Thunderbirds Are Go!

Gerry Anderson

1929–2012

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“Anything can happen in the next half-hour.” For many of us it was a promise only Gerry Anderson could deliver on. Week after week we sat enthralled in front of TV sets made huge through the power of Supermarionation. The small screen stretched to its broadest dimensions in an attempt to accommodate the imagination of a man who refused to accept limitations of any kind. No cinema wall would ever look so big.

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The Tracy brothers, and the fabulous machines they flew, are part of a zeitgeist that is long gone now. It was an era that produced the Mercury Seven astronauts, after whom the Tracy siblings were named. As well as Moon Shots, lunar buggies and flying cars. A heady amalgam of fact and fantasy that has been impossible to untangle ever since.

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UFO and Space 1999 were surely glimpses of a future that lay just around the corner. A technological inheritance waiting to be claimed. Golden cars with gull-wing doors, Special Patrol Vehicles fitted with James Bond style machine guns, and spacecraft that anyone could fly (not just the sons of Apollo).  

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We all knew those machines would be real someday. That they would take to the skies (even the impossibly heavy and un-aerodynamic Thunderbird 2, built like a flying brick), as International Rescue saved the day, time and again. We were too young to realise how truly glamorous those fantastic machines were. Such a perspective would only come later in life, from the vantage point of accumulating years. By then, to older eyes, the puppet strings would be clearly visible, along with the shaky sets and dodgy special effects.

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Such inconsistencies didn’t matter then and they don’t matter now. It was all part of the charm, like the endless appeal of a favourite storybook. Because of Gerry Anderson we all got to explore outer space. And steer a jet powered submarine, and defeat the Mysterons and their ominous leader, Captain Black. And all before many of us were twelve years old. Not a bad start in life.

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And it’s the same start in life that many children still benefit from today, the gentle impetus that will propel some of those youngsters onto a career in engineering, the sciences or astronautics. As a parent, I once queued at Hamleys toy store at six o’clock in the morning to get my hands on a Tracy Island adventure set, a Christmas present for my son. So I can testify to the enduring appeal of these shows, a fascination which crosses generations.

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He may be gone now but, like one of his most famous marionettes, Gerry Anderson’s legacy will always be indestructible.

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FAB, Gerry. Thanks for all the fun. And for all the Blast-Offs!

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