Too Much of a Good Thing?

The End of Nostalgia?

I’m now in my seventh decade of living with a bunch of characters and machines from the future – a future that will never happen. The worlds of Gerry Anderson are as old as I am. His futuristic visions first hit the small screen five weeks before I was born, and over the following decade, I think it’s safe to say that at least one episode of his work could be seen on TV almost every week.

This blog is about nostalgia. Nostalgia is defined as a wistful or sentimental yearning for the past, usually a past that is irrecoverable. But what happens to nostalgia when its object reappears, becomes readily available, ubiquitous, even?

I’ve long been aware that, in order to preserve the sharp tang of genuine nostalgia, one has to ration one’s exposure to the object of one’s nostalgic feelings. As an example, I’m going to use Gerry Anderson’s Fireball XL5, which was, I believe, the first pop cultural artefact to have that effect on me.

Fireball XL5 made its television debut in the Midlands early in 1963, when I was just two years old. For the next three years it was seldom off the screen, and I probably got to see most of the episodes two or three times. In 1966, the endless run of repeats came to an end, and Fireball would not appear again on our screens for another four years – which to me, aged nine, was almost half a lifetime.

I think my personal fascination for the series was piqued by narrowly missing out on a copy of the first Fireball XL5 Annual at a jumble sale. I still owned my original copy, bought for me at Christmas 1963, but it had lost its covers and quite a few pages. Getting a new copy of that book became an obsession. Without recourse to bookshops or other potential sources of supply, I set myself the task of ‘faking’ the missing cover and pages by drawing them in biro and felt-tip pen. Working off a borrowed copy (I might more usefully have offered to buy it from its owner), this work took me through to around 1972. Ludicrous, I hear you say, and I agree entirely. But it is a measure of the extent to which I was infatuated with this series.

From the day of the jumble sale, which I estimate as having been in the summer of 1967 or 68, right through to the autumn of 1970, I fixated on Fireball XL5, as mentioned elsewhere in this blog. In September 1970, finally, came the long-awaited repeat run. But once it had ended, I was back where I’d started, unable to see the series again until ATV Midlands chose to schedule another repeat. Incredibly, this happened within six months of the previous run, but frustratingly, the episodes were scheduled on weekday lunchtimes when I was at school. I remember envying my brother who was off school with a cold and got to see The Doomed Planet! In early 1972, ATV began experimenting with early Saturday morning broadcasts, none of which was scheduled in the TV Times. Many episodes of Fireball appeared in this context, of which only one – Space Monster – appeared in the listings. This broadcast, on April 29, 1972, would be my last sighting of Fireball XL5 for another four years. When I saw it again, in the autumn of 1976, it was in the form of two edited 8mm episodes owned by a lad from school. Over the next five years, I acquired the six episodes that had been released in this format, and an 8mm sound projector on which to run them. The complete series, however, remained elusive.

It would take until 1985 for the series to return in a repeat run on television. By this time, I was equipped with a VHS recorder and finally was able to obtain copies of all 39 episodes. For the first time, the series shifted out of the arena of nostalgia and into the realm of the immediately available. I’m not sure how many times I watched those tapes, but for the first two or three repeats, they retained their nostalgic appeal. Most of these were episodes I’d not seen in any form for fourteen years. Again, this was over half my lifetime, and it felt like it.

Gradually, however, I was becoming aware that the sharp nostalgic feeling for Fireball was beginning to diminish. I began to know many of the episodes in detail. In 2002, I got my first DVD set (imported from America, as the series had yet to appear on the format in Britain). I watched them all again, impressed at the vast improvement over the dirty, spliced old prints from the mid-80s repeats. I probably left it a year or two before running the DVDs again. Then I decided I had to put the series out of my life for a longer period of time. It wasn’t that I didn’t still want to watch them, or own the DVDs. I just felt sated. By 2010, when I ran the episodes through again, sufficient time had elapsed for them to have regained some of their nostalgic appeal, but I now knew them in sufficient detail as to be able to note subtlties in their production, such as the use of different Steve Zodiac puppets, continuity between episodes, re-use of sets, models and so forth. In short, I probably knew the episodes too well. By this time, I was watching on a DVD collection in which I’d had a hand myself, having designed the packaging for its release on the Network DVD label. I redesigned it for the 40th anniversary in 2012, and again, for its fiftieth, when the series finally made it to blu-ray in 2022. This time around, I chanelled some of my childhood enthusiasm into creating a raft of ephemera to include in the packaging.

I watched all the episodes again in their new HD editions – for what must have been maybe the tenth or twelfth time. How many more times could I sit through them? Did I even need to sit through them when I could replay huge chunks of episodes in my mind’s eye?

As of this summer, the series is back on the small screen, for the first time in 38 years, courtesy of free-to-air broadcaster Talking Pictures TV. I’m not watching them – TPTV’s relatively low bandwidth can’t compete with the detail on the blu-ray set, and Saturday afternoon is hardly an ideal slot – but I’m glad they’re still out there. More than that, I’m intrigued when I see people posting on social media that they’re watching the series for the first time since childhood. I wonder what that must feel like? There are TV series I’ve not seen since the very early 60s, but for the most part, those childhood artefacts have generally been made available to watch, where they still exist. There isn’t enough left of my life to put Fireball XL5 on the shelf for a decade, and if I do, I run the risk of dying without seeing it again. Unthinkable. But equally hard to accept is that I may never again get to experience the thrill of nostalgia fulfilled that I got from seeing the episodes when they reappeared in 1970 and 1985.

What do you want? Nostalgia or availability? You can’t have both. The more times you’re exposed to anything like a book, film or TV series, the less of its nostalgic appeal it retains. ‘Nostalgia isn’t what it was’ runs the old witticism, to which I might add: ‘and will never be again.’