I have always been a Gerry Anderson fan. It goes right back to my earliest memories of visiting my grandparents in the very early 1960s and thus being able to watch the new commercial ITV channel on their television set (our home model only received the BBC). I have vague memories of ‘Twizzle’ and ‘Torchy, the Battery Boy’, but at the time, Gerry’s best offering was the futuristic ‘Supercar’ and I loved it. I loved it so much that when it was announced that we would finally get ITV at home I was ecstatic.
So it was that one evening in 1962 I sat down in a frenzy of expectation to watch ‘Supercar’ on our brand new, ITV-receiving television – only to find that it wasn’t on! Its run had ended and in its place was a new show called ‘Fireball XL5’ and I was distraught! But not for long, for as it turned out, the new show was even better with spacecraft, alien worlds, robots and the beautiful Venus to keep me amused.
For the next few years, it is a little known fact that I was secretly Steve Zodiac, my most prized possession being a plastic replica of XL5 (with detachable Fireball Junior) obtained by collecting a number of Lyons Maid ‘Zoom’ ice cream wrappers, closely followed by a vivid and slightly obsessive imagination which involved roping in my schoolmates to play ‘XL5’ in the lunch hour. Stingray, Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet would follow but nothing really triggers memories of that secret childhood world like Fireball XL5. It is largely responsible for what I am today – a man with a mind still attuned to comics, cult TV and pop music. And the bad points are…um…it all costs so much.
I recently gritted my teeth and bought the entire series of Fireball on DVD and have spent many hours re-living those black and white days of the early 1960s. Some episodes I had no memory of at all but others, like my all time favourite episode, ‘XL5 to H2O’ with the fabulous smoke-firing Aquaphibian were as clear now as they were 40 years ago.
Sure, the increased clarity of DVD has highlighted all the puppet strings and other ‘imperfections’ but it has also revealed the imagination, the attention to detail and the sheer adventure inherent in these shows. It brought a kind of magic into my life which fired the imagination and left an indelible mark.
‘Ready, Venus?’
‘Ready, Steve…’
So it was that one evening in 1962 I sat down in a frenzy of expectation to watch ‘Supercar’ on our brand new, ITV-receiving television – only to find that it wasn’t on! Its run had ended and in its place was a new show called ‘Fireball XL5’ and I was distraught! But not for long, for as it turned out, the new show was even better with spacecraft, alien worlds, robots and the beautiful Venus to keep me amused.
For the next few years, it is a little known fact that I was secretly Steve Zodiac, my most prized possession being a plastic replica of XL5 (with detachable Fireball Junior) obtained by collecting a number of Lyons Maid ‘Zoom’ ice cream wrappers, closely followed by a vivid and slightly obsessive imagination which involved roping in my schoolmates to play ‘XL5’ in the lunch hour. Stingray, Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet would follow but nothing really triggers memories of that secret childhood world like Fireball XL5. It is largely responsible for what I am today – a man with a mind still attuned to comics, cult TV and pop music. And the bad points are…um…it all costs so much.
I recently gritted my teeth and bought the entire series of Fireball on DVD and have spent many hours re-living those black and white days of the early 1960s. Some episodes I had no memory of at all but others, like my all time favourite episode, ‘XL5 to H2O’ with the fabulous smoke-firing Aquaphibian were as clear now as they were 40 years ago.
Sure, the increased clarity of DVD has highlighted all the puppet strings and other ‘imperfections’ but it has also revealed the imagination, the attention to detail and the sheer adventure inherent in these shows. It brought a kind of magic into my life which fired the imagination and left an indelible mark.
‘Ready, Venus?’
‘Ready, Steve…’
