Gerry Anderson 1929 - 2012

This is my 300^th post on this blog and it is perhaps fitting that it pays tribute to a man that looms large in my childhood – Gerry Anderson, who died over the Christmas period.

Most will know his work through the iconic ‘Thunderbirds’ but my link goes back further to the dimly remembered late 50s collaboration with children’s writer, Roberta Leigh that produced the strangeness of ‘Twizzle’ and ‘Torchy the Battery Boy’, made with puppets so weird that it doesn’t bear thinking about.  Although these shows were my initial contact with Gerry’s puppet world, it was ‘Fireball XL5’ that really captured my imagination.  I was besotted with this programme and although the delights of ‘Stingray’, ‘Thunderbirds’ and ‘Captain Scarlet’ were to follow, XL5 remains my first love.  Even today its shiny monochrome world of space adventure still beguiles me.

There is a definable element that pervades the work of Gerry Anderson, from the scariness of ‘Twizzle’ via the live action ‘Space 1999’ and ‘UFO’ to the hand puppets of ‘Terrahawks’ (a million miles away from Sooty) and that thing is integrity.  Everything Gerry touched was stamped with the motto, ‘If you are going to do it, do it well’.  All his products had a sheen of quality, whether it was the tightly drawn scripts, the truly awe-inspiring modelling or the cutting edge special effects.  The live action 2004 ‘Thunderbirds’ movie, which Anderson had no hand in and from which he rightly distanced himself, didn’t have it – and it shows.

This reach for quality can be seen again in the 2005 re-imagining of Captain Scarlet, created using CGI technology.  The series of 26 x 25 minute episodes cost an astronomical £23M but the end result is worth every penny.  The scripts are fast paced and the visuals as inventive and spectacular as always.  Unforgivably, ITV refused to promote the new show and list it as a stand alone but buried it in amongst an existing Saturday morning kids’ show which cut it into two halves with games and adverts between them.  It sank without trace.

Anderson was reportedly furious and I can’t help feeling that it was the beginning of the end for him.  It was desperately sad because ‘The New Adventures of Captain Scarlet’ (now on DVD) is Anderson at his best and a fitting epitaph to a man who had a real pride in his work even if they were ‘only’ kids’ shows.  RIP Gerry.

Away with the Angels

Dear Marge

I am writing to you as I consider you to be my last hope. You see, I need advice badly and there is no one else who would understand. The problem is that there is a certain woman that I have admired from afar for what seems all my life and frankly, I don’t know what to do about it. Is it too late?

I first came across her on children’s television when I was only 11 but being somewhat older than me and living such a sophisticated and glamorous lifestyle, I knew she would never look at me, a mere boy. You see, she flew a gleaming white fighter jet and worked for a global security organisation and to an 11 year old you can’t get better than that. Of course, in those days she was a little wooden and barely showed any emotion at all so it was difficult to know what she was thinking. Also, she didn’t say much except to accept and confirm orders from some white-haired old chap in her sexy French accent.

However, as I grew older she faded from my life and we lost touch but you never forget your first love, do you? Sure enough, we bumped into each other again just recently as DVDs of her new updated CGI adventures have been released and it’s as if we’d never been apart. Funnily enough, she doesn’t seem to have aged a single day but now she has blossomed from that rigid character of old to a free moving, free speaking spirit, dressed in her usual skin-tight white/silver jumpsuit and flying helmet. Clearly, years of working in a global environment has caused her to lose her French accent, but hey. It seems like her mentor, Uncle Gerry has guided her well over the years and is to be applauded for her transformation to the fully fleshed out woman she is today. In fact she seems to have rounded out in more ways than one. Lara Croft eat your heart out!

Although still working for the same firm, she now not only leads the fighter pilot team, but involves herself in the combat side of the organisation and it is here that there may be a fly in the ointment. I have noticed that she seems quite keen on one of her fellow operatives, a fellow going by the codename of Scarlet.

So here is my dilemma, Marge. Will a woman such as her with a high profile career ever look at me? Does she hold a torch for this other bloke? Is it normal to fancy a virtual woman? I await your advice with breathless anticipation.

Oh, her name? It’s Destiny. Destiny Angel.

Supermarionation

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…’