshire, Grampian, Scottish, Border and Ulster regions. In the London and Anglia areas, it began two days later, on Saturday 6th at 5.50pm – arguably a better slot, but up against Dr. Who on BBC1 – and the Timelord had stolen a march on the Alphans by grabbing viewers a week earlier. This, clearly, didn’t help the Andersons' cause. Neither did the events of the coming months, when many ITV regions relegated the series to different slots. Christmas has a habit of interrupting any scheduled series, and in the LWT area, it provided the perfect excuse to demote Space:1999 to Saturday mornings at 11.50 commencing January 1976. One can only imagine what Gerry Anderson and Lew Grade thought of seeing their £3m investment treated as kids’s stuff.

'Space 99' gets its first mention in the TV Times, September 1974

It was too often the case on British television that science fiction was dismissed as juvenile fodder, the BBC’s Quatermass and Out of the Unknown being notable exceptions to an almost universal rule. Science fiction meant space ships, robots and men in monster suits. It did not equate to serious drama. When the BBC began showing Star Trek in the summer of 1969, it was in the slot normally occupied by Dr. Who. When the show’s appeal to adults was better understood, it got taken more seriously, and was promoted to a 7pm slot on midweek evenings – exactly the same slot that most ITV regions originally chose for Space:1999. Mr. Spock would have approved of their logic...

By the time the series appeared, I'd got ahead of the curve by reading the novelisation of the first episode. Further novels appeared through the autumn, along with a Space:1999 Annual, which a friend of mine got ordered for us through his mum's mail order catalogue. The series was promoted in the comic Look-in, where John Burns provided a rushed strip cartoon version (he reportedly hated drawing comics based on TV series). I'd stopped reading Look-in when it started featuring the likes of David Cassidy, but I made an exception this week. I might have kept on buying it if I'd liked the comic strip, but I wasn't keen on John Burns' artwork. Why couldn't they have got Mike Noble? (Don't tell me, I know...)

Here in the ATV region, Space:1999 stayed put on Thursday evenings for its whole first series run, with only a single episode, The Last Sunset, broadcast in an earlier slot on New Year’s Day 1976. When it returned, in the autumn, for a second season, ATV played the same trick as LWT and Anglia the previous year, putting it up against Dr. Who. I was quite happy to forsake the Doctor (I was never that keen on Tom Baker), and tuned in on Saturday 4 September for the first of the new series. Teatime on Saturday felt like a good time to watch Space:1999, ideally accompanied by a bacon and sausage sandwich – but it wouldn’t last. Only seven episodes were shown in that slot before the series was bumped to 4.45 on Thursday evenings, commencing with the all time dud episode, The Rules of Luton. Had the programme been under-performing against Dr. Who? It seems highly likely. But series two got the scheduling it deserved – under Fred Freiberger’s influence, it had degenerated into a children’s show, on a par with Lost in Space. Aged fifteen, I was keenly aware of this, and although I kept on watching, I knew the series had lost everything that had made it special – the serious, metaphysical air that pervaded year one was replaced with comic gags about Tony Verdeschi’s home-brewed beer, and a parade of increasingly silly monsters. It’s clear from my diary that I wasn’t taking the new series entirely seriously when I wrote about the Alphans blowing up ‘Brian Blessed’s fizzy drinks machine’ in the season opener, The Metamorph. Series two disappeared after Christmas, leaving seven episodes as yet unbroadcast, but by this time, I didn’t really care. The tail end of the series finally made it to the screen in August of 1977, when five episodes were shown, whilst the remaining two (The Immunity Syndrome and The Dorcons) were rolled out on a couple of Bank Holiday Mondays in 1978.

It’s sobering to reflect that half a century has passed since I first saw Breakaway. That broadcast was probably the very last time that a new sci-fi TV series gave me a frisson of anticipation. For the first few weeks it was all new, and strange and amazing, the sets, the hardware, the music – I’d got the same buzz about every Anderson series from Thunderbirds onwards, when I was old enough to enjoy the anticipation of a new and exciting series. I know it’s a feeling I’ll never get again.

TV Times looks at Space:1999 during its first week on air.

The Big Season

ITV pulls the stops out... September 1975

Autumn was always traditionally the time when broadcasters unveiled their new programme line-ups for the coming season, and this week fifty years ago, it was all kicking off on ITV and BBC1. From quite an early age, I was aware of the 'new series for autumn' phenomenon: for me, it usually meant a new series from Gerry Anderson: Thunderbirds (1965), Captain Scarlet (1967), Joe 90 (1968). Every autumn, the TV Times would promote forthcoming attractions in a special feature, whilst on-air promotional trails often featured a special jingle or seasonal graphics. In 1975, it all came together – on ITV at any rate – in a package called ‘The Big Season’. It even had its own logo – a very 70s design – featured prominently on the trailers, and splashed across the cover of seven weeks’ worth of the TV Times. No broadcaster in the UK had ever put this amount of effort into trailing their new autumn schedule, and whilst the BBC had been previewing its own autumn line-up since the middle of August, there was no comparable cross-over into the pages of the Radio Times.

‘It’s the Big Season on ITV’ sang the trailers, accompanied by the big, flabby 1970s logo that had been designed for use across the campaign. There were clips of everything from Raffles to Space:1999, and a lot of attention lavished on ITV’s big new crime drama, The Sweeney, about to enter its second season. I even drew my own ‘Big Season’ graphic in my diary to mark the occasion, although I misspelled the title of the new series – as did the publishers of the spin-off novel that appeared in bookshops the same week.

Here in the Midlands, 'The Big Season' even merited a whole programme to itself, which also got a mention in my diary. Aimed specifically at local viewers, and shown at 6.45pm on Saturday 30 August, this clip-fest, hosted by one of the regional continuity announcers, provided a first look at the new autumn line up, including clips from Space:1999 and the long deferred third series of Batman, both of which would make their debut the following Thursday. For me, Space:1999 was the big event of the season. Ironically, my first glimpse of Gerry Anderson’s outer space epic had been on BBC2, almost a year earlier, when the Horizon series presented a look at the special effects industry (How on Earth Did They Do That, 23 December 1974). Space:1999 was not well served by ITV, with broadcasts split across the various regions – London and Anglia scheduled it on Saturday teatime, in deliberate competition with Dr. Who, whilst in other areas it arrived two days earlier, at 7.00pm on Thursday 4 September. 

ITV’s big promotional push was pipped to the post by the BBC, who had begun to roll out its own autumn programmes a week earlier, in much the same way that supermarkets start stocking mince pies as soon as August Bank Holiday is out of the way. Pre-September debuts included rugged adventure series Oil Strike North (Tuesday 26th August), Le Carré-esque espionage drama Quiller (Friday 29th August) and new series of old favourites Softly, Softly: Task Force (Wednesday 27th August), The Liver Birds (Friday 29th) and Dr. Who (Saturday 30th), while September would bring new arrivals in the form of student nurse drama Angels (Monday 1st), beat-pounding comedy in The Growing Pains of PC Penrose (Thursday 4th) and an eighth series of Dad’s Army (Friday 5th). Also that autumn, a little number entitled Fawlty Towers shuffled hesitantly onto the small screen with next to no fanfare...

I'm sure no one at ITV took any notice: the network had plenty of its own big guns still waiting to roll out, including the return of Upstairs Downstairs (Sunday 7th September), while other popular titles being dusted off for the new season included Sale of the Century, Within These Walls (Saturday 6th) and World in Action (Monday 8th). Brand new drama included The Stars Look Down (Wednesday 3rd), Shades of Greene (Tuesday 9th) and Raffles (Wednesday 10th). But the biggest highlight of all, and a guaranteed ratings winner, was the television debut of James Bond, when Dr. No made its first appearance on the small screen on Tuesday 28th October.

All through September and well into October, the TV Times kept up its promotional campaign, with ‘Big Season’ cover montages highlighting the week’s biggest new arrivals. Inside the magazine, listings were accompanied by a ‘Big Season’ thumbnail, replacing the austere ‘new series’ flash that had previously served to alert viewers. Even children’s television got the same star treatment: Cosgrove Hall’s Noddy (Monday 22nd September), Here Comes Mumfie and Sooty (Wednesday 24th) all merited ‘Big Season’ status in the listings.

All of which merely served to guarantee what most media watchers already knew: in 1975, ITV were regularly trouncing the BBC in the ratings wars, with some of the year’s biggest audiences tuning in for The Benny Hill Show, The Royal Variety Performance, The Sweeney, Edward VII and Coronation Street. Not all of ITV’s new autumn programmes did the business, though. Space:1999 fared quite badly and in the London area was demoted after Christmas to a Saturday morning slot. One can well imagine what Lew Grade thought about this, having bankrolled the series to the tune of £3m. A brand-new Sunday evening comedy My Brother’s Keeper, starring George Layton and Jonathan Lynn as an ill-matched pair of brothers (one a policeman, the other a lefty agitator) is now long forgotten, along with Jewish family comedy My Son Reuben, and Vince Powell’s Rule Britannia, a sitcom embodiment of the old ‘Englishman, Irishman and Scotsman’ gag, which I think posterity can probably do without.

The ‘Big Season’ run of TV Times covers ended with the edition for 11-17 October, with a cover highlighting afternoon viewing. For many, this meant horse racing, but there was also the return of Crown Court and the medical soap General Hospital, alongside programmes focusing on travel, cookery and antiques. A latecomer in the sitcom stakes, John Esmonde and Bob Larbey’s national service comedy Get Some In! also began the same week, whilst Rising Damp – still some way off becoming a cult favourite – returned for a second series in November. I had yet to discover its brilliance, as it clashed with The Invisible Man over on BBC1 (David McCallum’s short-lived fantasy adventure, cancelled after a single series). 

Fifty years on, it’s interesting to look back at an era when television viewing was a good deal more straightforward than it has become: just two networks competing for viewers, and all the big new series available to anyone with a TV set and a license. Today, I wouldn’t have the first idea where to look for big new television series this autumn, and I doubt I’d bother even if I did know. Streaming services have fragmented and diffused the television viewing experience, and one would need a second mortgage to keep up with them all. You may well think that more channels, more choice, high definition and feature film production values all adds up to a whole lot more than viewers were being offered back in 1975. I’ll beg to differ with you.

Part of a large preview feature from the TV Times for 30 Aug-5 Sept 1975

Missing in Action: the end of a comic

 

The Demise of TV Action – August 1973

It’s always a shame to see a favourite comic come to an end, rather less so when the comic has become a shadow of its former self. It was towards the end of the long summer holiday in 1973 when TV Action, formerly Countdown disappeared suddenly, and without any warning. The comic had got off to a promising start in February 1971 with a line-up that felt like a throwback to the classic era of TV21. All of Gerry Anderson’s productions from Fireball XL5 onwards were featured in rotation over the coming weeks, alongside articles on current developments in science and space hardware, but it was Dr. Who, flown in from sibling title TV Comic that really pulled in the readers.

As the months rolled by, the Gerry Anderson content dropped off like needles from a Christmas tree. At issue 35, a minor revamp ushered in the exploits of TV’s latest playboy adventurers, The Persuaders! Brett and Danny were still in the line-up when the comic drew its last breath in August 1973, but by this time the title was barely recognisable, and as of April ‘72 had changed its name to the less sci-fi oriented TV Action. The revamp was necessitated by the end of an arrangement with Sun Printers, who had offered Polystyle a year's worth of machine time on their under-utilised rotogravure machines for the cost of materials only (Sun had also handled the first year of the Eagle comic). To keep production costs down, TV Action would henceforth be printed on cheap pulp paper, a far cry from the glossy magazine stock of the Countdown era.

The Countdown name was still appended to the rechristened comic, and Dr. Who was promoted to the cover, albeit losing over a page of colour artwork in the process, but this was now a very different entity from the space and sci-fi oriented title it had started out as. Only a handful of Gerry Anderson titles remained on board – UFO, drawn in black and white by Brian Lewis, Thunderbirds (Don Harley), and colour reprints of Ron Embleton’s Stingray spreads from TV21 (John Burns' Countdown strip, the comic's only original creation, had ended at issue 70). Signalling the move away from science fiction content, new strips comprised Hawaii 5-0 (nicely drawn in black and white by Leslie Branton), the Hanna Barbera cartoon Motormouse and Autocat (which the comic insisted on calling Autocat and Motormouse), and ATV’s teenage drama Tightrope. The latter seemed an unusual choice given that it was a standalone serial that didn’t lend itself to further development. It merited only a single monochrome page, with artwork from Stanley Houghton. 

The comic continued in this format, with minor content changes until January 1973 by which time Dr. Who was down to just two pages (including the cover), and other strips comprised UFO (John Burns), Mission Impossible (John Burns again) and The Persuaders! (Frank Langford). Motormouse and Autocat were still on the back cover and still titled in reverse order. UFO aside, there was no other Gerry Anderson content apart from a colour photo spread of his current series The Protectors. Harry Rule and co were the cover stars when the comic was once again revamped, in January 1973, entering what would prove to be its final phase.

With a redesigned masthead, a painted montage cover and calling itself ‘The New TV Action’, the comic’s line-up now included a weekly complete story (running across seven pages in black and white); Dr. Who (still in the capable hands of Gerry Haylock), Hawaii 5-0 (Leslie Branton), Mission Impossible (John Burns), and The Persuaders! Comic relief was provided by Dad’s Army (drafted in from sibling paper TV Comic) and Tex Avery’s Droopy, whose cartoons had recently been enjoying a revival on BBC1. An incongruous collection of pop star photos occupied the colour centre spread, perhaps aimed at readers’ little sisters, but aside from Dr. Who and The Persuaders! all the comic strip content was in black and white. Further new arrivals over the coming weeks included the portly Frank Cannon and western heroes Alias Smith and Jones, but even these TV heavyweights couldn’t stave off the inevitable.

Last editions of comics (or those preceding a merger with another title from the same publisher) usually came with cover splashes proclaiming ‘great news inside’. By contrast, TV Action’s last cover gave no hint that the game was up. The first clue came on page two where a single column promo listed the contents to be found ‘next week in TV Comic’, a line-up including Dr. Who, Dad’s Army, Droopy and Basil Brush. Given that three of them were currently featuring in TV Action, readers may have been forgiven for thinking ‘huh?’ I certainly did. It was, as Dr. Who’s teaser promised, ‘a most puzzling tale.’

TV Action directs readers towards its sibling comic without owning up to the fact that this is the final edition.

Countdown may have started with a bang, but TV Action went out, quite frankly, on a bit of a whimper. The week’s complete story was a risible Persuaders! tale about a hypnotic, exploding musical box, scrappily drawn by Jose Ortiz. Mission Impossible was still in the hands of John Burns, whose colour sense did not sit happily on the very absorbent pulp paper, and frankly came across in print as a murky mess*. The plot, wrapping up a Middle East conspiracy, wasn’t up to much. Droopy was still present and correct, and one-hit wonders Blackfoot Sue (already a year beyond their only UK chart action) made unlikely colour pinups across the centre pages. 

The following spread was given over to a cruel trick devised to entice readers across to next week’s TV Comic: the first in a two-part competition with the chance of winning one of 10 Raleigh Chopper bikes – a most desirable prize in 1973. To enter, you had to cut up and assemble a jigsaw of TV Comic characters, and colour in the results… and then wait for next week. Presumably, you were in with a much better chance of winning if you knew the correct colours for characters such as Texas Ted, Basil Brush and TV Terrors (to be in the know, you’d have had to be in possession of last year’s TV Comic Annual).

Dad’s Army occupied the next two pages, which were followed by TV Action’s very last colour strip, the last part of a cranky Protectors adventure, drawn by Mario Capaldi (Italian artists’ names were always a sure sign of a comic with a dwindling budget). The last four pages comprised a full-page advertisement for Brooke Bond’s latest set of collectable cards (Adventurers and Explorers) and the end of the disappointing Persuaders! strip. On the back cover, Harry Rule and Paul Bucket (sorry, Buchet) prepared to desert the sinking ship in a helicopter.

And with that, we were done.

My original copy of that swansong edition is still in reasonably good condition, but has worn a lot less well than older copies of Countdown: the uncoated pulp paper is now quite discoloured. It’s interesting, though, to reflect on the demise of a comic whose content was so closely tied in with television. It’s all well and good bringing on board the likes of The Persuaders! or The Protectors when the series themselves are brand new, but by August 1973, The Persuaders! was nearly two years old and reduced to random repeats across the ITV regions – not a great enticement to readers. Cannon was, if anything, too adult in tone to appeal to kids who liked Dr. Who (it never appealed to me), and Alias Smith and Jones was, well, a western – and western comic strips hadn’t been popular in Britain since the 1950s.

Countdown had been an interesting experiment. All experiments are devised to prove a theory, and in this case we can conclude that, by 1971, there was next to no market left for a comic devoted to Gerry Anderson content, or indeed any comic so closely wedded to an ephemeral medium like television. And so it proved. The 1990s brought short-lived comic revivals for Thunderbirds, Stingray and others, always piggybacking on repeat runs, but these endeavours had even shorter life spans than TV Action.

TV Action was, ultimately, a product of its time, reflecting an era of glossy, action-packed television series. Its editorial style harked back to the tone of Eagle, blending adventure strips with well-written factual material, and like Eagle, it gave employment to some of the best creatives in the British comics industry. There’s been nothing like it since. Today, you’ll find remnants of its DNA in Dr. Who Weekly, but there will never again be a weekly comic offering such diversity of content, produced to the same style or quality.

[* Interestingly, when John Burns contributed a strip to Network's one-shot TV21 revival, he remarked to me about the poor quality of the paper – perhaps he was reminded of the awful print quality of those TV Actions.]