The Unexplained - Howard Hughes - Edition 341 - Jamie Anderson

April 8, 2018 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes

01:27:08

Edition 341 - Jamie Anderson

Very special edition - Gerry Anderson's son Jamie talks about his far-sighted father'sinspirational tv sci-fi creations...

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	Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes, and this is The Unexplained.
	Thank you very much for being part of my show.
	If you want to get in touch with me, send the show a donation, or if you want to send me a message or guest suggestion, go to the website designed by Adam Cornwell from Creative Hotspot in Liverpool.
	It's theunexplained.tv.
	And it is a one-stop shop for all you need to know about this show, theunexplained.tv.
	Thank you for your recent emails.
	I will be responding to all of those emails and have seen them all.
	So thank you very much indeed.
	Now, this is a special edition of this show.
	And some of you might say, why is he doing this topic?
	And I'll tell you why.
	I'm going to be talking to the son of a man who is perhaps pivotal, terribly important in so many of our lives, if we're of a certain generation.
	And I think that's probably anybody from, I don't know, 35 upwards.
	The man we're going to be talking about is Jerry Anderson.
	He is the man who created series like Thunderbirds, Stingray, Captain Scarlet, UFO, Space 1999, and Terror Hawks.
	He was a man who was so far ahead of his time, who was the inspiration for a lot of technology and ideas that we now take as commonplace.
	But he was doing this work in the 1960s, the 1970s, and the 1980s.
	Jamie Anderson, his son, is carrying on his father's legacy.
	I've met him before a couple of times, but never had the chance to ask him all those questions that I waited a lifetime to ask.
	If I tell you that as I record this, behind me is a model of Thunderbird 1 and Thunderbird 2 on my bookcase.
	Because that series was hugely important to me, it expanded my horizons, but the work of Jerry Anderson made me think about topics like life after death, which of course was part of the theme of Captain Scarlett, he was immortal, and space exploration, which was part of Fireball XL5, Terrahawks and UFO, Thunderbirds, all of the series really had some degree of space connected with them somewhere.
	My imagination, maybe yours too, was sparked by this visionary man.
	So on this edition, unusually, we're going to talk about him and his work with his son, Jamie Anderson.
	Jamie, nice to talk with you again.
	It's been a while.
	We keep bumping into each other in corridors at the BBC, don't we?
	We're better to bump into each other.
	Exactly, exactly.
	Okay, now, this conversation, like many of the conversations that you will have, will be in large part, of course, about the legacy of your father, which you are now carrying on.
	And I'm delighted to hear that.
	And also about your work.
	So if you're happy with that, the first question I guess, Jamie, is, and I only thought of this just as I set up my recording gear today, I wondered if you ever got, and not sick of is a bad phrase, that's not applicable, but do you ever weary of being asked about your father and the shows?
	I completely understand why you'd ask that question, but bizarrely the answer is no, I don't ever tire of it.
	Every time I do a radio interview, normally it's played in with the Thunderbirds March, with the famous Peter Dynelly countdown, and I hear the 543C1.
	And every time I just think, isn't it amazing that I'm able to be introduced by that tune?
	Because it's so iconic.
	And so many of Dad's bits and pieces remain so iconic.
	You know, they've got that cult status.
	Well, they do, but I think they even go beyond that.
	For a certain generation, and Jamie, I have to tell you that I am of that generation.
	They had an impact.
	Well, in my life, there were loads of TV series for kids that I used to watch, and I loved many of them.
	But there was nothing, and you must have heard this a zillion, million times, that got to my core, that stirred my imagination, that excited me and enthused me more than the Gerry Anderson series.
	I don't know what it is about them, and maybe we'll explore a little bit of that.
	But if I tell you, look, I'm recording this now at home.
	Behind me is my bookcase, and on that bookcase, and you've heard this before, I'm sure, I'm sure you've heard all these questions before and all these points.
	On the bookcase behind me is Thunderbird 1 and Thunderbird 2.
	Great.
	And in my cupboard is the Spectrum Pursuit Vehicle.
	Nice.
	They should adorn every bookcase, really.
	They should.
	I don't know what it is that they still have a lasting influence over me.
	I don't know.
	But, you know, if you're born as I was in Liverpool and your horizons are expanding because Liverpool was a great place to be brought up.
	But those series opened my mind in a way to many other things.
	And I think it's partly, you know, a cause of why I am doing the work on radio that I'm doing now, because this is a very unusual show, both the podcast and the radio show.
	And I think that, you know, your dad, who I interviewed twice in his life, was part of that.
	So there.
	I'm glad to hear it.
	No, it's brilliant.
	And I do hear that all the time, whether it's people who've gone into entertainment or into, you know, the sciences.
	I went to NASA Goddard in Washington about 18 months ago, went around there, and everywhere, these guys who are at the forefront of space exploration, they've got posters of Eagle Transporters from Space 1999 everywhere.
	And so many of them basically said they went into their careers because they watched Space 1999 and they were inspired by it.
	So it's across all career paths, all generations.
	There is something amazing about it.
	And I think Dad always wanted to distill it.
	You know, if he could bottle it, then he would have had a tremendous success on his hands with every series.
	Yep.
	Do you know what?
	I think he actually said those words to me.
	I would like to be able to bottle this or distill it.
	I interviewed him twice, and we'll talk about this a little later, but I interviewed him twice in connection with his work with the real-life international rescue.
	So those are the contacts that I had with him.
	And I just found him somebody that I wanted to speak with, not for the three or four minutes that I had allotted on the radio, but, you know, for like half an hour or so.
	And, you know, there was never time.
	So I'm glad to be able to have this chance to talk with you about him.
	What kind of a man was he?
	One piece I read about him today suggested that he was almost a kind of reluctant hero.
	This work that made him internationally famous was not Work apparently that he initially wanted to do.
	You're spot on with that.
	Yeah, I think mid-1950s, he was just starting to direct his first bits and bobs down there.
	He was doing a documentary series called You've Never Seen This, which ironically was then Never Seen.
	He was traveling around Europe, directing that series, interviewing sort of the world's tallest man and sort of circus acts and record breakers.
	And he thought that was going to lead him into a live action career making huge movies.
	He wanted to be doing sort of Ben-Hur.
	So when he was approached in 1957 by Roberta Lee with a stack of scripts for a series called The Adventures of Twizzle, he was keen to take on the work and then realized it was to be made with puppets.
	And I think his famous thing he said then was, my instant reaction was nearly to vomit on the floor.
	So not keen then.
	It was so contrary to what he was expecting.
	It wasn't the path he was expecting.
	So yeah, and then he certainly felt like he was typecast with the puppets, but do you know, it's that sort of embarrassment, that sense of embarrassment of working with puppets that pushed him to make them into something more than they'd ever been before and to develop super marionation, that famous made-up term.
	So yeah, you're right.
	Reluctant hero is a really good description.
	Well, that was the impression that I got.
	But he has this attitude, and you know, a lot of us around the media kind of have this attitude.
	When we're given something to do that we don't really necessarily want to do, you can look at it in one of two ways.
	Let's just get the job done and move on to something else.
	Or you can try and get under the skin of it.
	And he struck me as being a man who liked to get under the skin of things.
	If you're going to do a job, do it properly.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	Always pushing the boundaries.
	And even from that very first puppet show, you know, around that time, Bill and Ben and Muffin the Mule, that sort of stuff.
	And it was puppeteers leaning over a painted background, you know, paper mache puppets with button eyes and carpet thread strings.
	And dad instantly thought, well, what can I do to improve this?
	And he developed a system where they had a puppeteer's gantry over the top of the set so the set could have depth and they could have puppets at multiple positions and eventually would go on to develop the live lip sync.
	They started using glass and acrylic eyes to give the puppets some life in their eyes.
	And all the way, yeah, he just sort of pushing puppetry as far as it could possibly go.
	And even for the time, I think they were doing some pretty amazing stuff.
	You know, modern puppets now, a lot of them don't do the amazing high-tech stuff those puppets were doing in the 60s.
	I grew up in the Grenada, in the days when we had regional ITV stations in the UK.
	These are, for my American listeners, commercial television in the UK for a long while was only one channel.
	When I was growing up, there was just the one, and then Channel 4 came along, and we had two commercial channels.
	But it was a federal system, and there were regions, and the regions were of various degrees of prosperity from the southwest, where I don't think there was a lot of money, to the Midlands and also London at the time.
	This company called ATV had one franchise, and the man who ran ATV, Lou Grade, was a great impresario and became very important in this story.
	But actually, as I read today, he wasn't the beginnings of the big time.
	The series that I remember when I was very, very tiny and barely remember anything about it, really, was made for Granada Television, another one of these companies.
	And that was called Four Feather Falls.
	Bizarrely, when we all think of futurism and space, the series that really started Jerry on the path, in my estimation, was Four Feather Falls.
	It was a Western.
	It was very unusual with Tex Tucker led by the great Nicholas Parsons.
	Yes.
	Yeah, it was a fascinating project.
	I mean, by that time, he'd done two series for Roberta Lee, and they wanted desperately to do their own series.
	And it was Barry Gray, the composer, the man who came up with all that fantastic music throughout the 60s and 70s for Dad, who came up with the pliss for this series, Four For the Fools.
	And while they were finishing Torchi the Battery Boy for Roberta Lee, they were secretly making the pilot episode of this Puppet Western.
	And whenever Roberta turned up, they'd all have to hide what they were doing and pretend they were still working on Torchi.
	Yeah, the series was picked up by Granada.
	But you know, although it was the beginning of what became Syncarination and those famous puppet series, it was almost the end too.
	Because despite the fact that it was fairly successful, Granada didn't want to renew.
	They weren't interested in any further series for whatever reason.
	And so there was a time just before they moved on to the next series, Supercar, when they almost faltered and the company almost closed.
	And that was the time when, yeah, Lou Grade to become the patron of Anderson series.
	Right, so we get to Supercar, and this was a flying car.
	And we laugh at this now because flying car, once, we'll talk about this a number of times.
	Your father was far-seeing, prescient in many ways.
	We're talking at the moment about flying cars.
	Yes, we've got self-driving cars being tested at the moment, but we are actively talking about flying cars.
	And I think Dubai is the place that is going to run them first.
	I think it was something that I read earlier this year.
	But Supercar was a flying car in probably about 1961.
	1960, they started shooting Supercar, yeah.
	And it was land, it flew, it went into space, it could go under the sea, it did everything.
	It can journey everywhere.
	It can, well ahead of the Bond's car going underwater and all that sort of stuff.
	I mean, Dad and the teams were just completely fascinated with technology.
	Dad was obsessed with flight.
	He was for his entire life, airflight and space flight.
	And people like Derek Meddings, Who was the special effects impresario, I guess?
	Derek also had a fascination with anything sort of cutting edge.
	So you see lots of elements through Supercar and beyond that were kind of, you know, really out there at the time.
	But because they had this fascination with technology and because they wanted to make things look spectacular, they just very naturally, very organically kind of pushed this fictional technology to way beyond where it was back in 1960.
	And so it kind of naturally created that excitement and that fascination in the audiences.
	And that's something that they tapped into very naturally.
	It wasn't a conscious thought of, oh, let's put fantastic vehicles in these things because that will drag the kids in and they'll get reinterested.
	And especially at that time, a supercar, there was no merchandising.
	It's not like today where most of the channels and the financiers are obsessed with the merchandising side.
	Back then, it wasn't really there.
	So it was just a series born out of love of storytelling and making cool cars fly everywhere.
	But the look of it is so far ahead of its time, even when you compare it with American products.
	I think there was a series around at the time that used to get shown a bit and got shown for years.
	What was it called?
	Space Patrol, I think it was called.
	I don't know if you remember that one.
	That wasn't one of your dad's.
	No, that actually was Roberta Lee, who dad had worked with previously on those first two series, Twizzle and Torchy, and Arthur Provis, who was dad's business partner up until they started on Supercar.
	So they went off and saw the success that dad had had with Supercar, et cetera.
	And they put together Space Patrol, I think in 1962.
	So it actually came later.
	But, you know, by that stage, AP Films, Dad's company, they just had this wonderful way of working.
	They created a real cottage industry.
	All the skills were in-house and they'd really honed their skills on supercar.
	So really, nobody could compete.
	And that was the same throughout the rest of the decade.
	There was nobody else who had the skill set and the knowledge and the creativity to make puppet shows as well.
	And I'm not sure anybody has ever since, really.
	No, I don't think they have.
	And I think it's partly down to the will of the people involved.
	I mean, I mentioned Space Patrol, and I do dimly remember it.
	And it had great sound effects, but it didn't look anything like the products that your father came up with, both then and later.
	Yeah, no, and that's it.
	You know, that was a case, I think, where they were trying to replicate the success, and they just didn't have the amazing group of people behind them to put it together visually.
	I mean, the puppets and the puppeteers, Christine Glanville and Mary Turner, who were leading the way there, they were just incredibly talented in terms of sculpting and performance.
	Like I said, Derek Meddings doing special effects, Bob Bell in the art department.
	They just had this magic sort of melting pot of creativity.
	And those names, you know, Jamie, they mean a lot to me because as a kid, you would want to milk every last second out of the show when it had been shown.
	And you would watch the titles right to the end.
	So those names, Derek Meddings and all of those people, and there was a name that always amused me, but I wondered if it was a real person.
	Who was Plug Shut?
	Because Plug Shut was on the titles.
	Plug Shut is a real person.
	So Plug Shut was actually brother to Judith Shutt, who was one of the key puppeteers through, I think, Fireball through, right through to the end of the puppet work on the Secret Service.
	So yeah, Judith and Plug, but yeah, great name.
	There are actually two or three Plugs that worked on the show through the years.
	Really?
	I know, Bizarre.
	It's a name that I hadn't heard, but I always used to think, well, maybe there was somebody they didn't want to name.
	Perhaps, you know, he worked for the BBC or something.
	So he was working under a made-up name.
	Now I know that Plug Shut was a real person.
	Absolutely.
	So supercar ahead of its time.
	And part of it, it was a whole conception, really, in that everything had to be right.
	So the names of the characters were very, very important from that point.
	How did you come up?
	How did your dad come up and the team come up with names?
	Well, in the case of Supercar, it was Hugh and Martin Woodhouse who came up with the names, I think.
	I mean, Beaker and Popkiss and Mitch the Monkey, Mike Mercury.
	I mean, there's obviously a lot going for the alliteration there, and that was very much their style.
	But Dad always liked to name baddies after people he didn't like.
	And goodies normally he found inspiration either in real life or with TV shows that he was enjoying at the time.
	They were just, you know, names of the moment.
	I think probably Supercar is the odd one out in that it bats down to Martin and Hugh.
	And they were great, ridiculous names.
	Well, they were, but they were names that you remember.
	They were yes, in Master Spy.
	Yes, I've just remembered that one.
	But they were names that stuck with you for your entire life.
	You know, Mike Mercury.
	You know, who can forget that?
	But the idea of space travel, which is what came next with Fireball XL5, you know, that was where things really did go up a gear.
	And again, if you look at the real life space exploration of that time, we had the Gemini missions from NASA, the beginnings of orbital space, but certainly, you know, planning for the moon, yes, after President Kennedy announced it.
	But we were just trying to get way beyond the atmosphere.
	You know, that was just about the limit of what we could achieve.
	And it was rather clunky compared with what we do now.
	But then along comes your dad, and there is a vehicle that can blast along a railway track, as it looks, and then lift off into space.
	I don't know how aerodynamic Fireball XL5 would have been, but it looked pretty damn good to Me when I was like four.
	But, you know, there were aliens in this thing.
	There were aliens on other planets.
	It was stuff that outside of very clunky 1950s movies, kids, like me, had just not been exposed to.
	The idea of space travel.
	How important was space to your dad?
	Well, again, it flowed naturally from his fascination with aircraft.
	He was endlessly fascinated by the universe and the potential for other life and other civilizations.
	He once shared an entire bottle of whiskey with Gene Modenberry talking about that very subject, in fact.
	It was just something that he was naturally fascinated by.
	Again, so was Derek Meddings.
	I think at the time there may have been a Russian aircraft launcher that was based with that rail setup that Fireball had.
	And so Derek took that and extrapolated it and came up with that amazing launch sequence.
	Although, whatever happened to those trolleys that flew off the end as Fireball took off and fell into the canyon, there must be a huge stack of them there.
	Well, they probably hit the wall of the little room in the Slough Trading Estate where you were making this.
	At great speed, I would have thought.
	With all of those explosives being used in a confined area, I mean, we have to say that these shows were not produced, were they, at the big lots.
	These were produced on the Slough Trading Estate.
	I think a place that still exists.
	Well, the Slough Trading Estate still exists.
	I don't know if the building still exists.
	Was it risky to do that?
	Yes.
	So Ipswich Roads in Slough, which is where they made Supercar and Fireball, that still does exist.
	Sadly, Sterling Road, where they made the rest of the shows, has now been demolished.
	But they did have a few accidents.
	They had the whole board of ATV over for a board meeting and had a bit of a disaster with Pyrotechnics where a board that was covered in dust that they used to leave those lovely tracks behind the vehicles.
	The board was flipped over by the Pyrotechnics and covered the entire board of ATV in dust and rubble, which thankfully Lou Grade laughed at, but the rest of them weren't very impressed by.
	And they did also have a terrible accident once when they blew the back wall out of the studio.
	So accidents did occasionally happen, but they were pioneers.
	You know, Derek was working out mixtures of explosives and bizarre chemicals, which are definitely now banned by health and safety, to create those amazing liquid flames that would roll towards camera and create, you know, create the look as if every vehicle was ever blown up in those series was packed with 40,000 tons of TNT.
	But that was part of the magic, though, wasn't it?
	And the way that vehicles blown up would always roll quite spectacularly.
	You know, I don't know whether that was done in slow-mo, but it always looked great, especially in later series.
	I didn't get onto a topic I should get onto.
	You mentioned Lou Grade.
	I mentioned him briefly at the beginning.
	I'm guessing that an awful lot of this would not have happened without him.
	Now, for listeners in America, you might be aware of him if you watched those old Tom Jones shows that were transatlantic shows made in the UK but shown across America, made in colour, when a lot of British programs were not made in colour.
	Lou Grade owned a company called ATV, which for a while had two television franchises, one in London, one in the Midlands, and then had subsequently one in the Midlands.
	But his core activity, really, I guess, was making shows that you could export, which he did for years.
	I mean, the Muppets are down to Lou Grade and so many other shows and the Saint and the Persuaders and the Protectors and various other series, all like that.
	He was a man of great vision, and fortunately, and I don't know how your father came across him and he came across your father, it was a marvelous partnership, wasn't it?
	It was a match made in heaven, you could say.
	Yeah, I mean, like I said earlier on, this was post-Four Feather Fools.
	They hadn't been renewed by Grinardo.
	Granado weren't interested in hearing any other pitches for whatever reason.
	They just decided that was it for puppetry from Dad.
	And he happened to meet a colleague who said, well, look, I can introduce you to this guy who works for Lou Grade, and I'm sure I can get you a meeting.
	Dad went for the meeting with Lou Grade at, I think, seven in the morning, which was Lou's preferred meeting time.
	Dad pitched him what would then become supercar.
	Lou said, how much is it going to cost?
	Dad gave him the budget number.
	And Lou said, no way, not a chance.
	Go away.
	Come back tomorrow morning at seven o'clock with a budget that's half of that.
	And then we'll see if we can do something.
	So Dad went away, worked through the night.
	They were cutting down, you know, everything in the budget, reusing tea bags, that sort of thing.
	And they worked through the night, cut the budget down, but they could only cut it down by a third.
	So Dad turned up at Lou's office at seven the next morning, looking disheveled, probably smelling to high heaven.
	He said to Lou, look, Lou, we've worked on everything.
	I just can't reduce it any further.
	It's down by a third, but I'm sorry.
	There's just nothing else we can do.
	And he was on the verge of tears by this point.
	Lou got up, opened a door and went into another room, disappeared for a couple of minutes.
	Dad thought he was talking to his finance office or something.
	He came back in and said, all right, Jerry, got a deal.
	And that was the beginning of the partnership.
	Now, it later transpired that that door didn't go anywhere except into a coat cupboard.
	And it was Lou's little trick to make it look as if there were lots of others involved in this decision.
	So Lou was a bit of a joker, but that was the start of a very, very successful relationship, which further down the line would really lead to anytime Dad wanted to make a show, he'd give Lou a quick five-minute pitch, and Lou would say, off you go, and here's a blank check.
	And I think that was part of the secret, because there are so many constraints on creatives now, now more so than ever.
	But back then, to be given the creative freedom, well, you've seen the results for yourself.
	And that's part of the reason.
	You know, you give an amazing team with fantastic concepts creative freedom to do what they want and you get an amazing result.
	And though Lugrade was a businessman primarily.
	And from what I've read, and I've read a lot about him, he was a great games player, as you said, that whole thing with the cupboard.
	But he would shout at people.
	He would give them a terrible time on the phone, slam the phone down, and the next day, everybody would be friends and the deal would be done.
	It was theatre to him.
	The whole thing was theatre.
	Absolutely.
	And Dad told me another thing about a screening they went to where Lou was late to a screening and he came down the stairs.
	Everybody was sat in the cinema or the theater ready to watch this thing.
	And he took a tumble and he rolled down the steps, hit the deck, hit the floor at the bottom, and quick as you like, jumped up and did a little tap dance and some jazz hands.
	Whether he meant to fall over or not, the whole thing became theatre.
	And it was, yeah, the same every time.
	Because Lou Grade was from the vaudeville tradition.
	Absolutely, exactly.
	And that never really left him.
	But I think it made him a character to work with.
	Well, I would love to have met him.
	You know, there were people like that.
	I've met Michael Grade, who became a television executive and still has a big interest in television.
	I liked him.
	I would love to have met Lou, Uncle Lou, as I think he called him back then.
	But there are not people like that today, Jamie.
	And this is a question you will get asked a zillion times as well on those local radio interviews that you do.
	You know, I'm wondering if all of these series, and we'll get back to Fireball XL5 and the timeline in a moment, whether they would be made today, because it is all unified and corporate.
	And there are, it seems to me, no mavericks left.
	I think you're probably right.
	I mean, the entire world of television now is incredibly risk-averse.
	You know, and that leads to sort of formulaic, homogeneous content where a lot of the stuff looks, feels, and sounds the same.
	And it really would take, well, it would take somebody pretty special and pretty far beyond Lou's level of maverick behavior to even consider putting something like this out.
	They'd be incredibly expensive to make today.
	I think Thunderbirds would be a million pounds plus per episode.
	And that is way, way beyond what TV execs today are looking to spend.
	But I think that's a great shame because it means we just don't have those standout shows as much anymore.
	And that's why I think it's terribly important that we keep your dad's legacy alive and we keep trying to instill in young people the thought that maybe what they're being given at the moment is not the very best.
	And if a previous generation had something better, then maybe you need to be asking questions.
	I mean, that's a philosophical point that we don't need to get into now, but it's a thought that you must have had.
	Oh, all the time.
	And, you know, when kids do see the classic series like Stingray and Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet, you know, they love them.
	There's this strange perception that puppets are old hat and nobody's interested in them anymore.
	They're too clunky.
	And that's just not the case.
	There's a magical transition that happens in the brain when you're watching puppetry.
	For the first few seconds, you know they're puppets.
	And very quickly, they have life breathed into them.
	You believe them as real characters.
	And there's something even more engaging about a puppet brought to life than there is about a 2D animated character, a CG animated character, or even a live actor.
	You see live people every day, but it's not that often you see a puppet given consciousness.
	Well, the Gerry Anderson puppets were life plus.
	Traditional puppets looked like something that was fictionalized, created.
	you were never really able to completely suspend belief or disbelief, rather, when watching them.
	But your dad's puppets had a dimension that was even above people, which is why I think the live-action series, for me, were not— They didn't quite have the magic that the puppets had.
	But maybe that's just a generational thing with me.
	But, you know, the puppets were very, very special, I think we're saying.
	Yeah, they were.
	They were.
	And, you know, they were very caricatured early on.
	And even in Thunderbirds, which you might say is the pinnacle of puppetry for Anderson work, they were still very caricatured.
	And Parker, especially, was the most caricatured probably of any of those puppets.
	Well, that's quite a nose.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	And the jowly cheeks.
	I mean, he was fantastic.
	But it was the finesse with which they were operated, the life through the eyes, the lip sync, and the fact that they had interchangeable heads that gave him a little expression.
	So he could cut away and cut back to frustrated Parker rather than his neutral head.
	All those little tiny bits of extra work, those extra bits of detail that were put in.
	But the exaggeration of the features was about giving us as kids the picture of this person who had been an old lag, as we say in the UK, you know, an ex-criminal who turned to being a good guy, but knew all the criminal tricks.
	You know, that face told a million stories, I think.
	Yeah, well, I think all the faces did, you know, Scott and Virgil, particularly in Thunderbirds, heroic faces, Troy Tempest in Stingray, the same again.
	Those sculptors working for AP Films and TV Century 21 just had the most amazing skill set to create those faces.
	It's very easy to create an ugly puppet face.
	And for the most part, all the faces they did were very different, striking, and memorable, which gave them even more personality.
	Well, Troy Tempest, I mean, those memorable eyebrows, they were noble eyebrows.
	Back to Fireball XL5 and the fascination with space.
	That is where my interest in space and all things to do with space and space travel became ignited as a very small child.
	You know, I first saw the series in black and white, and then the series went into colour, didn't it?
	And I later saw the series in colour, and it was even better in colour.
	You know, I thought perhaps this will only work in black and white, but when I saw it in colour, no, it worked even better for me.
	But the idea of a reusable spacecraft, even if it did blast along a track and sometimes blow out a wall on the Slough Trading Estate, the idea of a reusable spacecraft that went to places like Mars is today a bit ho-hum in the newspapers because we know that.
	we know that, we're in the process of doing that.
	But back then, it was absolutely cutting edge.
	And I'm wondering what kind of mind can come to that creation.
	A brilliant mind, I think, is all I can say.
	It's just one of those things where they got to sort of, they had a psychological playground, if you will, where they were free to do what they wanted.
	After the success of Supercar, Lou said, great, give me a new series and do what you want with it.
	Go crazy.
	And that's exactly what they did.
	It wasn't always down to the guys in the team, though.
	Do you know they used to take oxygen pills in Fibre XL5 because the spacesuit idea just didn't work at that time?
	They couldn't make it work for the puppets.
	But that came from Terry Nation, creator of the Daleks, who was having a tour around the set when they were in pre-production.
	And Dad was talking to him about the difficulties of using puppets in spacesuits.
	And Terry, just as a throwaway thing, said, well, why don't you have them take oxygen pills?
	And Dad went, that's an amazing idea.
	And Terry said, well, you can have that one.
	That's on me.
	And that was thrown into the series.
	And I can still see the character.
	Who was the character with the big glasses?
	Sorry, I've forgotten his name in XL5.
	Matthew Matic.
	Matthew Matic.
	I can still see Matthew Matic with one of these oxygen pills now.
	Yeah.
	Amazing idea.
	I mean, you know, there are a few other pressure issues in space that wouldn't really make it work, but it was a lovely idea.
	And that was just a throwaway idea from another brilliant mind.
	So it was the right place, right time, right collection of brains who were fascinated and really kind of still big kids underneath it all.
	Female characters.
	Also, your dad gave female characters a prominence, to our shame these days we realize, but a prominence they were not getting in other areas.
	You know, these series had, I mean, XL5 had a female character who was prominent.
	So did Supercar and even more so as you went through latter series.
	Absolutely.
	I mean, he was very pro-equality.
	I'm sure he described himself as a feminist several times over.
	But yeah, you know, he didn't see why women shouldn't have an equal role.
	And so as he kind of pushed the boundaries a bit, yeah, with Venus first of all, Atlanta and Marina in Stingray, Lady Penelope being the lead British agent for International Rescue and Thunderbirds, and then into Scarlet, where, you know, the best five fighter pilots in the world were all women.
	He was way ahead of his time.
	Harmony, Destiny, and all.
	I've still got a model of Harmony Angel.
	Do you know that?
	It's sounding more and more like a bit of a shrine there, Howard.
	No, it's these things.
	I don't know what it is, but they are, you know, things that are mile markers.
	I suppose in our homes we have things that are mile markers in our lives.
	So on the walls, I've got, for what they're worth, the awards over the years for doing the radio.
	And I've got on the bookshelves, I've got these things that were part of my life, along with my two favorite toys, if you want to know, were my Thunderbirds toys.
	Thunderbird 2, I've got an original, which must be worth some money now, an original Dinky, and a TV outside broadcast unit.
	And for me, they were the two favorite toys of my life.
	And that's Spectrum Pursuit Vehicle.
	There's three for you.
	But, you know, I'm sounding too much like a fan now.
	Not at all.
	It's a great selection.
	You must get all the Anoraks, though, asking you all kinds of questions.
	And we asked about whether you get a little wearied constantly talking about your dad.
	But there will be people talking about XL5 and the series around space who will know the most astonishing details that even though you can recall so much of it so well, that's clear, that even you won't know just like that.
	It happens quite a lot, actually, where we have events and I go to a Q ⁇ A session of some sort and they just, they'll ask the most detailed question about a particular location in a particular episode.
	And I just won't have a clue.
	But it's amazing that that provides so much fascination and captures their imagination quite so much.
	But yeah, quite often I can't answer the questions.
	But then at the same time, I get approached by people whose lives have been transformed through watching the shows, not just career-wise, but last year at London Film and Comic-Con, a guy approached me and he just said, I hope you don't mind me saying, but your dad's shows got me through a very, very difficult childhood.
	I was moved from care home to foster home to care home.
	I had a terrible time and the one constant was watching these shows.
	And the guy was in tears, bless him.
	It was a lovely moment, but so fantastic to hear that, you know, a set of old TV shows from the 60s, you know, got this guy through a really grim childhood.
	But I totally understand that they took us beyond the place we were at.
	I mean, look, I didn't have the happiest school days at all.
	You know, until age 13 or so, it was pretty lousy and then it improved quite radically and that's how I got to university.
	But the time up to 13 was miserable.
	And I've got to tell you that those shows, I don't know what they'd have been up to, they were probably in repeats then, but I still watch.
	In fact, I still watch them now.
	You know, and obviously I'm very, very much older.
	But they got me through.
	They were that important.
	It's a big burden of responsibility as, you know, second generation that you carry.
	But for a lot of us, they were that important.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	And that's brilliant to hear.
	And that's the sort of reason I never tire of hearing it.
	Yeah.
	Well, there you go.
	So XL5, it's space exploration, and it's way ahead of its time.
	Then came Stingray, which was a fantastic undersea craft.
	And as you say, a female hero that was so important that she, the mermaid Marina, was actually immortalized in the song at the end of the show.
	Yeah, everyone loves that song.
	Aqua Marina.
	Yeah, and everybody knows the words bizarrely too.
	We had a little screening event a few years ago and at the end of watching this episode of Stingray, the entire audience burst into song.
	It was a lovely, lovely moment.
	But although she was very important, she never spoke a word.
	no, she was absolutely silent.
	But again, how to do that with a puppet?
	Here was a mermaid who didn't speak, but had I think she had gifts, didn't she?
	She was very knowing.
	But the look, the looks that you got from Marina on the face, it's all coming back now, but from the face of a puppet were remarkable.
	You would have thought that only a human actor could do that.
	Yeah, well, that's, again, testament to the skill of the puppeteers.
	It is amazing the subtlety that can be put into a puppet performance and just how much it gives away.
	But yeah, I'm sure when they heard, right, you're going to be puppeting Marina, she doesn't speak, they must have thought, well, how the hell am I going to do this?
	Because it wouldn't have been an easy task.
	But by that time, you know, it was their third puppet series in this kind of area with these new type of now definitely Super Marination puppets.
	So they'd really perfected things.
	And yeah, I mean, the opening title sequence from Stingray and the music is sort of, that's when the whole team really hit their stride in terms of kind of primetime excitement, I think.
	Well, there were so many ideas that were way ahead of their time.
	It's a phrase that you'll be hearing a lot, but from the very moment where the first words are, stand by for action.
	So we get that.
	And then we get the base Marineville that actually is able to, when it's under attack, disappear under the ground.
	Yes.
	And then we get these fantastic seagoing undersea craft there.
	And some terrible baddies in this series, too.
	I don't know how he came up with those.
	The Mighty Titan.
	Yeah.
	Stingray is one of the shows that, in terms of its genesis, I don't know much about it, bizarrely.
	Because I think quite often Fireball XL5 was syndicated in America.
	So in terms of US recognition of the puppet shows, Fireball is the one.
	So he was asked a lot about that.
	And then, of course, in the UK and Australia and all sorts of places around Europe, Thunderbirds was the big one.
	So he often kind of skipped over Stingray.
	So do I too when I think about it?
	You know, I nearly, in fact, I've got a list here that I typed out this morning.
	I don't even have Stingray on it.
	I go from Fireball XL5 to Thunderbirds.
	So I understand that.
	People do, but it was the first British TV series to be shot in colour.
	They decided they were going to do it in colour.
	Dad sent Bob Bell and I think Harry Oakes out to the US to learn from them how to shoot in colour because it was something totally new to them.
	When they came back, they had to repaint loads of the sets, change the colours of various costumes because they were colours that weren't working well at that time on colour film.
	So technically, behind the scenes, it was a huge leap forward for them.
	But it still looks amazing.
	Hadn't some of the XL5s been made in colour?
	Not many of them, but I think some of them were working.
	They were actually all black and white.
	One of them was colourized.
	A Day in the Life of a Space General was colorized about 10 years ago.
	So there is an HD colour episode of XL5, but that was done much later on.
	And it does look amazing.
	But no, Stingray was the first true colour series.
	Although I think black and white broadcasting continued until 67, 68, before 67 with the BBC, 69 for all the channels, including the ones that these shows were shown on.
	So in fact, ironically, the biggest show of all, Thunderbirds, which we'll talk about now, which was the big production and the one that really hit the right spot everywhere, you know, that was made in color, but seen by most of us in black and white.
	And it was never, in its first showings, was just 405 line, not great definition black and white, but it still made the point.
	Absolutely.
	But how amazing to think ahead so far and be like, well, let's make this in color.
	And let's, I mean, the level of detail on Thunderbirds in particular is incredible.
	And that's shown by now when you get high definition versions where they rescan the film.
	The guys at the time would never have seen it in that level of definition.
	And yet it stands up.
	So a huge amount of effort to put all the sort of fine details went in.
	And it was just, again, just part of the atmosphere of creativity and effort that went in, which was sort of the secret at the heart of the success of shows like Thunderbirds.
	Did your dad know that this would be the big one?
	I think by this time they'd really hit their stride.
	And whereas the other shows were sort of inspired by cutting edge technology and them being big kids, I think Thunderbirds is the first one that was inspired by a real life disaster, which is a mining disaster in Germany in 1963, I think.
	Yeah, no, I read about that this morning, and until this morning, I hadn't got any idea that there was a real-life inspiration.
	Yeah, well, that was it.
	There was a mine in Germany, tunnels off the main hole of the mine.
	It flooded.
	Men were trapped at the end of one of these tunnels that run parallel to the ground.
	But the equipment to rescue them was something like 30 hours away.
	And dad became obsessed with this and was listening into the radio every day and just thought, wouldn't it be amazing if there was one team who had all the equipment to get these guys out?
	And the guys were got out by a boring machine like the mole.
	They drilled a tunnel down and brought the guys up one at a time in a small capsule.
	And lots of them were saved.
	A fair few died, of course, because of the delays in getting to them.
	But that gave Dad a real kind of buzz of an idea, which then became International Rescue and then was renamed Thunderbird.
	It's a mark of the man, really, that he came up with that idea.
	Because let's have a think back to what was on the TV at the time.
	They were mostly espionage series where people were shooting and killing each other.
	He was a series about saving people.
	Well, almost all of them are, aren't they?
	There's always an element of positivity in all the shows, even the darker ones.
	It's people trying to do the right thing and a mostly utopian idea of the future.
	Things are improving, things get better, and people want to help others.
	It sounds a bit corny saying that now, but that was how he wanted to create.
	And I think a lot of that was inspired by his brother, Lionel, who was sadly killed in the Second World War.
	But there's always a hero pilot to look up to.
	And I think that came from the bond dad had with his brother and the respect he had for him, always trying to create that.
	And it's little things that come naturally like that, you know, the fascination with the mining disaster and the love for a brother sadly lost poured into these shows.
	So was that brother Scott?
	Do we think that Scott became the embodiment?
	Absolutely.
	Well, Mike Mercury in Supercast, Steve Zodiac in Fireball XL5, Troy Tempest, Scott Tracy, Captain Scarlett.
	You could carry on through almost all the series.
	There is that lead pilot hero who everyone looks up to.
	And certainly with Scott being the older brother in Thunderbirds, I think that's the clearest reincarnation of Lionel.
	Well, you know, look, Thunderbirds was a series that had everything thrown at it.
	And again, it was way ahead of its time.
	I mean, how did the idea, it's perfectly normal to us now, of a space station, Thunderbird 5, come into it?
	You know, it was the only Thunderbird that I didn't own as a toy.
	That was the one that I never had.
	Maybe one day I'll buy it.
	But, you know, the idea of a space station was absolutely revolutionary.
	Yeah, again, dad's fascination.
	I mean, at the end of the Second World War, he was a radio telephone operator, listening in to calls, managing bits and pieces like that.
	So to him, it was natural that to listen out for all of these distress calls, you'd need something like that.
	It couldn't be on Earth.
	It wouldn't be possible to get all the signals through to cover the entire planet.
	So for him and the team, I guess a space station was the natural place to go.
	It sounds simple now, I guess.
	We would come up with it straight away if we were tasked with, how would you listen out for all these things?
	Not in 1964.
	No, again, amazing foresight.
	And again, technical fascination, looking into where the technology was going, where next for space travel and the space exploration.
	So it was that natural fascination again, feeding into it.
	But there wasn't just one craft in this series, as we know.
	You know, there were tremendous marketing opportunities.
	And of course, we all had the time.
	I mean, I even had the dolls, the action figures of Scott and Alan Tracy, who was the guy in Thunderbird 5.
	But there was five that was the space station, four that was underwater, three that went into space, two that got there before, no, two that was the big one that carried all the heavy lifting gear and rescue equipment to wherever it was needed in different, but not just one lot, five, I think it was, different pods full of equipment, including the mole and all the rest of it.
	And then one, of course, piloted by Scott, that was the one that was the advance, almost like the jet fighter craft.
	So there were five of these, and then they were all on, just to make it more interesting to maintain their secrecy, they were all on an island, and they lived an apparently ordinary, I never quite was sure where they were getting their money from, but they all lived a very nice life on the island most of the time, unless they were called on to do a rescue.
	Yeah.
	Well, Jeff, the father, was an ex-astronaut who'd earned his millions.
	That's where the money was coming from.
	I'm sure he had a whole range of investments that were paying off.
	Well, boy, we all wanted to be astronauts.
	I remember around that time saying to my sister, my sister walked me to school.
	And this was in the Thunderbirds era, and I was only very little.
	And she said, what do you want to be when you grow up then?
	I said, I want to be an astronaut.
	And why did I want to be an astronaut?
	Because I'd seen Thunderbirds and Fireball XL5 and all the rest of it.
	So, you know, I didn't get to be an astronaut.
	But at least I got to interview a few in my lifetime.
	Oh, exactly.
	Remarkable series.
	And again, an important female character based on Sylvia, you know, Lady Penelope.
	That was revolutionary, too.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	Well, again, naturally developing from Venus in Fireball and from Marina at Lantern Stingray.
	I think they felt it was just a natural progression to have a female agent.
	And I think the kind of the British comic aspect of the relationship between Lady Penelope and Parker was one of the keys to the success of the show.
	Lots of people think Thunderbirds is made in the US because Tracy Brothers have these sort of mid-Atlantic pseudo-American accents.
	But that was really to appeal to the international market.
	And Dad was always worried that there's a certain glamour that came along with American accents.
	In fact, they were all UK-based American actors, weren't they?
	I think.
	Yeah, they were.
	Some of them came over, but yeah, Shane Remerz, Canadian, Matt Zimmerman, David Graham, who played Gordon and Parker and Brains as a Brit, still going strong now, doing voices in Peppa Pig at 94, I think he is.
	He's brilliant.
	Yeah, so they got a few genuine American Canadian actors in.
	But I think to keep it true to its British roots, having Lady Penelope Crydon Ward and Parker was a stroke of genius.
	And Parker, of course, he was based on the slightly strange character who was the wine waiter at the local pub to the studio.
	Again, did he have that voice?
	We all try and do that voice, don't we?
	I've polished up the cannons and they've loaded up the guns.
	Very good, Howard.
	Definitely give you an A-I-I never try and be the voice.
	Dad sent David Graham down to the King's Arms in Cookham every day For a week for lunch to sort of study Arthur the Wine Waiter's voice, and that became Parker.
	He slightly caricatured it more, but yeah, the guy really did sound quite like that.
	I actually worked for somebody who spoke like that in later years, and he could never quite get why I laughed because he'd say, you know, we've got to be getting out and doing this story.
	I would used to find it really funny.
	But that's another story.
	So we had, but why base Lady Penelope on Sylvia?
	I base it on the missus.
	So she, well, she wasn't originally to be based on Sylvia.
	They basically struggled to create the right face for this character.
	And they tried again and again and again.
	And every time they sort of reviewed it and put the wig on on this little clay sculpt, it would never look right.
	And eventually, I think it was Mary Turner who was sculpting Lady Penelope.
	Mary took the sculpt home over the weekend.
	And all this time, part of the review process had been working with Sylvia.
	And so she'd been looking at the puppet and looking at Sylvia.
	And over that weekend, she just thought, well, if I base it a bit more on Sylvia, and she re-sculpted it to look more like Sylvia, and it just worked.
	It just clicked.
	And so that was just one of those things.
	It was never intended to be that way.
	But they struggled and struggled.
	And then the magic happened.
	And Lady Philomothy was born.
	Yes.
	And, you know, we all had the pink Rolls-Royce with the rockets that fired from the front, the toy version.
	They were so easily lost under the sofa.
	Absolutely.
	The little rockets, you know, they probably lasted five minutes that Christmas.
	Yeah.
	I seem to recall.
	But, you know, we all had all the toys.
	We had to.
	I think this was the first generation of real pasta power for things.
	Because Thunderbirds was marketed in a way that other series weren't.
	I can remember going to the cinema with my mum and dad, and there was a great big color commercial for, I think they were lions-made ice creams.
	Yes.
	And they were Thunderbirds.
	Probably.
	Zoom ice, at least.
	And there was never anything like that.
	And of course, for the first time, we saw them all in color.
	The way that we were captivated, I don't think there's been anything like it.
	I stand to be corrected on that, Jamie.
	But some of this stuff was very far-sighted.
	As we said, the space station was ahead of its time.
	The mole, I think there is, I know there were earlier primitive versions of this, but there is something that is very much like the mole that we see in Thunderbirds.
	A lot of this stuff has actually come to pass now.
	Absolutely.
	They really did predict the future.
	Watching the rockets from Elon Musk's recent launch with the Falcon Heavy.
	Looks like Thunderbird 3.
	Well, yeah, watching them come back in and do their vertical landing, amazing.
	I mean, but that's what Thunderbird 1 and 3 were doing in Thunderbirds back in 1964 when they were filming it, 1965 when it was on TV.
	I know Elon Musk is a fan of Space 1999, so I'm sure he's taken some inspiration.
	But yeah, incredible.
	And even things like, you know, the smart watches, video calling, Skype, that sort of thing, they all were there back in Thunderbirds and even earlier in some cases.
	And you wanted to talk to somebody, whether it be, you know, the space station Thunderbird 5 or whether you wanted to talk to Lady Penelope somewhere near London, then you just, you know, the portrait would slide back and you would have what we would now call a Skype call.
	Absolutely.
	It's incredible when you think about it.
	And even, I think, two years ago, Samson or one of them who have a smartwatch model, we're using clips of Alan Tracy using his smartwatch from, I think, the Thunderbirds Are Go movie in 1966.
	So, yeah, that was literally 50 years before the product actually existed.
	There it was on a puppet's wrist.
	And we always have the triumph of good over evil.
	You know, I can remember one of the many episodes that made an impact on me was the one where some bad guy was trying to take photographs of Thunderbird 1, which wasn't allowed.
	And Thunderbird 1 had a photography alert system that alerted Scott to the fact that somebody was trying to take pictures.
	So Scott chased this person and shot him off the road.
	So that's the very first episode of Thunderbirds.
	It's the hood.
	The hood.
	Yes.
	And the photo detector picks him up.
	And then that's actually Lady Penelope and Parker giving chase and shooting him off the road.
	Yeah.
	I mean, and then, you know, having shot this guy down and big explosion, Penny just turns around with Parker and says, right, let's go home.
	That's it.
	Slightly callous attitude, I'd say.
	Home, Parker.
	Home, Billy.
	That's it, exactly.
	Excellent.
	Oh, God, so many memories.
	But then following that was something that I talk about on this show a great deal, but was very radical for kids.
	The idea of immortality, which is something that I've explored in the journalistic work that I've done over the years.
	But Captain Scarlet was a hero who you could shoot him, burn him, you could drop him into a sea full of sharks, he would come back alive.
	I know.
	They crash him and his body may burn, smash him.
	Maybe they'll return to live again.
	Exactly.
	And that, of course, had a pop-themed tune.
	I think somebody bought me the record.
	It was on Pi, surprisingly enough, I think it was Lou Grade's company, Pi Records.
	Probably.
	But God was stung by the Spectrum.
	And who were the Spectrum, we ask?
	They were a pop group.
	I think they were formed as a result of Scarlett, but I'm not entirely sure.
	I don't know any of their other hits, if there were any.
	But I've got some lovely photos of them in their spectrum uniforms with the puppets.
	But again, way ahead of its time in that you had aliens, supposedly, as the bad guys.
	This is the voice of the Mr. Runs.
	Well, they were the bad guys, but we caused the fight, didn't we?
	At the time, pretty much every movie that had aliens in, the aliens were the baddies.
	They came here.
	It wasn't our fault.
	They want to invade or, you know, steal our water or something.
	You know, they were always the bad guys.
	And Dad thought, Well, why do they have to be bad straight away?
	You know, they might not be.
	And so that's where the idea of Spectrum actually causing the war with the Mysterons in their hasty actions and firing before thinking, when actually all the Mysterons wanted to do was share a fascination with the universe.
	And there's a morality tale for today in all of that, because if we're not very careful, that's going to happen.
	Absolutely, yeah.
	The shoot first, ask questions later issue is one that keeps cropping up, doesn't it?
	But also at the time, there were new photographs of Mars coming back from satellites, new high-powered telescopes, and they showed strange things on the surface of Mars that people thought maybe they might be canals or something made by something up there.
	So there was a real feeling, a popular feeling, that there might be life on Mars.
	But Dan thought, well, if we make the little green men and then we go up there in a few years' time and discover there's nothing there, we're going to look a bit silly, aren't we?
	So the Mysterons became non-corporeal.
	They became invisible beings that we could never really see.
	And so he sort of future-proofed himself there as well.
	So amazing forward planning, but it certainly took a darker turn than anything before.
	But they took over humans and they assimilated Captain Black years before Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek, and I wonder if Gene Roddenberry was influenced by Captain Scarlet, years before Jean-Luc Picard was assimilated by the artificial intelligence.
	Yeah, absolutely, by the Borg.
	Was that?
	By the Borg, yes, you have been assimilated.
	Exactly.
	You never know.
	I mean, like I said, Gene and Dad certainly met up a couple of times and shared some ideas and thoughts.
	So I like the idea that that might be a little nod to Captain Black.
	But yeah, the idea of taking over people and vehicles and being able to recreate them and bend them to the Mysteron's will was very sinister indeed because it's, you know, I think in the same but opposite really way that Thunderbirds, you had a normal family you could really relate to that then went off and were heroes.
	In this case, things that you knew every day could be replaced by something.
	It's something that could bizarrely translate into the real world, whether that be in a play environment or something to freak you out at night before you went to sleep.
	Has mum been replaced by a Mistron agent?
	I don't know.
	There was something really smart in that idea.
	And again, it wasn't them trying to retrofit what would be relatable for kids in real life, but quite fun.
	It's just a natural, good idea that came up and worked extremely well.
	And some great British acting talent, I think, but I've never been sure.
	Was the voice of the Mistrons, the famous British actor with a big, deep voice Valentine dial?
	No, it was Donald Gray who played Colonel White.
	Really, same guy, big, deep voice.
	Yes, it computes now.
	I can hear that guy's voice.
	Yeah, it's funny, but at the time, even though I thought they sounded quite similar, and they were doing a trick where they recorded on the tape where the tape was playing through the reels at one and a half times speed, I think.
	So when they played it back, it had that drawn, low-pitched feel to it.
	I've been working on that for years.
	Same guy.
	Yeah.
	But it works so well.
	I was never quite convinced by the Mistrons declaring their intent at the start of every time.
	You know, I get the War of Nerves thing, but it always felt an interesting choice to do that.
	I thought it would have been creepier if they didn't say.
	Maybe this speaks to the era that we were beginning to get shorter attention spans, I think, by that stage.
	And maybe you had to hook people in right at the beginning, otherwise you were not going to keep them.
	Yeah, I suppose then you normally have some sort of disaster, vehicle crashing off the road or train being sabotaged, something would certainly blow up in the first five minutes of most episodes.
	So that's certainly the hook for me.
	But no, I mean, Scarlett was so much darker.
	Francis Matthews, who played Captain Scarlett, he brought in his, I think maybe son and daughter or nephew and niece right up front to see the first episode in a little test screening with Reg Hill, one of the leads of Century 21 back then.
	And the minute the voice and the Mistrons came on, the little boy ran out from the studio screaming.
	I never heard anything like it.
	It was very eerie.
	But as you say, some great actors involved in this.
	And Francis Matthews, I mean, I can't, for years I tried to do that accent.
	It's a very proper English accent, isn't it?
	It's almost Carrie Grant.
	It is Carrie Grant, and that's where it came from.
	Dad heard Francis doing his Carrie Grant impression on a talk show and rang up his agent and said, will you come in and do it?
	And he went in and did it and everyone loved it.
	And yeah, that's where it came from.
	I never knew it until today.
	I just used to think that Francis Matthews doing that part sounds like Cary Grant.
	So it was meant to be.
	Absolutely, yeah.
	It was his sort of slightly mocking impression.
	But it worked perfectly, didn't it?
	Absolutely, more than perfectly.
	And five positive female characters in the pilots of the Angels, the angels who were the literally avenging angels in these beautiful white planes, them wearing beautiful white uniforms.
	I think probably, you know, as a sort of nine or ten year old, I was in love with Harmony Angel.
	I think lots of people were.
	Destiny was the most fancied angel, I think, played by Liz Morgan, who occasionally gets challenged and they say, Liz, you don't look anything like the puppet.
	Never mind, it was 51 years ago and she was never like the puppet.
	But yeah, no, Destiny, the French one, was the most popular.
	But again, he was, you know, we've already said ahead of his time with that, you know, declaring the five best pilots in the world are all women.
	But also having Lieutenant Green, having a person of colour in the leading role alongside Colonel White.
	That was quite a big thing at the time as well.
	So always pushing the boundaries, pushing social norms towards a place of equality, which obviously makes me very proud, especially Now, when equality seems to be higher on the agenda than it ever has.
	And people forget this.
	You know, people talk about Gene Roddenberry having, you know, Uhura there as a groundbreaking path-leading character, but you know, your dad was doing that too.
	Absolutely.
	And probably in a slightly less, with slightly less liberal support, I would think, as well, you know, slightly sort of buttoned up, stiff-collared British attitude, he was really breaking new ground.
	Joe 90, and I know that your time is probably limited, so we'll try and compress a bit, but Joe 90 was the kid who became a secret agent, could have his brain implanted through his glasses with the personality of a secret agent, effectively.
	This was where our own aspirations as children came into it, because Joe 90 was the character you could imagine yourself being.
	Absolutely.
	Yeah, again, it's that similar to the Thunderbird setup, where it's a normal family who go off and do these amazing things.
	This is a kid like any other kid who is the world's most special agent.
	Although I have to say, Howard, I did find Joe to be quite an irritating little gid.
	There was something terribly precocious about him.
	Who did the voice?
	Was it a woman who did the voice?
	No, it was a little boy called Len Jones.
	Was it?
	I've got no idea what happened to Len.
	I think he was on the radio about 10 years ago.
	I think he was working in Slough somewhere.
	He definitely didn't sound like Joe 90 anymore, but I suppose you wouldn't 50 years down the line.
	But yeah, we'd love to find Len Jones at some point.
	He must have had a great time.
	Again, there's a few pictures of him, the sort of freckly little kid with a bowl cut with the Joe 90 puppet sat on his shoulder.
	Well, there was a dual thing going on with Joe 90.
	He did amazing things.
	But for a lot of us, yes, we could aspire.
	Well, we could dream of this.
	But for a lot of us, he was the irritating kid at school who, you know, went on all the best holidays and had all the best toys and always got top marks in all the tests.
	Yes, he was teacher's pet, a little spod.
	I think that's probably for me why I never really connected with Joe.
	There wasn't enough that was likable about him.
	But I did always want to go in the big rat.
	That was a very cool device.
	Yeah, you know, this spinning globe thing that looked like one of those, we have them in the UK.
	I don't know if they have them in America.
	Chocolate oranges, it looked like.
	I was about to say the same thing, yeah, very much like that.
	I would buy one of those.
	Then the decision to go partly live action, but not entirely live action.
	I wonder what prompted that in secret service with a bizarre choice as the main character.
	Stanley Unwin, yeah.
	Now, Stanley Unwin, again, for our Americans may be aware of this, but for our American listeners, Stanley Unwin was a guy who used to pop up on TV talk shows all the time, and he had his own language that was, I mean, I can't imitate any of it.
	You've got to go online and check it out.
	I was never quite sure whether Stanley Unwin was an actor, a comedian, an academic.
	But what a weird choice for a TV series to be essentially a secret agent vicar.
	Yeah, well, you see, that central idea of secret agent vicar, I think, is quite cool.
	I think that's got legs.
	But the further you go with it, you know, the secret agent vicar who lives with his gardener, Matthew, and when they go on missions, he uses a device hidden in a Bible to shrink Matthew down to one-third scale and puts him in a briefcase.
	It gets more and more bizarre.
	And then Father Oman gets out of situations by speaking on Wines, which confuses police officers, spies and baddies.
	And then the mix of live action and puppetry, which I think really by this point, Dad was so desperate to move to live action.
	He felt like he'd earned it.
	I don't think that was necessarily a case of self-sabotage, but I think he was so desperate he would start doing that live action work at any cost.
	But for me as a kid, it didn't quite work because you would have Stanley Unwin pulling back the curtains in the vestry, and then you would have a cut to a scene of the puppet Stanley Unwin.
	And although they looked uncannily similar, they were not the same.
	No, I know.
	And that was pushing the experimental boundaries to breaking point, I think.
	And it's one of the reasons why when Lou saw the pilot episode, he said, right, cancel it, finish the first 13, can it, that's it, we're done.
	Because Lou could see that this was not going to work.
	Now, I have a soft spot for the Secret Service.
	I do think it's quirky, great fun, and really enjoyable.
	And very British.
	Well, that's part of the problem for Lou.
	I think it was so British and so quirky that it just wouldn't have translated.
	I wouldn't be surprised now if it was shown it could pick up a new little cult audience because it's so quirky and all.
	But it definitely was the sort of death knell for Super Marian Nation.
	We'd have to explain to a whole new generation what Stanley Unwin was all about.
	I think they'd probably get the measure of him pretty quick if they watched our first episode and listen to him talking unmanned.
	He's very bizarre.
	So we moved to live action, various series, Space 1999 UFO, which, you know, I personally loved with some great, there were some great actors in that.
	I mean, Ed Bishop holding things together in a quite spectacular way.
	Yeah, I mean, Ed had started as Captain Blue on Captain Scarlett, of course, and then came back for his actual live on-camera role.
	And Ed had a great voice.
	I think he even said himself, I've got the kind of voice that you hear and you'll instantly trust it and do what I say.
	But he really did.
	That voice tells you we're under attack and you believe it.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	And we're going to do this and you just do it.
	But yeah, him, George Sewell, Wanda Ventham, that's Benedict Cumberbatch's mum, was in there as Colonel Virginia Lake.
	I mean, they're an amazing collection of people and they did some great performances.
	Did you mention Gabrielle Drake?
	Well, I actually said Wanda Ventham, who played Virginia Lake.
	But yes, Gabrielle Drake as well, who I think was fancied by lots of boys and men at the time.
	But some really interesting choices in that.
	I mean, it was such a British thing, but again, this was more targeted towards America.
	But there were lots of people who were well known in Britain there.
	And in that series, and I never quite computed this, was a dancer called Peter Gordino.
	Yes.
	And good for him, he was one of the pilots of one of the fighter planes that took on the UFOs and shot them out of the sky.
	You know, what was the rationale behind bringing in people like Peter Gordino?
	And there was also somebody who's completely disappeared who used to do kids' TV programs, and she was a singer called Aisha Brough.
	She was in it too.
	Yeah, I see Aisha from time to time.
	She's lovely.
	Yeah, do you know what?
	In terms of the casting, it was their first live-action show.
	I guess they wanted to make a bit of a statement, and they did.
	They spent a long time casting and finding the right people.
	And I honestly think they just wanted to be different.
	And I'm sure the idea of a dancer, someone who can move like that, was such an exciting idea after the restrictions of puppetry.
	I guess that's part of where it came from.
	But as to the exact reasons for their casting, I'm not entirely sure, Howard.
	Do you know, I always think, maybe you can confirm this for me, it's probably somewhere else.
	But the office block that is the headquarters of Shadow in that series looks to me a lot like the office block on top of Twickenham Station.
	No, it's Neptune House, actually, which is now where they shoot Casualty.
	Oh, is it?
	Okay.
	Well, whenever I see it, I always think it looks terrible.
	It looks like it should have a silver plaque saying Shadow.
	It's that era of architecture, I'm sure.
	All the buildings look the same back then.
	Oh, boy.
	So it was a move into live action.
	And how successful was that?
	I mean, those UFO shows are still seen, and I still enjoy them.
	In fact, I watch them online, I have to say.
	Yeah, well, UFO has been rebroadcast recently by Forces TV, so even now it's still being played.
	I think at the time, they had difficulty pitching it to the right audience.
	Some of the episodes were too dark and aggressive for a young audience.
	Some of them were a bit risque.
	There are a couple with some very scantily clad.
	Yes, there are mildly sexual themes.
	I mean, nothing compared with some of the stuff that goes out today, but there were dynamics in it that were like that.
	Yeah, people found it very difficult.
	So I think there were all sorts of scheduling issues.
	People tried to show it at the same slot each day, or each week rather, and they couldn't because some of them were just too risque, so they'd have to push the slot to later in the day.
	So it never got that really solid foundation for its audience because people often couldn't find episodes.
	Some were skipped out, played at midnight.
	So they definitely had some difficulties there.
	But the result was stunning and a great series.
	But at the time, it had difficulty finding its audience and broadcasters found it very difficult to deal with.
	Fantastic acting, amazing theme tune.
	But there is a video on YouTube at the moment of an orchestra who've recreated that.
	I don't know if you've seen it, but my God, it's compelling.
	You've got to check it out.
	It's a live orchestra who actually do that amazing theme tune, which it's going through my head now.
	So compelling is it.
	And they do a fantastic job of recreating it in live sound.
	And the editing on the title sequence with the multiply exploding UFOs.
	I mean, let's forget the premise that you're going to blow UFOs out of the sky because we should really be remonstrating and trying to negotiate with them, I suppose.
	But that was stunning.
	Yeah, amazing special effects work again at Small Derrick Meadings.
	I mean, doing little tricks like getting their space explosions.
	So if you film a miniature exploding, hanging it from a Y, you blow it up, all the debris falls downwards under gravity.
	So they just put the camera underneath.
	So the debris fell towards the camera and it gave that kind of zero-G environment feel.
	Amazing little tricks like that just made it even more believable.
	What were the 1970s like then for your dad?
	Because we didn't see much in the way of product from him during the 1970s.
	Well, I mean, of course, Space 1999, which followed UFO, that was from 1974 to 1976 or 7.
	They were making that, two full series of it, with Fred Freiberger joining the team on the second series and turning it into a bit of rubber monster of the week, which some people didn't like.
	But again, a victim of scheduling because, again, we had this federal system of television in this country.
	So different, you know, Lou Grade's own ATV area in the Midlands would show that in a good slot, but other regions weren't doing that.
	Yeah, but it's interesting.
	That one in the UK had the scheduling problems, but in the US, it was the only other show that was syndicated and became the most successful live-action show that we've had shown over there.
	So business was the biggest determinant.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	Especially then, it was entirely under the control of the broadcasters and their scheduling.
	But yeah, Space 1999 was massive over there, which has led to so many people, like I said, joining NASA, going into robotics, into space travel exploration, and possibly even being part of inspiration for Elon Musk's SpaceX.
	It's disappointing, isn't it, that the future hasn't turned out to be quite as futuristic as we thought.
	I mean, that's 1999, and we can, you know, we've both been through and existed through 1999, and it's now nearly 20 years ago.
	And it wasn't quite as futuristic as the series.
	It was a disappointment.
	No, but I'm fairly pleased that the moon is still in Earth orbit.
	That's a small positive we can take away.
	Well, of course, there are people I talk to on this show, Jamie, who will tell you that the moon is an alien craft, you know, is not what it appears to be.
	I've heard that theory very recently from somebody, in fact.
	But at least it's still there.
	But we are making our moves out into the stars and out to Mars and beyond now.
	So I think I'd prefer that they predicted it too early than for us to be years ahead of those ideas.
	Do you think your dad would be developing those sorts of themes now, or would he be doing something different because that is where reality is now?
	It would still be very forward-looking, utopian, but it would be several steps ahead of where things are looking in the next 20 or 30 years.
	That was just the way he worked.
	He'd look at, you know, draw a line of progress and follow it on to its natural position 50 years from now and work on ideas like that.
	In the 80s came Terror Hawks, and Terra Hawks was where the technology had come on by leaps and bounds.
	It was quite remarkable.
	But again, I suspect, and you can tell me, this was something that in the UK was maybe affected by scheduling.
	On TerraHawks, it was actually a combination of difficulties for them.
	So Dad was no longer working with Lou Grade.
	The partnership had been split there.
	So he didn't have a patron behind him.
	Well, of course, Lou Grade had lost his television franchise, ATV, hadn't he?
	So he was not in the picture, sadly.
	Sadly, no.
	So Dad found a new business partner, Christopher Burr.
	Dad told Christopher how much it would cost to make something akin to Thunderbirds.
	And Christopher said, well, there's no way we can raise that sort of money.
	You're going to have to find some other way of doing it.
	So they developed a new form of puppetry, which was much more kind of Muppet-like, you know, puppeteered from below glove puppet style.
	They had to make all sorts of cost savings.
	And so they didn't have the funds available that were available to them for Thunderbirds.
	It was a very different style.
	And they went down a slightly sort of dark comedic route with Terrahawks.
	And Terror's only really found its feet in the middle of its second out of three series, I think.
	And then you had the problem of the existing audience who'd watched the reruns of Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlett.
	They all heard, oh, there's going to be a new Gerry Anderson show with puppets.
	They were obviously expecting something very similar to Thunderbirds or Scarlet.
	I just was afraid I was.
	And exactly that reaction.
	I thought, oh, it's back.
	And it was different.
	It was different.
	It was very different.
	So there's a whole audience that had never heard of Anderson before that point, who absolutely loved Terror Hawks.
	And there's others, and you might be one of them, Howard, who were disappointed by it and didn't get it because they were expecting more of the same from the 60s.
	Well, I guess we're too stalled a bit.
	Yeah, I just gave it the benefit of the doubt and I thought, well, maybe I'm just simply now too old for this stuff.
	Yeah, and it definitely split the fans 50-50.
	I love Terrahawks, but I grew up in the household where they just finished making it.
	I was surrounded by the videos, by models and stuff from it, and it was great for me.
	I had a zero toy that I spent many hours bouncing around the carpet.
	So, you know, each their own.
	Okay, and listen, Jamie, you've been so kind to give me the chance to ask questions that have taken me a lifetime to get to ask and have answered.
	So, you know, thank you very much for that.
	We're just coming to a point now where we're bringing it all up to date.
	We've been through Terror Hawks.
	We've been through the live action phase.
	Your father then became involved in a real-life organization called International Rescue.
	He was very much at the head of that.
	I interviewed him twice on the radio in London about its work.
	And whenever there was a big disaster, International Rescue would be called in.
	Why did he want to be involved in the creation of a real-life organization like that?
	Well, I mean, it's what he wanted to do when he came up with the idea for Thunderbirds.
	You know, it was really, I think anything fictional, especially science fiction, there's an element of saying this should happen.
	This should be a real thing.
	And that's part of the excitement behind it.
	So when he heard that there was a charity being formed to go out and save people and do the right thing anywhere in the world, even though they maybe didn't have equipment akin to Thunderbird 2 or anything like that, he wanted to get behind it.
	So he took on the role, I think, of vice president, a role which I took on a few years ago to honor the work that he did back then.
	And International Rescue Corps is still going strong.
	I'm glad to hear it.
	The last time I think I spoke with him may have been around the time of the big tsunami at the end of 2004.
	I think he was involved in relief for that.
	I believe so, yes, yeah.
	But nice to carry on something from fiction into real life like that.
	Yes, and again, an indication of how very important and how fundamental to so many of us that series and the ideas that it generated were.
	Okay, now to your own work.
	I think the last time you and I had any contact was when you were planning to recreate Thunderbirds in the traditional way with proper puppets done in a similar location in the proper way.
	How has that all gone?
	So that went very well.
	It was completed and the episodes were finished off by Pod 4 Films, a group of very talented guys who've really got the knack for recreating Super Marination.
	Those were put on DVD and Blu-ray and went out to back as a Kickstarter.
	And sadly, that is most likely where the story ends.
	ITV had the rights to it and it's up to them what happens to it now.
	But, you know, it was a lovely job.
	It was done extremely well by the team that worked on it.
	Maybe it means it'll have legs in the future.
	I really hope that those episodes are certainly released to the public.
	It's what we need now.
	So I think it's, you know, ITV should really get its act together about that.
	Well, I think as long as ITV have got their new series on the air, I doubt very much that the classic Super Marination series will get broadcast, which is a great shame.
	I do hope they reconsider that point of view, but it's not something we have any control of.
	And again, like so many things in all our careers in media, it comes down not to the creativity or the scripts or the way that you do your job, whether you're in front of a microphone or in front of a camera.
	It comes down to business again.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	I mean, so with that in mind, where those Thunderbirds episodes are sort of stuck, we've got another Anderson project, puppet-driven project called Firestorm, which we're working on, which we're pitching currently.
	We're certainly meeting with that kind of business resistance.
	But I think more and more broadcasters understand that there is something magic in the handcrafted.
	There's something magic in puppetry and something very special about miniatures and real special effects.
	And that's the route we're going down.
	So I'm convinced that at some point in the next 12 to 18 months, let's say, there will be in production with that either as a feature or a series to bring back or to bring Anderson puppetry into the 21st century.
	Well, I know it's always a struggle.
	I wish you all the best of luck.
	What is Firestorm about?
	Firestorm is, for those who know the original shows, it's sort of a cross between Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlett.
	I don't want to give away the story too much, but it's based on an original idea that Dad wrote in 2001.
	But it's got all the hallmarks of a Jerry Anderson series, but brought bang up to date without losing the handcrafted.
	It's 95% in camera.
	So everything is real, which I think is a big part of the magic.
	When you look back on your dad and his life and his legacy and being the son of a man like that, how do you sum him up?
	Gosh.
	It's quite difficult to do.
	It's a big one, isn't it?
	Yeah.
	I mean, he loved what he did.
	His work was his passion.
	In fact, it was his life.
	And he poured everything into it.
	Every ounce of creativity was matched 100% with blood, sweat, and tears.
	Clearly, he was a very, very special man with a fantastic mind and the closest thing the UK has ever had to Walt Disney and possibly the closest it will ever have.
	I'd never thought of it in that way.
	And now you're absolutely right.
	He was indeed the closest thing that we'll ever have to Walt Disney.
	Jamie, I wish you luck with your projects and everything that you do.
	And you've been very gracious to give me so much time to answer those questions that are so personal to me.
	And I have to say that I'm still watching the series.
	And they will always, until I turn up my toes, they'll always be part of my life.
	I'm glad to hear it.
	Please keep watching.
	Thank you, Jamie.
	My thanks to Jamie Anderson for giving me such a lot of his time to answer questions that have burned in me for a lifetime.
	And maybe they're some of the questions that you'd have liked to have asked.
	And yes, it isn't a regular edition of The Unexplained, but Jerry Anderson was so far ahead of his time, was so visionary in so many ways, and made such a big impact on so many people, not only of my generation, he's still making an impact today.
	He was Britain's Walt Disney in so many ways, as Jamie said.
	I really wanted to have this conversation, and I hope you enjoyed what has been a very different edition of The Unexplained.
	I think every so often it's good to take a little detour and see where we go.
	More great guests in the pipeline.
	If you want to get in touch, go to my website, theunexplained.tv.
	Send me a message from there.
	So until next we meet, my name is Howard Hughes.
	This has been The Unexplained.
	I am in London, and please stay safe.
	Please stay calm.
	Above all, please stay in touch.
	Thank you very much.
	Take care.

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