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 55th 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.
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