Diaries of Christmas Past

 

When I started this blog, back in 2016, my original source of reference was the diaries I’d kept, sporadically, beginning in January 1971 and detailing, for the most part, what I saw on TV, what comics I read, and so forth – the idea being to convey some idea of how it felt to encounter some iconic pop cultural phenomena on their first appearance.

The diaries were seldom written in any great detail, and there are often large blanks, some of which I filled in at the time by referring back to copies of the Radio and TV Times to remind myself what I’d watched and when (I was in the habit of keeping whole copies from around 1976 onwards). But as a general rule, I would write in a little more detail around Christmas time – television tended to up its game, and there were new toys, books and records deserving of a mention.

So, for my next few entries, I’m going back to the diaries of the 1970s to see what I was watching all those Christmases ago. The first diary that contains any entries around Christmas time is 1974, and starting on Sunday 22 December, I note that I watched the big film on BBC1 that evening, Grand Prix... these days seldom seen on television, and a very distracting movie to watch on account of its reliance on split screen techniques. The Sunday-before-Christmas primetime slot suggested the BBC considered it a blockbuster, and it was certainly promoted as such, but today it is a near-forgotten movie.

Of much greater enduring interest that same evening, separated from the big movie by the news bulletin, was the Omnibus documentary Mr Laurel and Mr Hardy, a timely retrospective of the film careers of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, which yielded valuable archival interviews with many survivors of the era including their boss, Hal Roach Jr, who outlived his two comedy stars by several decades. This was the first L&H documentary ever attempted on television, but sadly, save for occasional exhumations of choice interview clips, it has languished in the archive for years.

Since 1972, holiday seasons meant daytime television repeats, and the BBC were running episodes of Star Trek throughout the festive season, billed as ‘Holiday Star Trek’, in a short tradition that would continue into the following year. Somewhat amusingly, the Radio Times billing refers to ‘the return of the real-life Captain Kirk’, the cartoon series having lately usurped the original in the schedules. My diary records that I saw the episode brodacast on Monday December 23, the classic tranporter malfunction tale The Enemy Within. The diary also records that on the same day, I saw ‘Boss Cat’ (I actually wrote it thus, preserving the BBC’s own appellation) – this at 9.55am. Later on, there was a Christmas Blue Peter which illustrated the theatrical ‘Kirby Wire’ flying harness in operation on the pantomime circuit. But the evening’s must-see programme came at 9.05pm on BBC2 in the form of a Horizon episode looking at the work of special effects in film and television, a subject which already fascinated me. Aside from glimpses of classics like King Kong and Mighty Joe Young (neither of which I had seen since the 1960s), the programme also offered viewers a fleeting first glimpse of Gerry Anderson’s Space:1999, which would not come to air for another nine months. Two great documentaries in a single festive season? The BBC would never reach such heights again, at least not in my estimation.

Monday December 23 concluded with what was fast becoming a Christmas tradition in the form of a filmed adaptation of an M.R. James ghost story. I’d seen my first of these back on Christmas Eve 1972, with the eerily atmospheric A Warning to the Curious, itself the second in the series and arguably one of the best editions. 1974’s offering was without doubt the very best: The Treasure of Abbot Thomas featured a notable performance from the great Shakespearean actor Michael Bryant – a face familiar to me from his memorable single-episode appearance in the series Colditz. I’m not sure I found Abbot Thomas quite the equal of A Warning... at the time, possibly on account of its antiquated atmosphere, and more obliquely realised threat, but when I finally saw it again, on a 1983 repeat, its greatness was instantly apparent. By that time, video recording was available and I had the presence of mind to commit Abbot Thomas to VHS, in which form I re-watched it on many successive Christmases... when a little slime may or may not have bubbled under the front door...

Christmas Eve ‘74 brought us what would go on to become a perennial classic festive sitcom episode, in the form of The Likely Lads (losing it’s ‘Whatever Happened to...’ prefix for this one-off festive edition). It’s probably the best of all of Bob and Terry’s televised adventures, albeit nobody knew at the time that we’d see no more of them (aside from 1976’s cinema outing, itself a staple of festive telly in years to come). We’d been out visiting relatives during the afternoon, but were back home in time for the lads' festive special. The episode has been much repeated over the years but today is to be seen in slightly modified form, a reference to Rolf Harris having been expunged by the BBC. Those wishing to see the unbowdlerised version are advised to seek out the DVD release.

This classic was followed by the evening’s big film Ice Station Zebra, receiving what must have been its British television premiere. The trails for this focused heavily on Patrick McGoohan’s scenery-chewing performance... ‘put another torpedo up the spout, blow another hole in the ice, but GET ME THERE!’ he roared.

Christmas Day highlights, as recorded by the diary, were The Generation Game, Mike Yarwood and Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em. No mention of Morecambe and Wise, and for good reason: inexplicably, there was no Eric and Ernie Christmas Show that year. Frank Spencer had bagged the cover of the Christmas double issue of The Radio Times (in the days before it had become, ahem, ‘legendary’) and his show, airing at 7.15pm on Christmas Night, was clearly the big draw of the year. One festive televisual tradition that seems to have fallen out of favour this year was the ‘Christmas Night With the Stars’ compilation, a mix of sitcom snippets and variety items that had been a popular Christmas Day tradition for at least a decade.

Boxing Day brought another festive tradition in the form of a Beatles movie. You only got one a year, and this year’s offering was Help!, going out at 10.30 am immediately after Star Trek’s dodgy Halloween outing Catspaw. Elsewhere in the schedules, The Magnificent Seven lost out in our house to ITV’s big evening movie offering, The Valley of Gwangi, with the dinosaur exiting stage left just in time to turn over for a slightly disappointing Christmas Steptoe and Son on BBC1 at 9.05. The ‘Harold wants a holiday and the old man doesn’t’ trope had been played out on previous occasions, and it’s a shame that Galton and Simpson chose to revisit this well-worn scenario for what would prove to be the very last episode of their classic creation.

With that, the festive telly entries in the 1974 diary begin to fizzle out... there were new LPs waiting to be played (one of them is still waiting, 46 years later), annuals to be read, games to be played. Was 1974 the year of Haunted House? The diary makes no mention, but does refer to something called Spy Trap, which despite the intriguing title, was a fairly primitive variation on ludo.

The diary does include honourable mentions for Top of the Pops ‘74 and the traditional ‘complete’ Dr. Who serial Planet of the Spiders, both duly noted for Friday December 27. And speaking of that pesky timelord, he’d only gone and changed his appearance, because Saturday evening brought the intriguing prospect of a new face in the Tardis.

New Year’s eve offered an Old Grey Whistle Test special, a tradition which arguably continues to date in the form of Jools Holland’s ‘Hootenanny’. And on New Year’s Day itself, we got an episode of UFO, The Pyschobombs... which was my first look at the series in colour.

Next time, we’ll fast forward to December ‘75...

End of the Road

Thunderbirds in the 70s... and beyond

I never grew out of Thunderbirds, although I can recall a time when it seemed to slip back into second or third place amongst the Anderson canon. Captain Scarlet, when he arrived, immediately conferred upon Thunderbirds a sort of dated quality, and it wasn’t merely a question of the new generation of marionettes. Curiously, part of it seemed to stem from the improved asethetics of the series, particularly as regards the use of typefaces. In the first series of Thunderbirds, every item of hardware that demanded a label seemed to be identified in a large, friendly sans serif font that I would later come to recognise as Grotesque No. 9. By the second run of episodes, a new, cooler, futuristic font was in evidence: Microgramma (otherwise known as Eurostile). The ubiquity of this typeface across the later Anderson productions (all the way through to UFO) helped to consign Thunderbirds to a kind of retro-futurist backwater of car indicator bulbs and toothpaste tube caps that had endured since the latter days of Supercar.

As the 1960s drew to a close, Thunderbirds began to lose its grip on the popular imagination. Toys gradually began to disappear from the shelves, and were seen on increasingly rare occasions: I recall finding a glut of mid-60s JR21 models in a toyshop in Paignton, Devon, as late as 1971, but such sightings were a rarity. Only Dinky toys remained widely available, with their FAB 1 and TB2 models continuing in the company’s catalogues for years to come. Adventures continued in TV21, but they became less and less like what I remembered from the TV series, with some quite out there artwork and psychotic villains more suited to a superhero comic. These strips still looked extraordinary thanks to the bravura artwork of Frank Bellamy, but the writing was, frankly, mental. Scripts were, I believe, the work of TV21 contributor Scott Goodall, who took every available opportunity to trash Tracy Island and the Thunderbird craft, having done the same with Fireball XL5 a few years earlier. Thunderbirds annuals continued through to 1969, when the series doubled up with Captain Scarlet, and saw a ‘slight return’ courtesy of Polystyle publications in 1971, but the contents were increasingly a disappointment.

The Tracys’ last hoorah came with the release, in summer of 1968, of the movie Thunderbird 6. We saw it at the Odeon Sutton Coldfield and even at age seven I recall a sense of feeling slightly underwhelmed by it all. I’d half expected a Captain Scarlet movie – and at the very least I was hoping for a cool new piece of hardware to fulfil the promise of the title. Granted, Skyship One looked great, and went out in a blaze of pyrotechnic glory, but did anyone my age care about an aeroplane of WW1 vintage? Indeed we did not. Was Gerry Anderson slipping? Further evidence arrived a few months later when Joe 90 made his TV debut. I was all in favour for a few weeks, but it somehow never quite lived up to the sheer explosive excitement of those earlier series.

Thunderbirds remained a staple of children’s television until around 1971, when my earliest diary entries record a new run of repeats, beginning with Trapped in the Sky before jumping to the mid-series episode The Imposters, and thence to a run of second series stories. Despite being broadcast in colour, I was still viewing in black and white, our first colour TV set being still three years in the future.

Seeing the series in colour for the first time was a minor milestone, but I had to wait until Easter 1975, when ATV in the Midlands ran a one-off broadcast of the episode Lord Parker’s ‘Oliday. Richocet followed at Christmas, but for me, this would prove to be the last sighting of International Rescue on the small screen for the best part of a decade. But there were other ways of watching Thunderbirds...

In the era before home taping of television programmes, the only way to see your favourite shows when not on air was via the medium of 8mm home movies. As far back as 1965 I recall seeing a 4-minute extract from a Fireball XL5 episode on my uncle’s Standard 8 projector, and several such films were available, some of them complete with soundtracks. At Christmas 1977, I was bought an 8mm movie projector and I quickly acquired the few Thunderbirds movies that were available in the format: Day of Disaster and Thirty Minutes After Noon came in 1-reel black and white silent editions lasting around eight minutes each, with captions burned into the picture. I later acquired some 50ft colour shorts of highlights from Trapped in the Sky and Attack of the Alligators, all of which was a far cry from owning the entire series as a DVD box set.

During the 1970s, I also brought my collection up to date by acquiring the Thunderbirds paperback novels that had appeared in the mid-60s and were still relatively easy to find at jumble sales and second hand shops. Toys were a different matter. Aside from a board game and a couple of jigsaws, I didn't find any old Thunderbirds merchandise available to buy, with the sole exception of a Thunderbird One-shaped pencil sharpener, a new old stock item that turned up at Birmingham's Nostalgia and Comics (also an excellent source of vintage TV21 comics).

 

'Sharpenings are go!' That TB1 pencil sharpener sits today in a cabinet of other vintage goodies

Strange as it may now seem in this era of never-ending über-fandom, by around 1980, to declare oneself a grown-up fan of Gerry Anderson was to belong to what felt like a very, very small clique of individuals, scattered across the globe. At this time, I enjoyed a correspondence with Amsterdam-based Anderson aficionado Theo De Klerk, who might easily have been the only person on the planet who shared my enthusiasm. Through his good offices, I was able to acquire photographs, film prints, audio tapes of episodes and even occasional video tapes on the recently-arrived VHS format. A few fellow enthusiasts gathered one evening in my parents’ back room to watch 16mm prints of Captain Scarlet (Seek and Destroy) and a stunning colour print of Stingray (Rescue from the Skies). Amongst those in attendance was Starlog writer David Hirsch, future Network CEO Tim Beddows, and the late modeller and prop collector supreme, Philip D. Rae. Sitting there in the dark with the projector clattering away, we felt like the last of the faithful. Fanderson hadn’t yet got going, and hooking up with fellow collectors was a tenuous and difficult business. Did anyone still care about Supermarionation? Fortunately, we now know the answer to that question, but back in 1980 it all felt a bit niche, frankly.

It was through these channels of tentative fandom that I acquired my first video copies of Thunderbirds. The series had made its last on-air appearance on British screens in the Yorkshire TV area, circa 1979, where a number of episodes were diligently committed to Umatic Video Tape by a college video technician by the name of Rod Oldfield. From this source, I was able to acquire decent (for the time) transfers of episodes including Sun Probe, End of the Road and The Uninvited. Compared with what came later, they barely qualified as ‘standard def’ but next to some of the barely watchable bootlegs I’d seen of other material, they were good stuff. The colours were a bit over-saturated and unsteady, but this was still emerging technology, and one had to be prepared to cut it a generous amount of slack. And, after all, this was Thunderbirds.

Acquiring these precious copies confirmed what I’d secretly known all along. Never mind those brief dalliances with Fireball XL5, Stingray or Captain Scarlet: Thunderbirds was the best and would never be beaten. You couldn’t keep a good thing down, and sure enough, within a year or so, a set of nice new 35mm prints saw the series restored to television for the first time in almost a decade. I spared no expense in acquiring a full set of off-air recordings in what was then seen as pristine quality. The colour grading of these prints (and the subsequent Carlton DVD release) was in fact superior to the later HD remaster.

Exciting though this revival was, it pales into insignificance compared with what was to come. In 1991, the unthinkable happened. Well, it seemed unthinkable to someone who’d grown up with Thunderbirds on ITV. Suddenly, the BBC had acquired the series, and a new, clean set of prints began to appear in a prime early evening slot (ITV’s 1982 screenings had been confined to lunchtimes and mornings). A whole new generation discovered the series and presumably experienced the same insane rush of excitement that I’d felt at the same age back in the mid-60s. Before you knew where you were, the whole merchandising phenomenon was starting all over again. History, from my own childhood, was repeating itself. Aged 30, I found myself visiting the local branch of Woolworths’ to see what new toys had been added to the range. Some of them were very nice indeed – one might even venture to say they were too good for their own good – but all were let down by the too slick, too shiny packaging, none of which managed to recapture the lovely retro aesthetic of those 1960s toys. I bought, and still own a few of them, but I’d trade the lot for a battery-operated, mid-60s J Rosenthal Thunderbird One.

Of the subsequent revivals and reboots, I will offer no comment except to say, simply, ‘not for me, thanks.’ For me, the whole point of ‘classic’ Thunderbirds is its real-world aesthetic of models being blown to bits with fireworks, and ‘real’ characters in ‘real’ rooms, all of them crafted by model makers of peerless talent and vision. This was a unique way of making television films and it’s a shame that Gerry Anderson allowed it all to be dismantled when the chance came to do it all with actors. Shame too, that the puppets had to ‘evolve’. So they bobbed around a bit, their heads were too big for their bodies, and their mouths went up and down in a fairly unrealistic way: but that was why we loved them, and what set them apart from any number of live actors, CGI creations or cell animations. A unique art form found its ultimate expression in Thunderbirds and this is why, I believe, there will still be kids watching it in 2065. And it won’t be the 2015 version they’re watching, either. 

F.A.B.!

The Case That Went Cold

 Revisiting The Enigma Files

 

I think I have one of ‘those faces’: you know the type. There’s something naggingly familiar that reminds you of someone you’ve seen on TV. At work and elsewhere, people often used to tell me I looked like such-and-such off the telly. Not all of them good, either. But the first of these ‘not quite lookalikes’ is the one I always remember: Tom Adams.

He may have been 42 to my 20-something, but, around the early 1980s there was a certain, and occasionally-remarked upon similarity between myself and the stage and screen actor who, at the time, was perhaps best known for fronting a long-running series of commercials for furniture warehouse DFS. Much later, I learned that our dates of birth were merely two days apart (and some 23 years...) but I don’t think astrology has much to do with physiognomy. Maybe it was on account of this slight resemblance that I was prepared to cut old Tom rather more than the usual amount of slack when it came to his appearances on the small screen.

A capable actor and a familiar face on television and film during the 1960s, there was, nevertheless, a certain quality about Tom Adams that made him an ideal candidate when the DFS gig came up. Remember Patrick Allen buzzing around in his helicopter whilst extolling the virtues of Barratt Homes? Yes, that quality... avuncular yet assertive: the tone is warm and reassuringly confident, but there’s no mistaking the call to sit up straight and pay attention. Admittedly, nobody did it quite like Patrick Allen (still much imitated long after his demise), but Adams came pretty close. Over the years, he clocked up guest appearances in the likes of The Avengers, Maigret, Dr. Who and even The Great Escape, as well as ongoing character roles in The Onedin Line and Emergency – Ward 10, although he remained under my own personal radar until the spring of 1980 when the BBC smuggled onto the schedules a low-budget crime drama series called The Engima Files.

The Enigma Files was possibly the first example on television of what would now be called a ‘cold case’ drama. Adams played an ex-Detective Inspector placed in charge of a warehouse of ‘open case’ files: investigations that have been left unconcluded but are no longer being pursued. It was original enough to grab my attention in an era when new, British detective type drama series were surprisingly thin on the ground, and accordingly, I tuned into BBC2 at 9.30pm on Tuesday, April 15, 1980.

Let’s just look again at that last sentence: BBC2, Tuesday, 9.30pm, April 15... this was clearly not a series of which the BBC entertained great expectations. With a start date of mid-April, the 15-part series would end in late July, a traditional television graveyard. A start date in January would have given it more of a chance, and as to the channel placement: well, I’m not sure to what extent if at all BBC2 commissioned its own drama series or whether this was a case of a show considered a dud being quietly hidden away in an inconspicuous slot. And slots don’t come much more inconspicuous than 9.30pm on a Tuesday, on BBC2. Even One Man and His Dog managed better...

So what was all the lack of hoo-hah in aid of? Thanks to the miracle that is YouTube, we can now find out, as some public-spirited user has uploaded what may very well be the entire 15-part series. The Enigma Files wasn’t just buried on release, it’s stayed that way ever since, without so much as a half-baked VHS to its name. I’m not sure if it found its way onto satellite, but if so, it eluded me (not that I was looking out for it). You might say, it became its own cold case...

Watching it again after over thirty years, it has acquired a quality it most certainly did not possess at the time: nostalgia. The street scenes, populated by dirty, unappealing cars (not to mention citizens) are strongly redolent of the late 70s (with good reason), and the grim November/December weather merely adds piquancy to that whole ‘winter of discontent’ vibe. Contasting this, the VT scenes look, to quote a comment from the TV forum Roobarb’s, ‘beige’: an excellent description which can be applied to a whole raft of videotaped drama and comedy from the same era.

The opening episode, The Sweeper, sees Detective Inspector Nick Lewis shunted out of the force, apparently on account of his maverick tendencies. The way his superior officer is going on, you’d think he was dealing with Jack Regan, not cosy Mr. DFS sofas. But heigh-ho... Nick takes up his new job in a very beige late 70s office where Sharon Maughan is doing a screen test for the Nescafé commercials that would make her a household face later in the decade (she is, honestly, stirring a cup of coffee when we first meet her). Sharon plays Kate Burton, a civil servant in charge of the administrative backwater in which Nick has been dumped. The only other member of the ‘team’ we get to meet is Phil Strong, a slightly chubby guy with a bad sweater and an even worse haircut, played by comic actor Duggie Brown (and, surprise, surprise, Phil is the series’ token ‘comic turn’).

Rather than spending all day filing dusty old Eastlight box files, DI Lewis, egged on by a daughter old enough to be his wife, decides to look into some of the unsolved cases, and starts with the murder of a petty criminal in the grounds of the mansion of a wealthy crime boss, portrayed by that doyen of Talking Pictures TV, Sydney Tafler. In the course of the investigation, Nick narrowly avoids being blown up by a car bomb and blown away by a sawn-off shotgun, all of which sounds like ripping adventure on paper and must have helped sell the series to whoever signed off on it. But the Enigma Files is no Sweeney. Sure, it had aspirations in that general direction: but Tom Adams is just too likeable to be a rival to Jack Regan, and despite some half-hearted efforts on the part of series writer Derek Ingrey (nope, me neither), the hoped-for bristling relationship between Nick and Kate doesn’t really catch fire... at least not in this first episode.

The music doesn’t help: back in the late 70s, it was written into the statute book that every crime or detective drama series must feature slightly funky incidental music with wah-wah guitar. That box was ticked with due diligence, but the result sounds more suited to accompany the exploits of PC Penrose than a hard-nosed detective on the mean, rainy streets of North London.

The drama proceeds at a reasonable pace, with a few talky interludes punctuated by some action sequences that feel more like an obligation than a natural part of the storyline; and, if you check it out, don’t expect much from the ending. But do check it out, because The Enigma Files had its heart in the right place, and is warmly nostalgic in all the right ways. It’s easy to see why the BBC clearly thought so little of it in its day, but the series did spawn the obligatory paperback novelisation, which suggests it might have done rather better business than Auntie anticipated. And, as a 19-year-old viewer, I stuck with it for pretty well the entire run, so it must have had something... apart from a lookalike lead actor, of course.

And now, having said all that, I’d like to take this opportunity to sell you a three-piece suite... 

https://youtu.be/nWx95k37tvM 

Remember, Remember...

 

It may seem hard to credit in an age when every supermarket is piled high with pumpkins around mid-October, but back in the 1960s, in Britain, there was no Halloween industry: no orange and black decorations, no ‘creepy comestibles’, no dressing up as witches, ghosts or zombies, nothing. The season was still essentially a religious festival, the Eve of All Hallows; and barring a few nods to the gothic such as an occasional item on Blue Peter, or a spooky Jackanory, it tended to pass off quite uneventfully. By the age of nine or ten, I knew about ‘apple bobbing’ (and if you didn’t have a barrel, a plastic washing-up bowl would do), and I’d seen pumpkin carving done on Blue Peter... but did you ever go looking for a pumpkin in Britain in the 1960s? There weren’t any. Maybe a few specialist farmers and gardeners grew their own, but on nothing like a commercial scale. Our mum tried make a Jack-O-Lantern out of a turnip. It wasn’t quite the same, plus you had to actually hollow the thing out. Halloween was something we did projects about at school, but we definitely did not dress up and go from house to house begging for sweets. Trick or Treat did not exist.

I first encountered the concept in a Peanuts comic strip collection, where it felt as alien and un-British as the schoolroom ‘show and tell’ sessions also seen in Charles M. Schulz’s cartoons. Judging from depictions in popular culture, the whole phenomenon of Halloween as a kind of celebratory holiday had been firmly entrenched in America since at least the 1940s, but Britain, even in the 1960s, remained strangely resistant. Perhaps it was because we had our own, home-grown late autumn event in the form of Bonfire Night, which incorporated various aspects of what any American youngster would think of as Halloween celebrations... the wearing of masks (predominantly styled after Guy Fawkes, but also depicting various horror characters) and canvassing for money on the streets, which in Britain took the form of ‘penny for the guy.’

I doubt anyone beneath the age of 40 has ever seen this taking place, and coming from an aspirational middle-class family, I didn’t participate myself, but I do remember seeing kids of a certain stripe (‘from the council estate’ as our mum would say) pushing guys in barrows around the streets in hope of soliciting money from strangers. The guys were usually fairly rudimentary, consisting of a bunch of old clothes, stuffed with newspapers, and topped with one of the green papier-maché Guy Fawkes masks you could buy in Woolworths. They tended to be pushed around in hand carts of home-made origin, essentially an old fruit crate with pram wheels... sometimes the whole pram, rusty and long past its prime, would itself be pressed into service.

Unlike the average Trick or Treater, who can usually be fobbed off with a fun-size Milky Way, the Penny-for-the-Guy brigade were after your money, and they wanted it to buy fireworks – an alarming reminder that there was then no age restriction on the sale of pyrotechnics. Any of the ranges of small to medium sized garden fireworks could be bought over the counter by any child in possession of sufficient funds.

This state of affairs remained unchallenged until relatively recently, but from the late 60s onwards, the media began a long campaign aimed at raising awareness of firework accidents and ultimately changing legislation governing their sale. The move was spearheaded by the BBC's Man Alive film of 1968, Remember Remember, which included graphic film of children who had suffered firework-related accidents. I saw the programme on at least two occasions (It was much repeated) and it certainly helped to change the way I thought about what had formerly seemed like an innocent back garden entertainent.

In 1970, the BBC's Nationwide showed us how certain children's comics were still setting a bad example with depictions of firework mayhem in various forms. The item included a page from a firework number of Whizzer and Chips wherein Ginger (a tom cat) proposed some manner of mischief with the aid of a ‘Mount Vesuivius firework.’ Where would the madness end? In hospital, of course...

The Central Office of Information weighed in with a series of public information films dealing with the dangers of fireworks, but their sombre little films were utterly eclipsed by a chorus of advertising jingles, of which the most memorable was ‘light up the sky with Standard Fireworks’. I can still sing it to this day.

Personally, I never did ‘fool with fireworks’ as the COI had it. I wasn’t actually afraid of them, like the lad two doors down our street, who used to watch our displays from his bedroom window, but I had enough sense to leave them to the grown-ups. Sparklers were okay (and the COI’s ad illustrated them in the hands of children), but I remember being astonished to see some of the smaller ‘fountain’ type garden fireworks declaring that they could be held in the hand.

For me, the appeal of fireworks was twofold. Firstly, you got to look at the wrappings, the design of which must have kept several graphics departments in gainful employment for decades. The formula was simple: two or three-colour separated artwork in bright shades of red, yellow, green and blue, stylised sparks, floral explosions and the name spelled out in exciting jagged lettering. Alonside the familiar Roman Candles and Catherine Wheels, an average selection box might contain such goodies as ‘Flower Pot’ (multi-coloured floral type popping stars), ‘Traffic Light’ (a kind of signal flare that started by emitting red smoke before shading into amber and green), ‘Screech Owl’ (a cross between a garden firework and a rocket which, when lit, took off on a small plastic wing, – resembling a V1 rocket – and emitted a piercing shriek) and the triangular ‘Mount Vesuivus’ type from which you got a fountain of golden sparks. 

 

The examples above (scanned from Robert Opie’s excellent ‘1950s Scrapbook’) are entirely typical of the types that were on sale in the 1960s and 70s, and their appearance had most likely not changed in several decades. I liked these designs so much that, on November 6^th, I would sometimes collect the burned-out husks from the garden and, on at least one occasion, brought them into the house where our mum allowed them to be displayed on the fireplace for a day or so – until the smell of sulphur necessitated their removal.

Our dad took charge of the actual business of lighting fireworks and the occasional building of bonfires: you had to take care not to set the fence on fire, if your Catherine Wheel hadn’t already done so. For years, one fence post in our garden bore the scorch marks of a stalled Catherine Wheel.

The fireworks themselves were never disappointing. Those on sale today seem to be over in mere seconds, whereas I remember getting a good long show of sparks from most of the ‘stick it in the flowerbed’ varieties, and one particularly explosive example sent us all scurrying around the side of the house to take shelter. Rockets, however, were always a let-down, and never equalled the huge blossoming explosions you saw at organised displays. It was a fair few years before I attended one of these local events, held in a nearby farmer’s field, with a huge bonfire and a few stalls selling hot dogs and baked potatoes – the latter subequently becoming a November 5^th tradition in our house, long after we’d lost interest in the actual fireworks

As mentioned above, most British comic papers tended to offer a ‘firework number’ on the week of November 5^th but by the late 60s the tradition was tending to fizzle out (if you’ll pardon the pun), in a move that reflected growing awareness of firework accidents amongst children. Nationwide’s feature shaming IPC’s Whizzer and Chips had appeared in 1970, and the following year, D.C. Thompson’s 4^th November dated edition of The Beano contained not a single reference to fireworks. My own personal favourite firework ‘text’, if you will, was a strip book from Enid Blyton's now forgotten Mary Mouse series, charmingly illustrated in naive pen-and-ink by watercolourist Olive F. Openshaw. When the doll’s house family children Melia, Pip and Roundy decide to hide their illicit box of fireworks up on the roof next to the chimney, you just know it's not going to end well...

 

Happily none of our own fireworks ever went awry, and the worst we suffered was an occasional ‘damp squib’. But Bonfire Night itself could, occasionally, be a washout. This was the case in 1966, when our dad came home with a box intriguingly labelled ‘indoor fireworks.’ These appear to have been more of a Boxing Day tradition and were mostly about as interesting as watching a smouldering cigarette. Some of them were, indeed, merely matches that flared for fractionally longer than the average Swan Vesta. The one that remains in my mind was called ‘snake in the grass’, and when lit, created a long, coiling serpent of brown gunk that looked like something an errant pet might leave on the hearthrug...

From the early 70s onwards, media scare tactics began slowly to diminish the appeal of Bonfire Night as an event for children, and as the years went by, other Guy Fawkes traditions like masks and penny-for-the-guy have dwindled away. But popular culture abohors a vacuum and the way was now clear for the wholesale importation of Halloween in its American incarnation. Bonfire Night lingers on, but increasingly in the shadow of All Hallows. What was once an officially sanctioned day of public celebration has become a simple social occasion: and with the prospect of organised bonfires unlikely under the present climate, 2020 could prove to be a genuine ‘firebreak’ that could well end the four-hundred-and-fifteen year old festivities for good. Fireworks will, of course, never go away, but since the millennium they’ve become increasingly associated with New Year’s Eve. And the stylised face of Guy Fawkes is now a symbol of anti-establishment protest, which almost brings us back to square one. 

Thunderbirds Toys, for Girls and Boys...

 

...such was the slogan appearing on a series of lavishly-painted advertisements designed to sell Thunderbird models to young fans of the series. Possibly the easiest marketing gig ever, with an audience of youngsters fairly drooling to get their hands on plastic replicas of their favourite craft...

* * *

1966 was truly the year of Thunderbirds... the year in which Gerry Anderson’s greatest success was consolidated across every available medium of popular culture. By the end of the year, International Rescue, its hardware and characters had appeared in books, comics, annuals, trading cards (from manfacturers of bubble gum and what were then still referred to as ‘sweet cigarettes’), jigsaws, rub-down transfers, plasticene moulding sets; on breakfast cereal packets, bars of chocolate and any number of other commercial products. An enterprising retailer could easily have opened a store selling nothing but Thunderbirds-branded items and, for a year or two, done very well out of it. Profit margins were Go! Never mind the secrets of International Rescue, the Hood would have done better by stealing their mechandising rights...

At the age of four-going-on-five, I was firmly in the crosshairs of those merchandisers with en eye to flogging Thunderbirds tat. Not all of it was tat, mind. In fact, most of the toys that found their way into our house were thoughtfully designed realistic representations of the hero craft.

At first, however, young fans of the series had to play a waiting game. Surprising as it may seem in these days of excessive character merchandising, there would be no Thunderbirds toys in the shops in time for Christmas 1965 – Thunderbird One opened the batting in January of 1966. So what was the average young fan to do? We wanted to play at Thunderbirds, but to do so, we had to use our imaginations. I don’t know about anyone else, but I was forced to improvise, using whatever futuristic toys I already had available. A Triang model of a Gloster Javelin – which, with its delta wings looked nothing at all like Thunderbird One – stood in for the hero craft just as a plastic aeroplane had once filled in for Fireball XL5. J. Rosenthal toys – who would soon be bringing officially-licensed Thunderbirds products to the shops – had a lorry-mounted spacecraft on the market at around this time which, with its three wing-mounted rocket nacelles was a passable imitation of Thunderbird 3 (and of course a rocket on the back of a lorry would soon become the subject of an entire Thunderbirds episode). 

Ready to drill all the way to the sun... Somportex cards's unique Mole/Sunprobe hybrid features in this selection of the first series of Thunderbirds gum cards.

Bubble gum cards were among the first bona fide items of Thunderbirds merchandise to appear, featuring a range of occasionally odd photographs from the series (what, we asked ourselves, was Sunprobe doing sitting on the tractor unit of the Mole?) The backs of these cards made up into a jigsaw depicting another early entry in the merchandising fray, the 7” EP record Introducing Thunderbirds, which reached the shops (and our BSR record player) in October 1965. The sleeve, featuring a colour photo of TB1 (the first I’d ever seen) was great, but I never thought much of the actual record – it wasn’t a proper Thunderbirds adventure: there was no rescue; no Scott, Virgil or even Brains; just Jeff talking to Lady Penelope and Parker. But better things were on the horizon...

The second set of Thunderbirds gum cards, issued in 1966, featured colour photographs. I'm still waiting to see the episode with the monster (this, in fact, was one of a series of stills specially shot for use in TV Century 21 and related publications).

Oddly enough, it wasn’t any of the actual Thunderbirds that I asked for at Christmas of 1965. What I wanted most of all was a model of the Fireflash airliner, whose two appearances in the series had clearly left a huge impression. Our dad gamely tried, and most likely asked the kindly ladies who ran Osborne’s Toy Shop in Lichfield only to be told: sorry, no Fireflash... As compensation, he bought me a model of the most futuristic real-world aircraft of the day – the Tactical Strike and Reconnaissance nuclear bomber TSR-2, whose anti-flash white paint job and streamlined wings gave it a certain Fireflash-y quality, never mind that its real mission was to deliver armageddon to the Russians. With its sparking, flashing engine nacelles, the TSR-2 was nevertheless a cool toy, and I still own it, along with a near-mint, fully functional example.

My Gloster Javelin was eventually retired from service when a plastic model of Thunderbird One finally found its way into my hands. The fuselage was blue, but having only seen the craft in black and white (aside from a couple of colour photos), I saw nothing wrong with this. What was wrong with the toy was the bloody great red wheel below the nose cone, a feature I hated so much that our dad ended up having to remove it with a Stanley knife... the need for wheels on toy aeroplanes and space rockets always bothered me. On JR21’s TB2 toy it was less of an issue, with the friction motor thoughtfully concealed behind the pod, and only a tiny directional wheel below the nose. This duly arrived in our house as soon as it landed in the toy shop. A new one was called for almost immediately after I dropped (and broke) the pod, and managed to mangle one of the retractable legs. USN Sentinel had nothing on a five-year-old child...

Playing at Thunderbirds with toys was a sure way to consign many a fine model to the dustbin. The trouble was, every piece of hardware encountered in the series usually ended up in a million pieces and one’s games tended to reflect this. I can remember smashing up at least one really nice toy in the course of a Thunderbirds game, but fortunately there was always Lego available for the building of something like the Sidewinder, which could be dispatched and rebuilt into some other doomed piece of 21^st Century hardware without the need for another visit to the toyshop.

It took me until March 1967 to acquire a full set of Thunderbirds toys. TB4 was the last to arrive, with JR21’s big plastic battery-operated model coming as a birthday present. I’d previously had a simple motorised kit version (built, like all my other model kits by our dad on a wet Saturday afternoon), and a smaller, snap-together model (hey, even I could do that!) acquired as a send-away offer from Kellogg’s Sugar Smacks, and perfectly scaled to fit inside the pod of JR21’s TB2. Of the models then on the market, I had every one bar the motorised TB1, examples of which I still eye speculatively on ebay. The only real disappointment among them was what I’ll refer to as the ‘comedy Thunderbird 5’: it certainly amused us, spinning around on the floor with its unrealistic lights flashing whilst inside John Tracy must have been getting thoroughly sick... I’ve often wondered whether this hadn’t started life as a generic flying saucer toy, requiring the mere grafting-on of TB3’s docking annexe in order to do double duty as International Rescue’s space monitor...

Late '66 or early '67 also saw the arrival – and immediate disappearance from toyshops – of a range of Thunderbirds 'dolls' (or action figures as we'd call them today). These were clearly taking a line from Palitoy's hugely successful Action Man who had debuted in the spring of 1966. A lad in our class at school brought in a Scott Tracy example, which remains the only one I've ever seen to date. By the time we got down to the toyshop, every Tracy Brother was sold out with the exception of John. Jeff, Brains, Parker and Penelope were all accounted for, but Scott, Virgil, Alan and even Gordon had sold out. John's plastic alter ego bore a very good resemblance to International Rescue's least interesting character, but he was to prove somewhat less enduring than his Action Man inspiration... within a few years the elastic string that held his limbs in place had perished, causing John to go a bit floppy, and eventually go all to pieces. Perhaps he'd inhaled too much OD-60 during that Ocean Pioneer rescue...

 

Sold out across the land... the coveted Scott Tracy figure, a fully poseable (until he falls to bits) Action Man type doll, available in all good toy shops for about ten minutes...

The end of 1966 brought the almost unbelievable excitement of seeing Thunderbirds in colour, at the cinema. The fact that this trip also involved my first journey by rail made for a doubly memorable occasion. The train, despite looking as if it might be bound for Anderbad, was a slight disappointment, as I’d been expecting a proper steam loco rather than the multiple unit deisel that rolled into Lichfield City Station. The film itself did not disappoint (that would come later). I still remember hearing another young audience member telling his parents: ‘there’s Thunderbird One’ when what he was in fact looking at was Zero-X’s Lifting Body One, being trundled out of its hangar. The fool! (I thought to myself). I’d only been introduced to Zero-X a minute ago, but I could already tell it apart from Thunderbird One.

As a model, Zero-X was a cinch to make: all you needed was about six empty cigarette packets, and there were plenty of those to be found around the house with our dad on 20-a-day. All you had to do was sellotape the packs together in a line, then wedge the top of the front one in at an angle to form the MEV (these were Embassy Cigarette packets, which were clearly designed in collaboration with Century 21 toys...) As for Lift Bodies and the heat shield... who needs ‘em? 

We got it all for real a year later when Century 21 toys unveiled what was probably their greatest-ever model, the battery-operated Zero-X toy. I still have it, complete with the original box and all the bits. Okay, it had wheels, but you hardly noticed them. And there were flashing lights, but I was one of those who rarely put batteries in battery-operated toys, preferring to rely on imagination for motive power. When you did put the batteries in, they often stayed there for life. My TB4 still has its original 1967 set of Ever Ready (for Life!) batteries fused into the internal cavity to this day. 

 

Direct from London Airport, via Cape Kennedy... the Matchbox 'Cooper-Jarrett' Inter-State Double Freighter, based on a vehicle from a real life Chicago-based trucking company.

Something I began to notice about Thunderbirds, particularly as more photographs became available to me, was how many items out of my toybox were already in the episodes. A notable model was the Matchbox ‘Inter-State Double Freighter’, which can be seen in both Trapped in the Sky and Sun Probe. Whenever I made up a London Airport model (Lego control tower, TSR-2 Fireflash, etc), this die-cast would appear on the runway alongside an American ambulance, a Ford Galaxie police car and a fire tender (‘Crash crews to centre of 2-9... Roger!’) Add a couple of Lego trees and streetlamps, and you could hardly tell it from the ‘real’ thing. In my imagination, at any rate... 

While Thunderbirds was now all systems go in every toyshop, book retailers were similarly taking advantage of pop culture's biggest merchandising phenomenon since the Daleks... or maybe the Beatles. Thunderbirds had arrived on television a bit too late to capture the Christmas book market of 1965, but the following year saw the publication of a range of paperback books from the Armada imprint, who had already produced a Stingray novel penned by John W. Jennison under his nom de plume, John Theydon. I remained unaware of these until much later, and in any event, they didn't have enough pictures to interest me. Much more in my line was the Thunderbirds Annual which appeared at Christmas 1966 and would be a yearly event for the rest of the decade (finally doubling up with Captain Scarlet in 1969). I can still remember opening this on Christmas morning and gazing at the the inner cover photo of Thunderbird One in its launch bay, the pages still fresh and new with that distinctive 'brand new annual' smell of barely dried printers ink.

In the final part of this retrospective, I'll be looking back to the later years of Thunderbirds... the final foray into cinemas, and the Friday afternoon repeats that felt as if they would never end.

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

1999 @ 45

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1999 @ 45

Part One: A Stylish Weirdness

Forty-five years ago, at the end of August 1975, I was getting a bit excited about something new on television. I’d known about it for months, and as far back as March of that year, I’d bought the first in a series of paperback novelisations, published prematurely to tie-in with an anticipated broadcast date that never materialised. The programme in question was, of course, Gerry Anderson’s Space:1999 and there was just cause for excitement, if not celebration, given that it was all of five years since we’d last seen a new Anderson sci-fi production on our screens, in the form of UFO.

Viewers might have been forgiven for thinking that the Andersons’ run on television had come to an end. I remember my disappointment with The Protectors when the series appeared in 1972. A vapid, watered-down clone of a standard ITC action/adventure template, this glossy cosmopolitan trash wasn’t what anyone had come to expect from Gerry and Sylvia Anderson. For me, The Protectors – slick, soulless, formulaic junk – was the death knell for the futuristic schtick that had been the Andersons’ stock in trade. But I would be proven wrong.

News of nascent film and television endeavours was hard to come by in that era, with few if any magazines or informed sources available to consult. Latterly, and, I have to say, regrettably, far too many putative Anderson productions were flagged up across the media, with barely a single one actually making it into production. I saw the man himself, at a convention in Birmingham some time during the 1990s, outlining the format of a new science-fiction series he had in development. He spent a long time describing it, and to my certain knowledge, a former acquaintance of mine was already helping to develop the script. I think it may have been called Eternity... appropriately enough, since it never arrived. Back in the 70s, it would have been quietly set aside and nobody would have been any the wiser (viz. the Anderson’s puppet/live action pilot The Investigator, filmed and shelved circa 1973).

Unless one was a regular subscriber to British entertainment trade papers, no advance notice was given of any TV series until it was well into production and at a stage where stills could be released to the likes of the TVTimes. And it was, indeed, in the TVTimes, some time during 1974, that I first learned of a new Gerry Anderson endeavour called, so the piece told me, Space 99. Cool title, I thought. Cooler, in fact, than the somewhat clumsy title it ended up with. There wasn’t much to go on at this stage: a black and white photograph (reproduced above, in colour) of Martin Landau and Barbara Bain (neither of whom was familiar to me) was accompanied by a single, short paragraph referring to the new series. The uniforms and the Main Mission control panel backdrop hinted at another sci-fi production, if the text didn’t make it explicit. And in any case, the name Gerry Anderson was synonymous with science fiction.

I’m fairly sure this small promotional piece appeared quite early in 1974, and I awaited further developments, expecting to see the new series on air in the autumn. What I did see, on Monday 23 December 1974, and in the context of a BBC Horizon film about the movie special effects industry, was a brief clip from the pilot episode Breakaway. The clip showed an Eagle, being flown by remote control, making a crash-landing on the moon, but it was devoid of context: no mention of the series; no sign of any of the cast members; even the ship itself was referred to simply as a ‘moon bus.’

Fast forward to Saturday March 8, 1975, when on a trip to the nearest branch of WH Smiths, I discovered the first two Space:1999 novelisations; ‘Breakaway’ and ‘Moon Odyssey’. The cover designs were somewhat simplistic (and I should know, having designed many covers for Space:1999 DVDs and blu-rays), but back then all one wanted from a TV tie-in paperback was a decent rendering of the logo, and some colour photos, and the Orbit paperbacks offered all that. In fact, I had no idea whether the cover treatment of the logo was accurate or not, but it looked like the kind of thing one might expect to see. Notably, there was no ‘Gerry Anderson’ credit either – something which the man himself took me to task over after I omitted it from a Fireball XL5 DVD. In fact, the Anderson name did not appear anywhere in either publication; the back cover blurb referred only to ‘ATV’s space spectacular’, and the authorial biographies referred only to the writing credentials of authors E.C. Tubb and John Rankine.

You might imagine that, as a Gerry Anderson fanatic, I took these books home and immediately read them from cover to cover. But you’d be wrong. I held fire on reading my Space:1999 books for the time being, happy to wait for the real thing to turn up on television. The books’ appearance was a sure sign that the series must be about to appear on television any day, and a spring ’75 debut was, I believe, the original plan. How or why it got deferred until the autumn, I have no idea, although autumn was the traditional time at which the television companies rolled out their big new productions.

My diary doesn’t mention Space:1999 again until Saturday 30 August 1975, when a trail for ITV’s ‘Big Season’ included excerpts from the forthcoming Anderson space opera... and also, oddly, enough, the third season of Batman which was finally coming to viewers in the midlands... a mere eight years after its US broadcasts. By this time, I already knew that Space:1999 would begin its run the following Thursday, 4 September, at 7.00pm. It seemed an unusually early hour for such a big budget, adult sci-fi series. After all, UFO had aired at 8pm, with some of its more controversial episodes deferred until even later hours; and over on the BBC, Star Trek had long since settled into a comfortable 8.10pm slot. Perhaps ATV’s programme planners were thinking back to the 1960s, when series like Thunderbirds, deemed to have ‘family appeal’ were shown at this same hour, drawing in both the target audience of children and their parents as well.

I counted down the days and, in anticipation, began reading the ‘Breakaway’ novel (itself somewhat different from the TV episode, having been derived from the original 90-minute pilot script). Thursday 4 September was also the first day of the new school year and, as mentioned above, the evening schedule also saw the return of Batman – which I was able to see in colour for the first time. The caped crusader, however, paled into insignificance next to Space:1999 which was literally the most extraordinary thing I’d seen on television up to that time.

It was also the last time that I’d get the frisson of excitement at the unknown that always came with any new Gerry Anderson series (well, most of them anyway, we’ll exclude The Secret Service). The first sight of the opening titles (with their fast-cut montage of tonight’s episode which took me right back to Thunderbirds); the first hearing of the music; working out the characters and their roles; marvelling at the hardware, sets and special effects. All this had been part of the ‘first run’ experience of every Gerry Anderson production going back to Thunderbirds, and in this respect, Space:1999 did not disappoint.

I was more than satisfied with what I’d seen on that September evening, and looked forward to more of the same as the autumn wore on into winter. However, it seemed my opinion was not widely shared. The next day at school, friends were complaining about the ‘cardboard characters’ (they’d probably been reading some of the less than complimentary newspaper reviews) and the strange low-key ‘whispery’ speech of leading characters like Koenig and Russell (I hardly noticed it at the time, but today I find it somewhat irritating...)

Within a week or so of this first broadcast, I’d begun creating my own Space:1999 comic, unhindered by the fact that I had only scant photographic or illustrative references. Look-In comic had featured the series on its cover, graced with a typically dynamic, scumbled illustration by noted movie poster artist Arnaldo Putzu. The comic strip inside was less appealing, drawn in a hectic, jagged fashion by either John M Burns or Martin Asbury. Whoever was responsible, I didn’t like it, and this was the only Look-In of the era that I took the trouble to acquire.

 

How not to design a Space: 1999 Annual... wrong font (Data 70), flipped pic of Barbara Bain. Orbit books did better with their 'as seen on screen' title treatment... well, almost.           

The first Space:1999 annual arrived on Tuesday 23 September (I know annuals are meant for Christmas, but I wasn’t about to wait that long). A friend ordered copies for us through his mum’s mail-order catalogue. Now, at last, I had a few more photographs to refer to, although the artwork was dreadful – as were the scripts. As the autumn wore on, a few more paperbacks began to appear, which I dutifully collected, but did not bother to read – nothing, after all, could top the experience of watching the series itself.

At the age of 14, my ability to judge any television or film production was fairly limited, if not non existent. As long as it fulfilled various criteria – space, or spy, or comedy, and preferably made in the UK (I made an exception for Star Trek), then it was good to go. Never mind how good, bad, indifferent or frankly rubbish the script, acting or direction were. Direction? I barely knew such a thing existed... Thus, Space:1999 didn’t have to do very much to meet with my approval. It was set in space, made by Gerry Anderson, featured a lot of explosions and had good, solid special effects. I couldn’t ask for much more. Yet even I had to acknowledge that certain episodes fell some way below the standard set by others.

Second to air was Force of Life, an episode whose direction (by Prisoner and UFO stalwart David Tombin) gave it a stylish weirdness that compensated for a script where odd things happened but were not properly explained. I liked it a lot, without realising that this would become something of a template for the series – show a lot but explain almost nothing. Some episodes dabbled in metaphysics, whilst others were simply obscure for obscurity’s sake. The best stories were those whose plots were developed and resolved with acceptable logic, no matter how bizarre the events they depicted: Voyager’s Return and The Last Sunset were probably the outstanding examples. My diary records that I found Dragon’s Domain ‘one of the best yet’, an opinion I’ve had cause to revise over the years, but even now, I’ll still concede that it looks great, even if it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

The real ‘stinkers’ from series one were, for my money, The Full Circle (caveman stories begin and end for me with The Flintstones), End of Eternity (Peter Bowles looks wrong in every conceivable way), Ring Around the Moon (just boring) and, worst by a long margin, Missing Link (dreary, pretentious, tenuous tosh not even alleviated by the presence of Peter Cushing). I’m even less forgiving of the series today, but back in 1975-6 these episodes struck me as lacking a certain something.

As to how well the series was doing on television, I had no idea. As long as it remained on ITV, on Thursday nights, all was well. It meant I missed out on six months’ worth of Top of the Pops, but there wasn’t a great deal to see there as 1975 shaded into ‘76. But the new year would bring changes on Moonbase Alpha, not all of them good.

To be precise, not any of them good... as we’ll explore in part 2.

 

Ponderings from a Parallel Universe

'Bad Spock' and... bad Kirk? Or is it good Kirk in bad Kirk's clothes? Star Trek enters the arena of the parallel universe with Mirror, Mirror

In a recent post, I touched on the fictional conceit of the parallel universe: fifty years ago, one of the great British examples was being played out on television in the form of the Dr. Who serial Inferno. And, later that same year, viewers in the UK would be introduced to another, more celebrated example, Star Trek’s season two episode Mirror, Mirror. These two stories have distinct similarities in that each posits an alternate version of the world as we know it, populated by fascist döppelgangers of familiar figures. The very word döppelganger also suggests another example of the same plot device, cooked up by Gerry and Sylvia Anderson for their 1969 film of the same name. So what is it with these parallel universes? Where did they get started? Are we, in fact, living in one right now? Looking around at 2020, I’d say it meets most of the requirements: populations living under strangely altered circumstances, bad guys in power, killer virus at large. Perhaps the question for us today is not ‘are we living in a parallel universe?’ but how do we get back from it?

Wikipedia has a lot to say on the subject of parallel universes, alternate realities, call them what you will, but their article is muddled and lacks focus, allowing far too much material under the ‘parallel earth’ umbrella. I would argue that the ‘classic’ parallel universe of speculative fiction – and, indeed, quantum physics – is not merely ‘another world’ or a strange, new country such as are visited in the likes of the Narnia series and Gulliver’s Travels (both of which find their way into Wikipedia's very muddled discussion). It is a fictional world whose characters and settings duplicate an existing fictional world in a way that allows the author to engage in often complex moral debate about the actual world we inhabit. That, after all, was the original purpose of science fiction.

Looking back at the aforementioned Dr. Who serial, Inferno, I reckoned that this was probably the first time I’d come across the idea of a parallel world, inhabited by a cast of döppelgangers, and I was almost right; but not quite. The very first example I saw was in the Fireball XL5 Annual published in 1964, in which series writer Alan Fennell penned a comic strip adventure called Solar System II. In this six-page story, the crew of Fireball XL5 are pulled across the universe by a time-travel beam invented in the distant future by their counterparts on a parallel version of Earth, ‘with people and things the same as the Earth we know,’ as Steve Zodiac explains (to his parallel self). The only difference is that the new Earth is one hundred years ahead of the one they’ve left behind.

The parallel Earth visited in Dr. Who’s Inferno serial added the intriguing notion of the duplicate world being a fascist dictatorship, with the implicit notion (never stated as such) of the Nazis having won the Second World War. Back in 1970, this was still a relatively novel idea. Star Trek had already been there, albeit on a different planet (with ‘parallel development’) in the 1967 episode Patterns of Force (screened in the UK in 1970). Of all the many parallel world fictions, the ‘what if Hitler won the war’ has become the most widely explored – to the point, I would argue, of tedium. Examples are too numerous to list, but the idea seems to have first taken root with Philip K Dick’s 1962 novel The Man in the High Castle, and has been doing the rounds ever since. Stephen Fry turned the whiskery concept on its head with his novel Making History, which speculates on the consequences of Adolf Hitler’s removal from history. Needless to say, it doesn’t end well...

Pulp sci-fi writer Murray Leinster’s Sidewise in Time is widely cited as being one of the first instances of the parallel universe in fiction, although H.G. Wells had toyed with the idea of alternate worlds running along parallel but altered lines to our own in novels such as Men Like Gods. But it seems that Star Trek’s Mirror Mirror was the first example in this emerging sub-genre to use the conceit of ‘evil döppelgangers’ as part of the alternate reality set-up.

The döppelganger is, of course, a fictional trope of its own, with examples including the 1970 thriller film The Man Who Haunted Himself, based on the 1940 short story (later expanded into a novel) The Strange Case of Mr. Pelham. Star Trek was only a few episodes into production when the series offered up its own take on the idea in the ‘good Kirk v. bad Kirk’ episode The Enemy Within. But these ‘evil doubles’ operate in our own world rather than being a manifestation of an entirely altered reality. Gerry and Sylvia Anderson fused the idea of döppelgangers and alternate realities in their 1969 feature film Döppelganger (aka Journey to the Far Side of the Sun) where the alternate reality is identical to our own, but a mirror image. There is no good/evil dichotomy, which leaves the script floundering somewhat. One of the fictional rules of any alternate reality is that you’re supposed to use it to advance moral/philosophical arguments about the world we inhabit... not merely as an excuse for a lot of special effects and explosions. The big problem with Döppelganger the movie is that it thinks it’s working on this deeper level... there are moments when it thinks it’s 2001 instead of what it really is – a very long episode of UFO.

Star Trek’s Mirror Mirror episode is itself embedded in a kind of alternate reality, as least as regards its first roadcast by the BBC. According to the Radio Times database (BBG Genome), this was on Monday 15 June, 1970, a date I cited in my earlier blog where I noted the close coincidence of this broadcast and the transmission dates of Dr. Who’s ‘parallel parallel universe’ (if you will), Inferno. Only, it didn’t happen that way. Despite being scheduled on the said date, Mirror Mirror did not in fact air on 15 June 1970, its first UK brodcast being deferred until Wednesday 11 November of the same year. Genome lists both dates, but only the November date is right. So what happened on Monday 15 June 1970 to cause this Star Trek episode to drift into an alternate reality? Simple: Britain got knocked out of the World Cup tournament, losing in the quarter finals to West Germany in a match played in the closing hours of June 14. The programme schedule for the evening of Monday 15 was evidently altered to offer a retrospective of Britain’s World Cup journey, and the World Cup Grandstand that had been scheduled to run from 18.00 to 19.20 that evening was clearly extended – kicking Star Trek into touch. But it gets better... Britain’s World Cup failure was widely interpreted as being a factor in the defeat, just three days later, of Harold Wilson’s government in a General Election that returned the Tories to power. The events that branch off from this single moment in history are myriad and complex. Somewhere, there may exist a parallel England where Britain, if not winning the 1970 World Cup, at least made it past the quarter finals, and Harold Wilson remained in number 10...

All of which suggests that there could be more to this whole parallel universe idea than a few science-fiction escapades. As recently as March of this year, scientists were excitedly discussing the concept as the ‘only possible explanation’ of a strange particle that did not behave as predicted and seemed to hint at a parallel universe where time runs backwards, an idea previously advanced by Stephen Hawking and others. As far back as 1954, Hugh Everett III conceived of what is now known as the ‘many worlds theory’, a branch of quantum physics which argues for the existence of parallel timelines occurring endlessly and infinitely through a process of ‘branching off’. Put in the most simple terms, the theory posits that for every event at the level of quantum physics, there is an infinity of alternate outcomes, all of which result in parallel but discrete realities. More than sixty years later, the existence of these parallel universes is still hotly debated by physicists, but most of the advocates of the theory are in agreement that there can be no travel between the realities. They are coincident, but self-contained. Unless, of course, you happen to be in possession of the console from the TARDIS... or a red Audi A4.

I once conceived my own humorous conceit regarding parallel worlds, partly to explain my own experience of reality which has, over the decades, seemed to oscillate between discrete and unconnected timelines. I’ve had, as it were, various different lives, often involving different protagonists who, typically, never interact with those from the ‘other’ realities. I decided there had to be a mechanism for these ‘transitions’, and found it in the form of Radio 4’s late-night shipping forecast. The shipping forecast had once prefaced the news at midday and 6pm, but for some years, on FM radio at any rate, it has been relegated to 12.45am where is always prefaced by an ‘iconic’ piece of music called Sailing By. I decided that this would be my ‘gateway’ between realities and that the transitions occured at those times when I was away from home and heard Sailing By on the radio, usually in the car. This, as I say, is merely a fictional conceit, not a genuine belief, before you summon medical assistance... Then, just a few months ago, when the present ‘lockdown’ situation had not quite kicked off, Radio 4’s PM programme saw fit to play this piece of music as a ‘soothing’ theme at the end of an edition in late March. I heard it in the car. ‘This isn’t good,’ I thought, invoking my own fictional conceit...

And, as if in acknowledgment of the fact that there really might be ‘something weird going on’, as I sat writing this piece, with the radio on in the kitchen, DJ Ken Bruce uttered the words ‘parallel universe’. Which, if nothing else, serves to illustrate how this once elegant science-fiction/moral philosophical construct is now a part of everyday speech. At least it is in this version of reality.

Whichever reality you inhabit, good luck in getting back from there. Beam me up, Scotty...