Thunderbirds 1965: Set Visit, 27th March 2016

Last weekend, hordes of children, aged roughly between 6 and 60, descended upon Slough, including me. We had travelled to see, one last time, the soon-to-be-demolished buildings on Stirling Road, Slough Trading Estate, where Gerry and Sylvia Anderson’s legendary Supermarionation shows were produced – and where one of them, over the last few months, has been briefly revived.

For the 50^th anniversary of Thunderbirds, a dedicated (or mad, or both, depending on how you look at it) team of TV and film-makers, led by Stephen La Rivière, set out to make three brand new episodes of the show, in its original style. Three audio episodes were released exclusively on vinyl in the 1960s, starring all the original voice artists – all they needed were some 1960s visuals to go with them, puppets and all. With painstaking effort and immense love, Thunderbirds, as it first captured children’s imaginations, was brought back to Slough – the place has perhaps never been so full of magic.

There was a special atmosphere in the place on Easter Sunday when I visited, helped no end by the palpable enthusiasm of the crewmembers who had given up their Easter weekends to show us all around. It was a comprehensive tour, with excitingly thorough looks at all the work that had gone into making the episodes as authentic as possible. We saw not just sets, but had glimpses of props, models large and small, puppet wrangling – even a wig-making demonstration.

The dedication to accurately re-creating the look of the period was particularly staggering. Costumes have been based, just as the originals would have been, on fashion magazines and designs of the sixties (and now that my attention has been drawn to them, I will never be able to ignore Jeff Tracy’s horrible, horrible shirts). Genuine 1960s model kits, tape recorder components and light bulbs had all been sourced and used, to see these new episodes match the original series perfectly. There’s been a diligent drive for economy too: the components are often now rare and pricey, so they’ve been discretely reused from set to set, from episode to episode. It’s how it would’ve been then, so it is now.

Such attention to period detail applies to recording techniques just as it does to design. Stylistically, these have been filmed to complement perfectly what’s come out of Stirling Road in years gone by. We were told one shot was proving problematic – the look of it remained just slightly too ‘modern’, in spite of the processes and filters the digital footage was put through. So it was transferred to 35mm film and, sure enough, at last attained a sufficiently ‘60s’ look. It’s up to eagle-eyed viewers to see if they can discern which sequence.

Even camera movements have been engineered for authenticity; we were treated to a quick demonstration of an intimidatingly bulky camera dolly, used on previous Supermarionation productions, The Empire Strikes Back, and, it’s reasonable to believe, other things too. Such a heavy thing doesn’t exactly guarantee a smooth stop when it moves during a shot – that ever-so-slight turbulence is just another little effect that helps convince the eye that this is a product of 1965. For the filmmakers to impose such technical limitations on themselves is testament to their love for the series they’re now honouring.

Yet throughout the tour, they were keen to point out that, when combating such practical restrictions, the techniques invariably the most effective were those adopted by the original crews of AP Films and Century 21 in the 1960s. These three new episodes, then, are not only a monument to the crew that has made them, but to the pioneering achievements of those who’ve come before. It was admiration for those original programmes that brought everyone together for the project in the first place, and that admiration will only endure with future generations.

Like Doctor Who, Thunderbirds has enjoyed numerous revivals down the decades, be they CGI incarnations, repeats of the originals, or indeed revivals, as we have now. The original idea is good enough always to keep coming back. It will keep winning over children’s imaginations, not least those filmmakers who put this project together over the last few months, and will keep entrenching itself in a new generation’s hearts. Always, as well, these revivals will lead people back to the work of the geniuses who created it.

Barely two weeks after Sylvia Anderson’s death, people gathered in Slough Trading Estate one last time to see out the place where these incredibly special programmes came together, and from where her and her team’s work will continue to echo – not least in the brand new episodes about to emerge. Now there’s a legacy.