Puppet master’s final cut
When approached to produce and direct a puppet show for children’s television in the 1950s, Gerry Anderson saw it purely as an opportunity to get a foot in the door and hoped it would lead to a career directing more conventional TV dramas and feature films, with human stars.
Anderson did direct one lowbudget British crime movie a few years later. But Crossroads to Crime (1960) merits nothing more than a footnote in British screen history, and it was Anderson’s subsequent return to working with marionettes on such cult sci-fi series as Supercar (1961-62), Fireball XL5 (1962-63), Stingray (1964-65) and Thunderbirds (1965-66) that secured a preeminent place in the story of British television, the history of puppetry and the memories of more than one generation of young viewers.
Anderson and his team, including his wife at the time, Sylvia Anderson, took puppetry to new levels of realism, with a technique he christened ‘‘supermarionation’’, a portmanteau of ‘‘super marionette animation’’. It employed very thin metal wires, which not only controlled the puppets, but also carried signals that synchronised lip movements with dialogue.
The downside, or at least the apparent downside, was that the heads contained the equipment and were overly large for the bodies. The puppet-makers could have made larger bodies too, but they would have been too heavy for the operators.
Advances in electronics enabled a leap forward again with Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons (1967-68) and this time the puppets’ heads were in perfect proportion to their bodies. The storyline of a war with aliens, represented as two sinister circles of light, borrowed from the premise of the chilling sci-fi classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), and it marked a move away from the sweet notion of Thunderbirds as a
Departed: family business, with the former astronaut Jeff Tracy running a fleet of rescue craft, each manned by a different son.
He went on to create and produce many more series, with puppets and human actors, including Space: 1999 (1975-77), a live-action series that was reputedly the most expensive made for British television up to that point.
His career dipped in the 1980s, but he enjoyed a remarkable resurgence in the 1990s when repeats of Thunderbirds led to it becoming a phenomenon all over again. People queued overnight outside shops in the hope of being able to buy a model of Tracy Island for Christmas and Blue Peter ran an item on how to make your own.
The renewed popularity led to a big-budget, live-action film of Thunderbirds in 2004. It seemed to miss the point of the TV shows (which was that they were puppets) and failed abysmally at the box office. Anderson, who had once been so desperate to work in movies, had nothing to do with it.
Gerald Alexander Abrahams was born in London in 1929. His ancestors came from Central Europe and their surname was changed from Bieloglovski to Abrahams when they arrived in England. His parents changed it again when he was a boy.
Anderson’s film career began in the 1940s when he worked at the Colonial Film Unit and Gainsborough Pictures, serving as an assistant editor on The Wicked Lady (1945).
After national service in the RAF he returned to Gainsborough and then joined an independent television company called Polytechnic Studios. When it folded he set up a company, with several former colleagues, and they were desperate for work when they were offered the chance to get involved in a children’s show called The Adventures of Twizzle with the children’s author Roberta Leigh.
‘‘We had no alternative but to say yes, because we needed the money,’’ Anderson later recalled. ‘‘Then she told us we had to do it with puppets, and that really spoiled my day, because I had seen puppets on television and I thought they were terrible.’’
Sylvia Thamm had been a secretary at Polytechnic and subsequently worked for Anderson’s company AP Films (which evolved into Century 21 Productions). Anderson left his first wife, married Thamm and, as Sylvia Anderson, she became a key figure in the set-up and a familiar name in British television. She gets the credit for developing the personalities of many of the characters. She also provided voices for some, including Lady Penelope in Thunderbirds. The marriage ended acrimoniously and Anderson subsequently married a third time.
As well as pushing back the frontiers of puppet technology, Anderson was also a pioneer in the field of merchandising in the early 1960s. He set up a separate merchandising operation and there was a huge range of toys, comics, annuals, bubblegum and confectionery cards, model kits and other items, many of which are now valuable as memorabilia. He also acquired merchandising rights for other people’s shows, including Bewitched, The Man from UNCLE and The Saint, and at one point even had a deal with the pop group Abba.
His shows sold internationally, but had only limited success in the US; and two Thunderbirds films, Thunderbirds are Go (1966) and Thunderbird 6 (1968), did disappointing business. After Captain Scarlet, many regarded Joe 90 (1968-69), with its nine-yearold secret-agent hero, as puerile. Anderson realised a long-held ambition when he wrote and produced the live-action film Doppelganger (1969), about a planet on the far side of the Sun where everything on Earth is duplicated.
Anderson effectively hired himself out as producer for Lew Grade’s live-action drama series The Protectors (1972-74), which followed a trend of shows about freelance troubleshooters. He clashed repeatedly with the star Robert Vaughn. Space: 1999 was another live-action series, starring Martin Landau and Barbara Bain, who were husband and wife.
His third wife was Mary Robins, a former secretary. He had four children from the three marriages.
Gerry Anderson, TV puppet series producer, director and writer, was born on April 14, 1929. He died on December 26, 2012, aged 83