Garden Star Trek

 

Or... I was a pre-teenage Vulcan

It was high summer when Star Trek began broadcasting on the BBC, which meant that, as soon as this week’s episode ended, you could run out into the back garden and re-enact it yourself – or make up your own adventure. The back garden wasn’t a great fit for most Star Trek landscapes – not enough polystyrene boulders (in fact, none) – but wasn’t so bad for episodes like Shore Leave or This Side of Paradise where they’d gone out on location.

I happened to have a mustard yellow polo neck shirt, with thin stripes around the neck and cuffs, which made an ideal Captain Kirk outfit – down to the waist, at any rate. When our class started football practice that same autumn, I opted for a blue jersey so I could wear it and pretend to be Mr. Spock. My friends thought I supported something called ‘Everton’, but I’d never heard of the place – no, my team was Vulcan.

I think I swapped roles in our Star Trek games fairly early on, though I was still wearing the ‘Kirk top’ as late as 1973, when it still fit me. I’d noticed that Captain Kirk had a tendency to get his shirt torn to ribbons in a fist fight (you’d have thought Star Fleet tailoring would be more hard wearing), and whilst I wasn’t going to start tearing up my own clothes, I came up with the perfect solution for those ‘ripped shirt’ moments: simply tug one arm out of your sleeve, exposing your shoulder. Instant Shatner! As the series progressed, I began to focus more on Mr Spock as the more interesting character. He was an alien, after all, which must have spoken to some repressed aspect of my personality: I’d felt like a bit of an outsider since moving to a new area and a new school back in 1967. He was also a problem solver, with a brilliant mind. Well, anyone can dream…

By 1970, our school photos (above) reveal how far I had immersed myself in this new role. Sadly, my ears were still Earth normal, but I’d gone for the full-on Spock hairstyle, wearing a dead straight fringe, courtesy of our local barber whose shop also, for some reason, sold teddy bears and James Bond action figures. My eyebrows were already roughly the right shape, and my face was also developing along Vulcanian (or Romulan?) lines, with high cheekbones beginning to appear.

At the age of nine going on ten, I not only looked like Mr. Spock, but I’d started thinking like him as well. I was fascinated by his ability to control his emotions, which I thought was a pretty cool trait, though probably not great DIY child psychology at the dawn of the 1970s. 

Our ‘Garden Star Trek’ games were enhanced by cardboard Enterprise badges that I think came off the back of a Cornflakes pack, and even a cut-out and glued-together cardboard communicator from a similar source. At this time, there were no Star Trek toys available in the shops – what I’d have given for a proper phaser toy – so improvisation was key. Fortunately, we had the perfect ersatz phaser in the form of two ‘Pifco’ branded ‘Zetaray’ guns, which dated from the mid 60s. The ‘Zetaray’ was essentially a low-powered torch set inside a typically 50s futurist-styled ray gun, which lit up when you squeezed the trigger. The guns each had a red cone on the front, which could be unscrewed in order to change bulbs and batteries, and without them in place, they looked a lot like phasers. Mine was bronze, my brother’s was blue, and thus more realistic. We even had our own ‘hand phaser’ – I’d seen the smaller ‘phaser number one’ deployed in various episodes, and once again, a torch provided the perfect stand-in. We’d both been given ‘Ever Ready’ branded torches as stocking fillers one Christmas, and they now did sterling service in Garden Star Trek. I’ve still got one of them, and its resemblance to ‘phaser number one’ can’t be denied. Fortunately, it never occurred to me to give it a paint job to improve its appearance.

'Phaser number one' as portrayed by an Ever Ready pocket torch – absolutely no use against the Horta

Had we owned one of the Merit-branded Dan Dare multicoloured torch guns from the 1950s, we could even have had a stab at doing The Menagerie where the original Enterprise crew were armed with a larger and clunker version of the phaser (carved from wood, apparently, although they looked exactly like shop bought toys). The Dan Dare gun would have made a perfect substitute – but our back garden games never went back to the Captain Pike era. That said, The Menagerie is an episode I can still vividly recall from those first broadcasts, because it looked so strange. Some of the planet ‘exteriors’ had the same eerie quality as the studio sets from The Singing, Ringing Tree – and there even was a ‘singing, ringing tree’ on the surface of Talos IV.

When we weren’t playing Star Trek in the garden, or watching it on TV, there were always  Star Trek paperbacks to be read, which I discovered a couple of years later, and from which I got to know certain episodes very well, despite them having been broadcast only once or twice. The paperbacks were American imports, with their distinctive yellow text blocks – I’ve never discovered why American paperbacks were printed like this. In time, British versions would become available, but for the first few years, booksellers routinely stocked the imported versions. By 1971, the first four volumes had appeared, alongside an original novel called ‘Spock Must Die’. The main series of books comprised short stories adapted from original scripts, which occasionally contained scenes that had been omitted from the final drafts. In the case of The Menagerie, writer James Blish chose to adapt the story in its original pilot form rather than the unweildy two-part version we’d seen on TV. His foreword to the story was the first bit of Star Trek production history I ever read about: so The Menagerie had started life as a series pilot? Fascinating… (I may even have raised a quasi-Vulcan eyebrow). Further detailed information followed within a year or so with the publication of The Making of Star Trek: surely a book that spawned a whole generation of similar ‘behind-the scenes of television’ endeavours.

Some of the first Star Trek merchandise I remember was the gum card set produced by A&BC, who had cut frames from a 35mm print of the episode What Are Little Girls Made Of? to provide a photo story told across the fifty-five cards in the set. One particular card remained elusive: in the end, we resorted to buying the remaining contents of a display box, along with the box itself, which finally yielded the missing item. Sadly, we never thought to retain the display box, which would be highly collectable today. The photo story idea was later done on a larger scale, when Bantam Books, who’d published the original set of novels, crafted some impressively realised ‘photo novels’. In the days before home video, these were as good as you could get to reliving episodes when the series was off the air.

What I most wanted as a young Star Trek fan was a model of the USS Enterprise. It wasn’t the kind of spaceship you could build from Lego, or even old washing-up liquid bottles. Even Blue Peter didn’t attempt it. The problem was that saucer section – that and getting all the bits to stand upright, so I never attempted a DIY Enterprise. One day, from a car window, I glimpsed what looked very much like an Enterprise kit box in a toy shop near our grandparents’ house. The shop was closed at the time, but when we next looked in, the kit had gone. I hadn’t imagined it: years later, I turned up an image of the original AMT Enterprise kit box, and the artwork matched my recollection. The kits were rare at the time, but soon became more readily available, in a re-designed carton. My brother and I were both given them as Christmas presents in 1971, and mine was assembled in fairly short order. The kit was moulded in white plastic, so you didn’t even need to paint it… so I thought. Some years later, a school friend and amateur model maker showed me his own Enterprise kit (and some ‘kit-bashed’ takes on other Star Fleet vessels), all of which were painted in a bluey off-white. The original studio model, which survives to this day, is a kind of taupe colour, as white would have caused exposure problems and flared out when filmed.

The AMT Enterprise kit was a very accurate reproduction of the hero vessel – so good that it had been used in the original series episode The Doomsday Machine as the wrecked USS Constellation. Viewing the episode reveals one of the model’s defects which became apparent to me when attempting to build it at Christmas 1971: those tubes along the back simply would not stay upright: the supporting pylons had a tendency to lean outwards. Model builders who knew their stuff found solutions to this, by strengthening the interior of the kit: but the model used in The Doomsday Machine betrays the same sagging rear tubes.

Dinky toys, who were always bang up to date with the latest Gerry Anderson releases, took a surprisingly long time to add the USS Enterprise to their range of die-cast models. The model didn’t appear until 1976, seven years after the series had debuted over here. By that time, I was fifteen and considered myself a little too old to be buying Dinky toys. It wasn’t the greatest Dinky creation, but it looked passably like the original and at least it was white… Dinky had become notorious for issuing sci fi vehicles in metallic dayglo colours that violently contrasted their original appearance, as witness their UFO Interceptor of 1971.

I don’t know when we played our last game of Garden Star Trek: I think most of our adventures were enacted during the ‘Indian Summer’ of 1969, although I still had the Spock haircut for a good few years afterwards. By 1971, the back garden game of choice was The Persuaders!, with me as Brett Sinclair and my brother as Danny Wilde. I had straight hair, his was curly – it made sense. We even had the cravates...

The Dinky USS Enterprise and a 'Pifco Zetaray' phaser