Location Spotting: Cooling Towers

 

I’m always interested in locations from film and television. Many years ago, I trailed around the suburbs of Manchester trying to find locations from the 1963 film Billy Liar only to discover, much later, that they’d been shot in Bradford. But back then, I didn't have the internet to assist me...

Locations are always easier to track down when they include a landmark of some kind – by which I mean large, prominent buildings or other distinctive features in the landscape. Since childhood, I’ve nutured a curious fascination for coal-fired power stations, having been impressed at an early age by the shape and proportions of the cooling towers that were usually associated with such places. Within the past month, Britain’s last coal-fired generating station at Ratcliffe on Soar, Nottinghamshire, was closed for good, and the past twenty years have seen the decommissioning and demolition of stations the length and breadth of the British Isles. Save for a few stragglers – such as the five towers of Willington Power Station in Derbyshire – the many cooling towers that once dominated the landscape have long since gone to dust.

So if I ever spot a power station on an old piece of film or television, I’m keen to find out where it was. Last week, in Z Cars – currently being repeated on Talking Pictures TV – we got some good shots of two good examples in North London. There were a good many power stations dotted across the London suburbs over the years, so identification is not always easy. One of the two stations, however, I recognised, as it can also be seen in John Betjeman’s film Metro-land, shot a year before the Z Cars episode in 1972. This facility, located in Neasden, can easily be identified by the distinctive shape of its twin cooling towers (these structures showed a surprising amount of variation in their appearance). Neasden was already mothballed by the time the Z Cars episode was filmed, having been decomissioned in 1968. 

 

Neasden power station as seen in Z Cars, Absence (above) and Metro-Land (below)

The Z Cars episode included shots of another power station, still in operation, and located close to a canal. This one proved somewhat harder to identify. As the shots from the episode show, the station had three cooling towers and two smokestacks emerging from a large, brick built boiler house. Its canalside location helped in tracking it down, as did proximity to Neasden. I considered, but ruled out Brimsdown in Essex (too many cooling towers and of the wrong design) and West Ham power station (towers in the wrong configfuration), but after a bit of Googling, I found an image that matched almost exactly to one of the shots in the episode. The station in question was at Acton Lane, Willesden – not far from Neasden and conveniently close to the BBC studios at Shepherds’ Bush. The plant remained in operation until 1983, and its location can be seen clearly on this section from a London A-Z map of the same era.

It’s surprising to realise exactly how many power stations once served the major urban and industrial areas of the UK. Googling for images reveals numerous examples, all variations on the same basic design and layout, with plants often comprising half a dozen or more cooling towers. In more recent times, cooling towers have been demonised as iconography of fossil fuel power generation, with picture editors on news and documentary programmes using shots of the structures to illustrate the issue of global warming. In fact, nothing but steam ever emerged from cooling towers, which were used, as their name suggests, to cool the water from the steam turbines before recyling it back into the plant. The harmful carbon emissions from power stations came only from the tall smokestacks. But cooling towers, with their vast size and grimy weathering, made a better visual scapegoat.

In fact, I’ve always found them intriguing structures, and having lived in the vicinity of a few examples, would often be impressed by the effect of different lighting conditions, especially when the plants were running at full capacity and sending up vast columns of steam. I’m sure most people considered them blots on the landscape, but those who lived in close proximity to such stations have often developed a sentimental attachment to the towers and are sad to see them go.

And of course, modern thinking tells us that coal-fired power generation was a bad thing. That may be so, but where would we have been without it? One only has to think back to the days of miners’ strikes and the resulting power cuts to appreciate the monumental importance those stations played in everyday life.

There’s no point in looking out for power stations in today’s Britain, unless you happen to be travelling along the A50 trunk road, where you’ll still see the examples I mentioned earlier. So the best place to spot them is in vintage film and television...

Acton Lane (Willesden) power station as seen in Z Cars above, and in a Flickr image taken from the same spot, evidently a few years later (note the same tree is still visible)

Anything Can Happen in the Last Sixty Years

 

Stingray: A Personal Memoir

‘Stand by for Action!’ It was sixty years ago this week that young viewers were alerted by the barking voice of Commander Shore and the thundering drumbeat that ushered in the very first episode of Gerry and Sylvia Anderson’s Stingray. Viewers in the London ITV region got there first, on Sunday 4 October. Up here in the Midlands, we had to wait until Tuesday. Assuming we were actually watching…

This blog is primarily about pop cultural events and icons that I can remember. Yet I have no recollection whatsoever of the debut of Stingray. I was already a fan of Fireball XL5 – I’d had the annual bought for me the previous Christmas, and the series had scarcely been off the screen in all that time. Now here was a new Supermarionation show, bigger, more dynamic, more explosive than ever. Surely it arrived in a blaze of publicity? If so, I was utterly oblivious.

Here in the Midlands, Stingray was scheduled at the slightly unusual time of 7.00pm. Fireball had also been broadcast in this timeslot, which, when it debuted in March 1963, was a little after my bedtime. One of my earliest memories is of being brought downstairs to see the programme, possibly on its first screening. After its initial run, Fireball was moved to the more child-friendly slot of 5.25pm, at which hour I have much clearer recollections. By 1964, I was certainly stopping up until seven or seven thirty, as I can remember some of the programmes that occupied this time slot on ITV. So there’s no reason to suppose I was not allowed to see Stingray at this time. As I wrote in my last entry, I have many quite clear memories of television from the autumn of 1964: but my recollections of Stingray begin in 1965.

In my memory, Stingray was always on earlier, at a time when it was still light outside. This means that I’m remembering the broadcasts from spring 1965 onwards. That’s not to say I hadn’t seen it sooner – but I just don’t associate it with being on at 7pm. Batman, yes. Thunderbirds, certainly. Just not Stingray. But while Fireball saw out the whole of its first broadcast in the 7pm slot, Stingray would be brought forward to 5.25pm as of 03.02.65. Coincidentally or not, this move came a week after the launch of the TV21 comic, itself launched via a TV ad campaign. Viewers who hadn’t already seen Stingray in its later slot would have been introduced to the series with its all-time dud episode The Cool Caveman!

My earliest recollection of a specific episode is Raptures of the Deep, and it was definitely light outside, which dates that memory to its second broadcast on Wednesday 25 August 1965 – mere weeks before the arrival of Thunderbirds.

For much of 1965, Stingray was, for me, one of the main events on television. Toys had arrived in our local shops by early in the year, and I saw the very desirable battery-operated Stingray model from Lincoln International demonstrated in our favourite toy shop Osbornes’ – but I didn’t want it. Why not? Well, for one thing, I was never a huge fan of battery-operated toys, but I think the real reason is more simple: Stingray went underwater, and I wanted a toy you could play with in the bath. Fortunately, another manufacturer, Plaston, had what I wanted: a soft vinyl Stingray toy that was ideal for bathtime adventures. I already had their Supercar toy, and the Plaston Stingray was duly added to the toybox. I can still remember getting it, on an afternoon in 1965. Today, of this highly collectable toy, only the ‘ratemaster’ propellor remains.

Other Stingray toys that found their way into my hands included a wooden jigsaw of Marineville (still extant as of 2024); a die-cast cap gun, which came from a toyshop close to our grandparents’ home; and a smaller Stingray model, again intended for aquatic operation, that was driven by a rubber band. I saw, but was not bought, that year’s Stingray Annual, which was displayed on the wall of our local newsagents, and I also had the 33rpm ‘Mini-Album’ Into Action With Troy Tempest. This was an oddity: a record that spoke directly to you, the listener. I felt a bit uneasy being ordered about by Commander Shore, who wanted me to do impersonations of Troy Tempest and Phones. “Let’s hear you try to talk just like him,” he instructed, in a voice that meant business.

One of the most ludicrous items of Stingray merchandise was the so-called ‘scan shoes’: elasticated slippers decorated with the heads of Troy Tempest and Phones. These were on display in the window of Lichfield’s ‘Model Shop’ toy retailer when we went in to get the Plaston model, and even at the age of four, I found them utterly ridiculous.

Aside from playing with my plastic models in the bath, there was another kind of Stingray game I made up. This involved filling a plastic seaside bucket with water, then flinging it up the garden while shouting ‘stand by for action!’ The resulting watery explosion was meant to replicate the one we saw on the opening titles, and this particular game – which we called ‘Action Buckets’ – became a favourite of my brother and myself. I’m not sure our mum was quite so keen. She did, however, display some ingenuity when I asked for a pair of hydrophones like those worn by Stingray’s co-pilot, Phones. You couldn’t get them in the shops, and we had no real headphones in the house. As a substitute, our mum sliced a used Jif lemon squeezer in half, added two lollypop sticks for aerials, and connected the two resulting ‘hydrophones’ with a piece of knicker elastic. It was a proper Blue Peter job, but the idea was, as far as I’m aware, completely original. Those Jif phones lasted for decades: years later I would still come across them whilst sifting through the junk in our loft.

The summer of 1965 was really the high watermark for Stingray toys, and in my memory it was bright, sunny weather – exactly like the blue summery sky in the Marineville jigsaw I had bought for me during those months. Like any spell of summer weather, it couldn’t last. When Thunderbirds exploded onto ITV in the autumn, all of Gerry Anderson’s earlier work was instantly eclipsed, and Stingray suddenly seemed like yesterday’s news. It had been ‘tomorrow’s news today’ as the main feature in the TV21 comic when it launched back in January, but TV21 was primarily conceived as a promotional vehicle for the coming Thunderbirds: its first dozen issues included covers featuring exciting new hardware from the work in progress, and a weekly strip introduced readers to the characters of Lady Penelope and Parker. Stingray may have had the lion’s share of TV21 covers during 1965, but from January 66 onwards, Thunderbirds was the main event.

In truth, Stingray’s days were numbered from the moment that AP Films began work on its successor. Journalists who called the studio wanting to know more about Troy Tempest and co were disappointed to learn that their creators weren’t really interested in promoting the series, and aside from ongoing merchandising deals, Stingray quickly dropped off the PR radar.

On television, it was a different matter. Here in the Midlands, Stingray was barely off the air from its October 1964 debut right through to June 1966, with the series ending randomly on the repeated episode Rescue From the Skies. After a seven-month gap, it was back, in February 1967, with The Big Gun (the episode order was all over the place during these broadcasts). Following a ludicrously misplaced screening of A Christmas to Remember on the first of August (!) this extended run came to an end the following week with yet another outing for The Big Gun.

I can remember these 1967 broadcasts, but mainly for a meterological reason: we were watching an episode some time around the end of April, when I looked up the garden and noticed it was snowing! I’d like to report that the episode we were watching had been Pink Ice (repeated on 27.04.67) but sadly this doesn’t quite match up with Met Office records.

In truth, I was getting a little tired of Stingray by this time, and I’m not sure we even bothered with it some weeks. The series was off the air completely during 1968 and for all but the last two weeks of 1969, when another repeat run commenced on Thursday afternoons. These repeats ran all the way through to September 1970, when the show was replaced by Fireball XL5. One particular episode from this run remains as a clear memory – Invisible Enemy, broadcast on 07.05.70 – and again, it’s for a weather-related reason, the afternoon in question having been notably thundery.

Troy and co were put on (pink) ice by ATV for the whole of 1971 and 72, and when they returned, it was in the recently introduced summer morning schedule, beginning with the pilot episode on 24.07.73. My brother recorded the next episode, The Ghost Ship (26.07.73) on cassette, and the same summer we also committed the episode Deep Heat to open-reel tape (30.08.73).

Stingray is, of course, famous for being the first British-made TV series to be shot entirely in colour: yet for all this time, we’d been watching in black and white. I wouldn’t get to see the series in colour until the summer of 1975, and ironically, it was the very last episode, Aquanaut of the Year. Episodes were being stripped into the Saturday morning kid-fest Tiswas, without any mention in the TV Times, and by the time I got wise to the fact, the series was all but over. It was back the following summer, when we managed to see another handful of episodes, but I would have to wait until 1982, and a full repeat run on ITV before I could claim to have seen the whole series as originally intended.

Compared with other Gerry Anderson series, Stingray got a bit of a raw deal – barely a year in the spotlight before being eclipsed by Thunderbirds. Supercar and Fireball XL5 both ran for a good eighteen months or more before being relegated to second base by their successors. I would argue that Stingray did appreciably better when revived by the BBC in the early 90s. The young viewers who tuned into these broadcasts had been primed by an earlier rerun of Thunderbirds (1991-92) which must have had the strange effect of making Stingray look like its successor. This was the first time either series had been nationally networked, and a ‘second generation’ of merchandising soon began to appear in the shops.

My own small contribution to the history of Stingray came towards the end of the Network DVD label in 2022, when the series was finally subjected to a long-overdue remaster and released in High Definition. I have to say the remastering work was a disappointment to me, with some episodes lacking in density and contrast, and displaying variable colour values (it was done, comparatively speaking, on the cheap), but it was still a big improvement on the old masters that had been doing the rounds since the advent of DVD. I was told to big up the set – and ended up cramming a whole pile of collectable goodies into the double-boxed ‘Super Deluxe’ edition, designed as an instant collectable, which sold out quite quickly (at time of writing, this edition is unavailable anywhere online, with the merely ‘deluxe’ complete box set listed at prices ranging from £150 to £300.)

Will Stingray endure into the future? Will any of these series, in an era when CGI and AI are capable of creating similar asethetics without the sweat and toil expended by Gerry Anderson’s creative team? I think they will. AI/CGI will never equal any of the ‘real world’ practical effects from the golden age of film and television production. Real light falling on real 3d objects is a phenomenon that no computer will ever convincingly recreate. As future audiences grow jaded with this kind of slick technology, they will, one hopes, rediscover the unique magic that was Supermarionation.

I may never watch Stingray again – I’ve seen the series so many times that, in the words of Commander Sam Shore, “I know every rusty old cannonball in it.” But it’s there for whenever I feel the memory needs topping up. And – thanks to the encouragement of Commander Shore on that 1965 Mini-Album – I can now recite whole swathes of dialogue in the voices of the original characters. You should hear me do Marina...

A collection of Stingray goodies as illustrated in the 'Merchandising Guide' included with Network's Super Deluxe edition blu ray.