Thirty years ago Blue Peter showed us how to build Tracy Island – is it still as fun to do?
Ed Cumming revisits a magical moment in TV history with original presenter Anthea Turner
Ihave just bought two packets of Swan Vesta matches from the corner shop and am emptying them into a mug. I only want them for their boxes. Tipping them out, I have a flashback: suddenly, I am five years old again. It’s funny what takes you back. Proust had his cakes, Gatsby had his green light; I have the Blue Peter Tracy Island.
On September 20 1991, BBC Two re-aired “Trapped in the Sky,” the first episode of
Thunderbirds, the children’s programme that hit our TV screens in 1965. Gerry and Sylvia Anderson’s puppet show followed the adventures of International Rescue, a para-governmental search-and-rescue organisation funded by wealthy American widower Jeff Tracy and staffed by his five sons: Scott, John, Virgil, Gordon and Alan, with help from a scientist called Brains, an enigmatic British aristocrat called Lady Penelope and her wily ex-con chauffeur, Parker. Their base was Tracy Island, a private island somewhere in the South Pacific, from which they operated a fleet of more-or-less plausible vehicles. Elon could learn a thing or two from Jeff.
Thunderbirds had been a hit when it first came out and the BBC was sufficiently optimistic about the re-run to trail its acquisition on the news. Even so, they could not have anticipated that seven million viewers would tune in. Back then, if you were a child and you wanted to watch TV, you were watching Thunderbirds.
By Christmas the following year, the toy on every present wish list was a plastic Tracy Island. They were sold out everywhere. “There were rumours that the manager of one famous toy store had even had mothers offering to sleep with him to get one,” says Jamie Anderson, Gerry’s son. [Gerry died in 2012.] “I don’t know if he took the offer up.”
In stepped Blue Peter to save the day with its usual solution: make your own. Thirty years ago today, on January 7, in a 13-minute live segment, the presenter Anthea Turner showed eager viewers how to make Tracy Island using nothing more than cardboard, tin foil, papier mâché, lavatory roll, pipe cleaners, crepe paper, yogurt pots, paint and sandpaper. The Tracy villa, a paragon of midcentury American chic inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright, was made from the lid of a cream cheese pot, straws and one-and-a-half Swan Vesta boxes.
“I cannot tell you how many of those things we made,” Turner says. “It was a live show, so you couldn’t make any mistakes. And we’d never give 13 minutes to anything, especially not a make. To execute it live on air I practised and practised and practised.
I think I could probably still make it, it’s so ingrained in me. The programme invited viewers to write in – with a stamped addressed envelope, naturally – for the instructions. They were deluged. “We couldn’t cope,” Turner says. “The newspapers came to the rescue. One of them ran a pull out, which showed readers how to make it. Schools started making it. Tracy Island clubs sprang up.”
Re-making the island, it struck me that it was pitched at just the right difficulty level. Not so easy that you could do it in an hour and forget about it, but not so hard that you would give up halfway. It is satisfying making something with your hands. Nevertheless, the idea you had this stuff lying around the house was always an illusion. A lavatory roll and an empty Kleenex box, maybe, but probably not sawdust. If pipe cleaners and split pins were common in shops in 1993, and they weren’t, they are even less so now.
“I think we have to acknowledge that no lone child pulled this together.” Turner says. “This was a group effort. Normally it was mums who made these things, but it was dads who helped make Tracy Island.” Not in my family. It was my mother who had to source the pipe cleaners and swivel pins and find somewhere in the house warm enough to dry the papier mâché, made with flour and water paste. “I think some people were a little heavy handed with the flour and water paste,” Turner recalls. “And some of the islands went mouldy.”
Jamie Anderson says the intergenerational fervour around the
Thunderbirds revival made his father happy. “My friends were watching a programme my dad had made,” he says. “They would give me annuals from the 1960s to take home and get signed. It was cool. For years Dad had felt Thunderbirds was a bit of a millstone around his neck. Then suddenly this legacy came good. When
Blue Peter did Tracy Island, it took it to a whole new level. The process of doing something tangible, and experiential, means a lot to people.” When Anderson Entertainment ran a competition during lockdown for people to make Tracy Island, Jamie says “we had hundreds and hundreds of entries. In some cases there were three generations.”
When I told my mother I was remaking the Blue Peter one, she revealed she still had the plastic one in the attic (my family got their hands on one in 2000). Best of all, she had the original Blue Peter instruction booklet, bearing the printed signatures of Turner, Diane Louise Jordan and John Leslie, the three presenters at the time. “Looking back on it, I am surprised I got round to making Tracy Island at all, with a job and two small children,” Mum says. “Perhaps it was a reaction to Blue Peter being such an important part of my childhood. I was pleased that the end result was approximately right but I got the colour wrong. I don’t think so much was meant to be sludge brown. It took ages to dry. it never did completely dry.”
Maybe ‘I can’t think of anything that could generate that excitement now. They were innocent times’
If the Tracy Island phenomenon was surprising in early 1993, it feels impossible now. Blue Peter is a diminished force; TV in general more atomised; children even less minded to sit down with papier mâché for hours on end.
“When we went to school, everybody had watched the same programme the night before; it’s a diluted medium now,” Turner says. “I can’t think of something else that would attract that sort of audience and that mass excitement. It’s a shame, but aren’t we lucky we lived it? They were gloriously innocent times.”
She's right. Despite the novelty of building something with my hands in the iphone age, making Tracy Island felt more like a chore this time around. Partly, it's because I'm 35 and have a job and a family, but also because I actually had to do it myself rather than getting my mother to make it for me. My school friends and their parents weren't making their own at the same time. The spirit of the Blue Peter Tracy Island feels like a long time ago. I fear the Thunderbirds have gone.