Thunderbird Sixty

TV21 counts down to Thunderbirds, December 1965

1: Early Days - 1965-66

You’ll need to be in your mid-sixties or older to remember seeing Thunderbirds the first time around. I was four and a half when the series burst onto our screens in September 1965 in a blaze of publicity, of which I retain some distant recollection. Over the next few blogs, I'm going to look back on some sixty-year-old recollections of how we experienced Thunderbirds for the first time.

The promotional trails began maybe a week or so before the series went on air. I vividly recall watching these with my mum – the Thunderbird 2 launch sequence was shown, along with a clip from the episode The Perils of Penelope showing Parker rescuing Lady P from a locked room using rockets in the back of FAB1. I’m sure other clips must have been shown as well, but these were the ones that most impressed themselves on my imagination. Lady Penelope herself was interviewed, on our local news magazine programme ATV Today: I remember very clearly how she described the new series as being ‘like Stingray, Fireball and Supercar all rolled into one.’ As a sales pitch, that rather put me off: I had bad memories of being scared of Supercar – or, more specifically, the series’ bald-headed bad guy Masterspy. Thunderbirds had its own bald baddie, and he turned up in the first episode – but even with his glowing eyes, the Hood never bothered me.

The Hood should, in theory, have been the first character we saw on screen when Thunderbirds made its TV debut on the last day of September 1965 – but I remember that premiere broadcast of Trapped in the Sky somewhat differently. In my recollection, the first scene showed the Fireflash airliner on the tarmac at London Airport. I don’t remember the establishing scenes in the Hood’s temple at all. That’s not to say they were missing – but script editor Alan Pattillo’s diary made reference to the first episode being ‘hacked to ribbons’ when it was shown on ITV London two days later, so maybe they were. I always felt it was an odd choice to start the series by introducing viewers to the bad guy. Anyway, we’ll never know for certain unless someone, somewhere has kept an off-air audio recording.

We did actually record part of the soundtrack of a Thunderbirds episode from that first run. On Friday 25 March 1966, our dad had purchased a Fidelity open-reel tape recorder, and the following Thursday, he taped parts of that evening’s episode – which also happened to be the last in the original series, Security Hazard. That tape confirms that ATV’s presentation of Thunderbirds was less than reverential – the opening titles were hacked off after the episode preview section, depriving viewers of the Thunderbirds theme. Likewise, the end credits were faded out early (over the caption of Thunderbird 2) and the continuity went straight into a commercial. This was somewhat ironic given that our dad had set up the recorder specifically to capture the music on tape.

Returning to that first broadcast, we find ourselves on the evening of Thursday 30 September 1965. It was 7.00pm – for some reason, ATV decided that the Gerry Anderson series deserved to be shown in this ‘family viewing’ slot and the first runs of Fireball XL5 and about half of Stingray had been scheduled the same way. It wasn’t just our family who sat down to watch Trapped in the Sky – we were joined by a lad from down the street, whose parents didn’t hold with television (they were teachers). Not having a TV set, I’m not sure how he even knew about Thunderbirds, but he was there on that first evening and on many weeks to come, and would be back when Batman began in the spring of 1966.

Thunderbirds was an immediate hit with me. I particularly liked the episode Pit of Peril and when it was repeated the following year, recorded my own version of it on our dad’s tape machine, with me doing all the voices. But how did we play at Thunderbirds in those early weeks on air, when toys had yet to arrive in the shops? Simple – we used our imaginations.

I had a box full of plastic aircraft, of which the most futuristic looking was the delta-winged Gloster Javelin. It looked nothing like Thunderbird One, but that didn’t matter – in my imagination it became the International Rescue scout craft. I’m not sure if I had a substitute for Thunderbird 2, but it didn’t really matter – TB1 was my favourite, and Scott Tracy was my favourite of the Tracy brothers (where everyone else tended to prefer Virgil). Century 21 Toys – or rather, J. Rosenthal Ltd – were already on the case, however, and at the beginning of 1966, a friction-drive Thunderbird One arrived in the toyshops. It had a blue plastic fuselage, but we were watching in black and white  so that hardly mattered. What did matter to me (aged almost five) were the toy's red plastic wheels. Thunderbird One didn’t have wheels! Especially not under the nose cone. This bothered me so much that I managed to get our dad to hack them off with a Stanley knife. The toy soon lost its brittle plastic tailplanes, broken in action, and was replaced a short while later by a grey version which I subsequently  customised into a more, ahem, ‘realistic’ model...

Rosenthal's Thunderbird One is announced in TV21. A year later it would cost two shillings less!

Thunderbird 2 was a much more successful toy, and, just like it did on TV, the toy took rather longer to reach the shops than Thunderbird One: indeed, it was beaten to the punch by Thunderbirds Three and Five which arrived in toyshops during March 1966, whereas TB2 wasn't announced until early June, when a half page ad in TV21 alerted readers to 'stand by' for the new release, which would be on 'limited sale in the shops'. This, together with the extended production timeline suggests problems behind the scenes. With its folding legs and detachable pod, TB2 was by far the most complex of the Thunderbirds toys to go on sale, and batches were made in both Hong Kong and the UK.

Being another friction-drive model, TB2 of course had wheels, but this time they were integrated more successfully into the design and the toy was a good representation of the ‘real’ thing. The un-numbered pod (I got our mum to rub on a numeral from a sheet of Letraset) contained a green plastic jeep. Thunderbird Four would have been a better pod vehicle, but a few months later a Smiths Crisps promotion allowed one to send away for snap-together model kits of the International Rescue craft. As luck would have it, their Thunderbird Four scaled perfectly with the Century 21 model of TB2.

The same but different: JR21's Thunderbird 2– on the left, made in England, on the right, made in Hong Kong.

The TB2 toys came in two slightly different versions (above), according to whether they were manufactured in England or Hong Kong. Mine had white plastic feet on the fold-out legs, and pierced foil inside the rear engine nacelles. My brother’s example was a slightly darker green, had red plastic feet and a grey plastic grid inside the nacelles. It also had the Mole in the pod, which was a distinct improvement on the jeep.

Although it had been released in March '66, I didn’t get Thunderbird 3 until a visit to the Ideal Home Exhibition at Birmingham’s Bingley Hall much later in the year. Until then, my games of Thunderbirds in toys made use of a 'JR21' X60 space rocket which, with its three booster nacelles, made a passable stand-in. The toy, which came on a blue roadgoing trailer, retailed at 8/11d. There was a giant-sized TB3 exhibit at the Ideal Home Exhibition, which you could go inside if you were prepared to wait ages in a queue. We didn’t wait, and all I saw of the interior were a few flashing lights. Thunderbird 5, modified from a flying saucer toy and only slightly resembling the real thing, came at Christmas 1966, and I had to wait for my sixth birthday to get Thunderbird Four. 

This, then, was how Thunderbirds left its impression on those of us who saw it first time around. I’m sure my experience must have been typical. Whether it was a good impression is less certain: the endless explosions and destruction certainly found their way into my childhood games and drawings. I recall smashing up a perfectly good plastic garage in the course of a game of Thunderbirds, and my drawing books became pages of scribbled explosions. I didn’t grow up wanting to plant bombs in airliners or steal the secrets of atomic power stations, but the series certainly seemed to foster an appetite for scenes of explosive destruction. And what of the friend from down the street whose parents didn’t own a television? He went on to become a barrister in London, whereas I ended up designing advertisements and DVD sleeves. That’s where too much television will get you…

In the next part, I'll revisit some of those early Thunderbirds toys in more detail.

A tabletop of Thunderbirds toys that have survived from childhood: Clockwise from bottom left: 'Repeater' water pistol; Lincoln International snap-together motorised TB4; battery operated TB5; friction drive TB2 (UK version); friction drive TB3; TB2 (Hong Kong version); TB3 'conversion'; Dinky FAB 1; friction drive TB1 'conversion'; battery operated TB4; dart gun. Centre: cap gun, hat, head of John Tracy doll, half a 'Mole' and, er, The Mighty Atom (okay, it was really a toy for cats...)

ITV@70

 

               

I wasn’t watching ITV yesterday (Monday 22 September), so I didn’t notice if the channel chose to mark its seventieth anniversary in any way, even if was just the ‘and finally’ item on the evening news. Somehow, I doubt it. Ten years ago, I seem to recall a similar lack of celebration when the channel turned sixty. At the Network label, we put out a lavish box set in celebration of the sixtieth anniversary (for which I did the artwork), but I suspect that the people responsible for on air promos and content at the station aren’t really focused on the past, and events of seven decades ago must seem positively prehistoric and beyond the lifespan of even their extended families.

It was a different story back in 1976, when the network celebrated its 21st anniversary. The TV Times included a ‘souvenir supplement’ reproducing its first ever cover (above), and a selection of others providing a timeline of memorable programming. On the night itself, Eamonn Andrews hosted a two-hour celebration ITV – This is Your Life, the contents of which can well be imagined. My diary mentions the inclusion of clips from The Prisoner, Thunderbirds and even The Adventures of Twizzle (which may account for how a solitary episode came to survive in the archive). Viewers in the ATV region were also getting to see The Prisoner on late night repeats, although, ironically, I wasn’t allowed to stop up to watch on this particular week, as the episode had been pushed back half an hour to make room for ‘The Independent Broadcasting Authority Banquet’. Quite why the network chose to televise a black tie junket for its executives and members of Parliament I can’t imagine. It certainly can’t have attracted many viewers.

You might have imagined that the anniversary provided an excuse to present a season of vintage programmes, in much the same way as the BBC had done back in the summer of '76 with its own ‘Festival Forty’. But the BBC had a channel to spare, whereas at ITV, such a celebratory season would have played havoc with scheduling and wasn’t likely to prove popular with advertisers. As a general rule, ITV has never really gone in for this kind of commemorative scheduling: if viewers wanted older programmes, they had to seek them out in the afternoons and late-night slots where occasional vintage items acted as filler for much of the 1970s.

In 1980, ITV’s quarter century was commemorated in print with a lavish coffee table book, produced in association with Michael Joseph. Imagine such a publication appearing today, when the only piece of vintage television that’s regularly enshrined in print is Dr. Who. The TV Times once again acknowledged the occasion with a silver jubilee edition, although the evening itself was marked only by a forty five-minute celebration, hidden away at 11.30pm. My diary recorded the fact of ITV’s 25th anniversary, but I didn’t bother with this self-congratulatory programme. The main event of the evening was The French Connection over on BBC1. The TV Times did rather better, with a nostalgic item at the back of the issue, including yet another reproduction of that 1955 Lucille Ball cover and the schedule for the channel’s first evening of broadcasting. Remarkably, we find something called Crossroads scheduled at 7.30, but this was a discussion forum – the infamous motel still lay nine years in the future. The early evening included ‘Flickwiz’, described as ‘a magazine programme for boys and girls’, but with a logo that, in print, could be interpreted somewhat differently…

My archive of TV Times pdfs fizzles out around 1983, so I can’t report on what, if anything, might have appeared at the time of ITV’s subsequent anniversaries. By the time the channel turned 50, in 2005, it was a ‘do it yourself’ celebration, as Tim Beddows pulled out numerous items from his personal archive to present one of his legendary film shows (for an audience of one!). The day’s programme, recorded in my diary, comprised The Persuaders (Someone Waiting); Return of the Saint (The Nightmare Man); The Adventurer (which broke down); The Saint (The Lawless Lady); Man in a Suitcase (Castle in the Clouds) and finally, Gideon’s Way (The Wall), all projected from 16mm or 35mm film prints. It wasn’t all ITV, though: we also found room for a ‘musical interlude from the BBC circa 1930s/40s’, an edition of Noel Gordon’s Lunchbox, and a vintage advertising film about the benefits of electricity which will no doubt resurface on Talking Pictures’ Footage Detectives sometime, if it hasn’t already (where would they be without Tim’s film archive?)

So there it is – ITV has been going for seventy years, if anyone cares. Without it, we’d never have had The Prisoner, The Sweeney, The Avengers, anything from Gerry Anderson and countless other classic series that have acquired the status of icons. These days, apart from Robert Peston and Tom Bradby, I barely bother with the channel, or indeed much else from contemporary television.

Back in 2015, I’m not sure if I’d have given ITV another decade, but it’s still here, with an extended presence as a streaming service, not to mention four freeview/satellite channels and a YouTube channel. Where they’ll be in another ten years is anybody’s guess, as the television viewing experience continues to fragment into ever increasing subscription services. If there’s still anything resembling today’s scheduled broadcast television around in 2035, I’ll be very surprised… assuming I’m even here to see it.

1999 @ 50

 

I’d known about Space:1999 for months. Paperback novelisations had begun appearing in bookshops well before the series got anywhere near a TV screen. The TV Times had mentioned it a year earlier, publishing a photo of Martin Landau and Barbara Bain and calling the series Space 99 (a better title if you ask me). The BBC’s Horizon had included clips in a film about the special effects industry, How on Earth Did They Do That, broadcast on 23 December 1974. I knew something was on its way from Gerry Anderson, I just didn’t know when to expect it.

Finally, on September 4, 1975, it arrived, promoted as part of ITV’s ‘Big Season’ of autumn programmes. Viewers in the ATV Midlands region, of whom I was one, got to see it first, at 7.00pm that evening, along with the Yorkshire, Grampian, Scottish, Border and Ulster regions. In the London and Anglia areas, it began two days later, on Saturday 6th at 5.50pm – arguably a better slot, but up against Dr. Who on BBC1 – and the Timelord had stolen a march on the Alphans by grabbing viewers a week earlier. This, clearly, didn’t help the Andersons' cause. Neither did the events of the coming months, when many ITV regions relegated the series to different slots. Christmas has a habit of interrupting any scheduled series, and in the LWT area, it provided the perfect excuse to demote Space:1999 to Saturday mornings at 11.50 commencing January 1976. One can only imagine what Gerry Anderson and Lew Grade thought of seeing their £3m investment treated as kids’s stuff.

'Space 99' gets its first mention in the TV Times, September 1974

It was too often the case on British television that science fiction was dismissed as juvenile fodder, the BBC’s Quatermass and Out of the Unknown being notable exceptions to an almost universal rule. Science fiction meant space ships, robots and men in monster suits. It did not equate to serious drama. When the BBC began showing Star Trek in the summer of 1969, it was in the slot normally occupied by Dr. Who. When the show’s appeal to adults was better understood, it got taken more seriously, and was promoted to a 7pm slot on midweek evenings – exactly the same slot that most ITV regions originally chose for Space:1999. Mr. Spock would have approved of their logic...

By the time the series appeared, I'd got ahead of the curve by reading the novelisation of the first episode. Further novels appeared through the autumn, along with a Space:1999 Annual, which a friend of mine got ordered for us through his mum's mail order catalogue. The series was promoted in the comic Look-in, where John Burns provided a rushed strip cartoon version (he reportedly hated drawing comics based on TV series). I'd stopped reading Look-in when it started featuring the likes of David Cassidy, but I made an exception this week. I might have kept on buying it if I'd liked the comic strip, but I wasn't keen on John Burns' artwork. Why couldn't they have got Mike Noble? (Don't tell me, I know...)

Here in the ATV region, Space:1999 stayed put on Thursday evenings for its whole first series run, with only a single episode, The Last Sunset, broadcast in an earlier slot on New Year’s Day 1976. When it returned, in the autumn, for a second season, ATV played the same trick as LWT and Anglia the previous year, putting it up against Dr. Who. I was quite happy to forsake the Doctor (I was never that keen on Tom Baker), and tuned in on Saturday 4 September for the first of the new series. Teatime on Saturday felt like a good time to watch Space:1999, ideally accompanied by a bacon and sausage sandwich – but it wouldn’t last. Only seven episodes were shown in that slot before the series was bumped to 4.45 on Thursday evenings, commencing with the all time dud episode, The Rules of Luton. Had the programme been under-performing against Dr. Who? It seems highly likely. But series two got the scheduling it deserved – under Fred Freiberger’s influence, it had degenerated into a children’s show, on a par with Lost in Space. Aged fifteen, I was keenly aware of this, and although I kept on watching, I knew the series had lost everything that had made it special – the serious, metaphysical air that pervaded year one was replaced with comic gags about Tony Verdeschi’s home-brewed beer, and a parade of increasingly silly monsters. It’s clear from my diary that I wasn’t taking the new series entirely seriously when I wrote about the Alphans blowing up ‘Brian Blessed’s fizzy drinks machine’ in the season opener, The Metamorph. Series two disappeared after Christmas, leaving seven episodes as yet unbroadcast, but by this time, I didn’t really care. The tail end of the series finally made it to the screen in August of 1977, when five episodes were shown, whilst the remaining two (The Immunity Syndrome and The Dorcons) were rolled out on a couple of Bank Holiday Mondays in 1978.

It’s sobering to reflect that half a century has passed since I first saw Breakaway. That broadcast was probably the very last time that a new sci-fi TV series gave me a frisson of anticipation. For the first few weeks it was all new, and strange and amazing, the sets, the hardware, the music – I’d got the same buzz about every Anderson series from Thunderbirds onwards, when I was old enough to enjoy the anticipation of a new and exciting series. I know it’s a feeling I’ll never get again.

TV Times looks at Space:1999 during its first week on air.

The Big Season

ITV pulls the stops out... September 1975

Autumn was always traditionally the time when broadcasters unveiled their new programme line-ups for the coming season, and this week fifty years ago, it was all kicking off on ITV and BBC1. From quite an early age, I was aware of the 'new series for autumn' phenomenon: for me, it usually meant a new series from Gerry Anderson: Thunderbirds (1965), Captain Scarlet (1967), Joe 90 (1968). Every autumn, the TV Times would promote forthcoming attractions in a special feature, whilst on-air promotional trails often featured a special jingle or seasonal graphics. In 1975, it all came together – on ITV at any rate – in a package called ‘The Big Season’. It even had its own logo – a very 70s design – featured prominently on the trailers, and splashed across the cover of seven weeks’ worth of the TV Times. No broadcaster in the UK had ever put this amount of effort into trailing their new autumn schedule, and whilst the BBC had been previewing its own autumn line-up since the middle of August, there was no comparable cross-over into the pages of the Radio Times.

‘It’s the Big Season on ITV’ sang the trailers, accompanied by the big, flabby 1970s logo that had been designed for use across the campaign. There were clips of everything from Raffles to Space:1999, and a lot of attention lavished on ITV’s big new crime drama, The Sweeney, about to enter its second season. I even drew my own ‘Big Season’ graphic in my diary to mark the occasion, although I misspelled the title of the new series – as did the publishers of the spin-off novel that appeared in bookshops the same week.

Here in the Midlands, 'The Big Season' even merited a whole programme to itself, which also got a mention in my diary. Aimed specifically at local viewers, and shown at 6.45pm on Saturday 30 August, this clip-fest, hosted by one of the regional continuity announcers, provided a first look at the new autumn line up, including clips from Space:1999 and the long deferred third series of Batman, both of which would make their debut the following Thursday. For me, Space:1999 was the big event of the season. Ironically, my first glimpse of Gerry Anderson’s outer space epic had been on BBC2, almost a year earlier, when the Horizon series presented a look at the special effects industry (How on Earth Did They Do That, 23 December 1974). Space:1999 was not well served by ITV, with broadcasts split across the various regions – London and Anglia scheduled it on Saturday teatime, in deliberate competition with Dr. Who, whilst in other areas it arrived two days earlier, at 7.00pm on Thursday 4 September. 

ITV’s big promotional push was pipped to the post by the BBC, who had begun to roll out its own autumn programmes a week earlier, in much the same way that supermarkets start stocking mince pies as soon as August Bank Holiday is out of the way. Pre-September debuts included rugged adventure series Oil Strike North (Tuesday 26th August), Le Carré-esque espionage drama Quiller (Friday 29th August) and new series of old favourites Softly, Softly: Task Force (Wednesday 27th August), The Liver Birds (Friday 29th) and Dr. Who (Saturday 30th), while September would bring new arrivals in the form of student nurse drama Angels (Monday 1st), beat-pounding comedy in The Growing Pains of PC Penrose (Thursday 4th) and an eighth series of Dad’s Army (Friday 5th). Also that autumn, a little number entitled Fawlty Towers shuffled hesitantly onto the small screen with next to no fanfare...

I'm sure no one at ITV took any notice: the network had plenty of its own big guns still waiting to roll out, including the return of Upstairs Downstairs (Sunday 7th September), while other popular titles being dusted off for the new season included Sale of the Century, Within These Walls (Saturday 6th) and World in Action (Monday 8th). Brand new drama included The Stars Look Down (Wednesday 3rd), Shades of Greene (Tuesday 9th) and Raffles (Wednesday 10th). But the biggest highlight of all, and a guaranteed ratings winner, was the television debut of James Bond, when Dr. No made its first appearance on the small screen on Tuesday 28th October.

All through September and well into October, the TV Times kept up its promotional campaign, with ‘Big Season’ cover montages highlighting the week’s biggest new arrivals. Inside the magazine, listings were accompanied by a ‘Big Season’ thumbnail, replacing the austere ‘new series’ flash that had previously served to alert viewers. Even children’s television got the same star treatment: Cosgrove Hall’s Noddy (Monday 22nd September), Here Comes Mumfie and Sooty (Wednesday 24th) all merited ‘Big Season’ status in the listings.

All of which merely served to guarantee what most media watchers already knew: in 1975, ITV were regularly trouncing the BBC in the ratings wars, with some of the year’s biggest audiences tuning in for The Benny Hill Show, The Royal Variety Performance, The Sweeney, Edward VII and Coronation Street. Not all of ITV’s new autumn programmes did the business, though. Space:1999 fared quite badly and in the London area was demoted after Christmas to a Saturday morning slot. One can well imagine what Lew Grade thought about this, having bankrolled the series to the tune of £3m. A brand-new Sunday evening comedy My Brother’s Keeper, starring George Layton and Jonathan Lynn as an ill-matched pair of brothers (one a policeman, the other a lefty agitator) is now long forgotten, along with Jewish family comedy My Son Reuben, and Vince Powell’s Rule Britannia, a sitcom embodiment of the old ‘Englishman, Irishman and Scotsman’ gag, which I think posterity can probably do without.

The ‘Big Season’ run of TV Times covers ended with the edition for 11-17 October, with a cover highlighting afternoon viewing. For many, this meant horse racing, but there was also the return of Crown Court and the medical soap General Hospital, alongside programmes focusing on travel, cookery and antiques. A latecomer in the sitcom stakes, John Esmonde and Bob Larbey’s national service comedy Get Some In! also began the same week, whilst Rising Damp – still some way off becoming a cult favourite – returned for a second series in November. I had yet to discover its brilliance, as it clashed with The Invisible Man over on BBC1 (David McCallum’s short-lived fantasy adventure, cancelled after a single series). 

Fifty years on, it’s interesting to look back at an era when television viewing was a good deal more straightforward than it has become: just two networks competing for viewers, and all the big new series available to anyone with a TV set and a license. Today, I wouldn’t have the first idea where to look for big new television series this autumn, and I doubt I’d bother even if I did know. Streaming services have fragmented and diffused the television viewing experience, and one would need a second mortgage to keep up with them all. You may well think that more channels, more choice, high definition and feature film production values all adds up to a whole lot more than viewers were being offered back in 1975. I’ll beg to differ with you.

Part of a large preview feature from the TV Times for 30 Aug-5 Sept 1975