... or how I learned to take nothing seriously
I was just eleven years old when it happened, I can even put a date to it: Sunday 19th March, 1972. The day’s entry in my diary reads: ‘Hilarious game of Supercar people’. The ‘Supercar people’ were small plastic figurines of the characters from Gerry Anderson’s series (illustrated above), and my brother and I had been enacting games with them for some little while, unhindered by the fact that we scarcely remembered the series (indeed, my brother had never seen it at all). I think it was this void in our knowledge that led me to take what seems, in retrospect, like a momentous decision.
Up to now, I’d always treated my pop culture heroes with a measure of respect, reverence even. The likes of Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet were there to be taken seriously, and my childhood games were in deadly earnest. I remember being somewhat baffled on a visit to the cinema in 1966 to see the Batman movie when my parents and, indeed, most of the audience, greeted Batman’s tussle with a shark with gales of laughter. Similarly, around the same time, I remember hearing what I took to be ‘Thunderbirds on the radio’, accompanied by an audience laughing. What was going on? It would take a few years, but in 1972, I finally got the joke. Those old series were inherently funny – the characters were funny, the whole idea of puppets prancing around, saving humanity was absurd beyond belief. Of course, I didn’t rationalise it that way at the time. I just thought I’d come up with a way of making our ‘Supercar people’ games more entertaining.
By 1972, it was nine years since I’d last had sight of an episode of Supercar, and apart from the basics – the vehicle could go anywhere, do anything and was piloted by Mike Mercury – I knew less than nothing about the format. Our mum filled in a few gaps, providing the name of ‘Little Jimmy’, and we knew Dr. Beaker and Mitch by name. But who was the fifth member of the team? The plastic figures, maufactured in the mid-60s by Cecil Coleman, were each set on a small green base, enabling them to stand upright. Mike, Beaker and even Jimmy were depicted standing: but the mystery fifth character seemed to be squatting down, like a goblin sitting on a toadstool. What was his name? We couldn’t remember. I would later come to know him as Professor Popkiss, but in 1972 the best I could come up with was that he was clearly a Professor. Only a mad scientist would be depicted peering over a pair of half-moon specs. He wasn’t even painted in the correct colours. Instead of Popkiss’s white hair and coat, the Cecil Coleman version had been rendered in the same shades as Dr. Beaker, with a blue suit and black hair. The character was something of an engima. I’d asked a friend at school, who assured me his name was Professor Popkiss, but this didn’t ring true to me. School friends were notoriously unreliable when it came to stuff like this, so I chose to ignore him. What happened on Sunday 19th March 1972 was that I finally came up with a name for this character, a name so absurd I won’t bother to write it down – and you wouldn’t be able to pronounce it if I did. Adding to his air of absurdity was his ability to fly. The Cecil Coleman plastic base became a kind of sit-’n’-ride flying machine. To operate it, all the character had to do was to shout his name aloud. My eleven-year-old imagination was clearly spiralling out of control…
Before very long, with input from my brother, we had completely trashed the whole Supercar format and reimagined the characters. Mike Mercury became James Jupiter (deliberately misspelled as 'Jupita'), a pompous swaggering type who was inordinately proud of his hairdo. Jimmy was turned into a whining brat, forever being sent off to the barber shop where he would be subjected to a ‘thimble cut’ (instead of the traditional pudding basin, the barber would place a thimble on his head and shave off everything else – a style now known as Turkish hairdressing). Lording it over them all was our reimagined Professor Popkiss, who would spin off into his own independent series of absurd adventures. The characters soon evolved into a cartoon, their appearance now radically altered. ‘Dr. Beaker’ (whose name, we decided, was Heinz), was always depicted with eyes in the form of huge spirals, whilst the whole crew were given bizarre hamster cheeks. How, or why these modifications took place, I have no idea. They just made us laugh at the time. In their new incarnation, the Supercar crew became a pop group, and utterly ludicrous they looked with their platform boots and 24-string guitars*.
Now, no Gerry Anderson series was safe. It wasn’t long before I decided that the crew of Fireball XL5 should also be turned into a pop group. One day, our mum came home with a couple of notebooks with psychedelic covers that she’d bought for us from the local post office. This seemed the perfect format in which to set out the history of Fireball XL5’s pop group, known as the Steve ‘n’ Matt Powerhouse. In 1975, I’d been bought a pictorial history of The Beatles, a 12” square softcover publication that comprised an overview of their career, focusing on their record releases. Album covers were depicted at actual size, hence the format. Basing my own version on the layout of the Beatles book, I began to concoct the humorous career history of the Fireball characters. They weren’t puppets after all: Gerry Anderson had merely attached strings to his recalcitrant actors to keep them in line. On ending the series, they’d gone off and formed a band, with Commander Zero in the role of Brian Epstein. Their career mirrored that of the Beatles – films in 1964 and 65, followed by a psychedelic era. I know what you’re thinking, and you’d be wrong. I started this endeavour in 1975 and The Rutles would not appear for another three years. When they did, the accompanying album was also clearly influenced by the same Beatles book that had provided the inspiration for my own piece of satire. Actually, satire is too grand a word for what I was doing: it was pure nonsense.
It didn’t stop there. I’d soon started writing parallel histories of the pop groups that evolved from the characters in Stingray and Thunderbirds. In the latter, I’d decided that instead of taking drugs, the Tracy brothers would get high on coffee (this idea came from a comment by Jeff Tracy on the Century 21 record Introducing Thunderbirds in which he claimed they all drank ‘gallons of the stuff’). Again, this was a good two years ahead of the Rutles: so when I saw Eric Idle’s creations getting high on tea instead of coffee, I began to wonder if he’d been dwelling in my head. The whole Rutles concept was so totally where I was at with my own comedy pop groups. Except that in their case, they were only satirising the Beatles, while I was making fun of them and the whole Gerry Anderson empire at a stroke.
As I later came to realise, it wasn’t just my brother and myself who saw the comic potential in the worlds of Gerry Anderson. Peter Cook and Dudley Moore had been there in 1966 with their legendary ‘Superthunderstingcar’, featuring a character called Johnny Jupiter. Clearly, we were on the same page.
Was nothing sacred?
Seemingly not, as we’ll see in part two…
[* There is no such thing as a 24-string guitar]
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