Desmond ‘Des’ Saunders
Director who worked with Gerry Anderson on Thunderbirds and Stingray
DESMOND “DES” SAUNDERS, who has died aged 91, was a television and film director who enjoyed a long association with the producer Gerry Anderson – famous for his 1960s productions filmed with “Supermarionation” (marionette puppets containing electronic moving parts).
He joined Anderson as one of a team of directors on the ITV children’s television programme Supercar (1961-62), the first of Anderson’s Supermarionation productions, about a vertical take-off and landing craft invented by Prof Rudolph Popkiss and Dr Horatio Beaker, and piloted by Mike Mercury.
Saunders had come from the low-budget B-movie production line of the Danziger Brothers’ New Elstree studios. Though Supercar was his first directorial work, he went on to become one of the main directors of Supermarionation series such as Stingray (1964–65) and Thunderbirds (1965–66), and by the time of Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons (1967–68) had risen to the position of supervising director.
Saunders, who was gay, was a lively raconteur with a ribald sense of humour – not always appreciated by the more conventional Anderson. He would recall that he received constant requests from the producer to make the puppets more “real”. Once, while directing Thunderbirds, he decided to respond by
attaching “little willies” to the male characters. When the crew came in during the morning, there was, as he recalled, “the most terrible uproar”.
“You gotta bring them to life somehow, haven’t you?” he responded. Desmond “Des” Saunders was born on June 23 1926 at Chorleywood, Hertfordshire, the illegitimate son of Dolly Saunders, a nursemaid, by her employer, a London businessman. He was adopted by another couple, Alfred Wheeler and his wife Sarah, but spent weekends with his birth mother, an arrangement which, he later admitted, caused confusion and divided loyalties. Dolly Saunders eventually emigrated to America and he never saw her again.
He did not enjoy school and, aged 14, got a job as an office boy with a local estate agent. He used his wages to fund private tuition at the Royal Masonic School in Bushey, Hertfordshire. Aged 16 he won a job as a runner at Alexander Korda’s Denham Film Studios.
Called up for military service in 1944, he declared himself a conscientious objector and served in the RAMC in India.
He returned to Denham, and when the studio closed in 1952 transferred to Pinewood, where he became a film editor on such productions as Laurence Olivier’s Richard III, before moving to the Danziger Brothers’ studio.
His film editing credits included RX for Murder (1958); A Woman’s Temptation (1959); Escort for Hire and Compelled (both 1960); Tarnished Heroes and So Evil, So Young (both 1961), and Voyage of the Damned (1976). He was credited as sound editor for Floods of Fear (1959).
With Anderson he also directed Joe 90 (1968–69), a Supermarionation series based on the adventures of a nine-year-old schoolchild-turned-superspy, of which he was also production controller.
In the 1980s the pair collaborated on Terrahawks (1983–86), a puppet series which followed the adventures of a task force responsible for protecting Earth from invasion by extraterrestrial androids and aliens. Rather than marionettes, the series used “Supermacromation”, a new system which used highly sophisticated glove puppets. It was Anderson’s – and Saunders’s – last television puppet series.
Saunders was sustained by a strong Christian faith and in retirement he volunteered as a hospital visitor, helping to bring comfort to the terminally ill.
Desmond Saunders, born June 23 1926, died April 21 2018