Happily, Thunderbirds are still go, but a misjudged transmission time could do more to finish off International Rescue than anything dreamed up by the Hood.
 |
| International Rescue - the next boy band? (Image: ITV) |
Ten years ago, a 1960s family
favourite returned to British television. Since then, Doctor Who has
sent a lot of ripples through the TV gene pool, resulting in new BBC fantasy
shows such as Life on Mars, Merlin, Robin Hood and Atlantis, to
name a few. ITV’s best shot at the title was the dinosaur runaround Primeval,
but beyond that they’ve struggled to come up with something that’s made a
lasting impact.
So you can understand why ITV has
looked back to its own 1960s golden age for inspiration. For a generation of
children, the science fiction puppet shows made then by Gerry and Sylvia
Anderson were the ideal complement to Doctor Who. Where the BBC’s
series, though often scarily brilliant, was actor-centric and mainly confined
to atmospheric (and small) studio sets, the Anderson’s oeuvre offered cinematic
visualisations of the future populated by organisations with great, Bond-ish
names like WASP and Spectrum, cool uniforms, rousing theme tunes you could sing
on the way to school and, above all, stylish, must-have futuristic vehicles
that gave the Daleks a run for their money in toy shops up and down the
country.
The Anderson series that made the most
impact and inspires the most affection is Thunderbirds (1965-66), featuring the square-jawed Tracy family
(who, thinking about it, all vaguely resembled John F. Kennedy). Their family
business International Rescue operated from an island base in the Pacific, and
the Tracy boys did exactly what their secret organisation’s name said on the
side of their iconic craft – the Thunderbirds of the title – saving
lives in natural and unnatural disasters around the world. Perhaps that’s why
the show was the most popular of the Anderson shows, generating two TV series
and two feature films and, thirty years later, again taking the country’s toy
emporiums by storm thanks to archive repeats on BBC2.
Watching ITV’s 2015 CGI revival is
fascinating. Like the new Doctor Who, it’s an instructive exercise in
how to update something but retain its original appeal. The producers have kept
the theme music and title sequence that got us all so excited on a weekly basis,
counting down through each of the Thunderbirds – ‘5… 4… 3… 2… 1!’ – until
Thunderbird 1 blasted off into an exciting montage of clips from that week’s
episode, just before the brave Tracy lads were each given an on-screen selfie. That’s
a brilliant introduction guaranteed to keep anyone watching, in 1965 or 2015.
The CGI itself isn’t so sophisticated
that it doesn’t have a charm of its own – the likenesses of the Tracys, bespectacled
scientist Brains and arch-enemy the Hood are all recognisable from the original
– and the thinking seems to have been that if CGI had been available to the
Andersons in the 1960s, this is what they would have come up with. While the
endearingly elaborate launch sequences have been kept (Thunderbird 1 from under
the swimming pool, Thunderbird 3, bizarrely, through the brothers’ house), this
time around, the Thunderbird machines, complete with crash zooms, can move as
fast as any ICBM. You can also see how the concept has been filtered through modern
action films like Mission: Impossible and Gravity, with
International Rescue’s all-in-one jump suits obviously influenced by the X
Men and the Marvel Avengers films. Pleasingly, the Tracys run, swim
and pirouette in zero gravity as realistically as any human action star.
 |
| M'Lady and the guv'nor. (Image: ITV) |
Rewarding the faith of the 1960s
audience is the return of voice artist David Graham as Aloysius Parker,
International Rescue agent Lady Penelope’s chauffer/safecracker/partner in
crime. This time he’s sleeker but somehow tougher, and you’re left with the
feeling that you wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of this particular cockney
geezer. Penny herself is voiced by bona
fide film star Rosamund Pike and, as in the ill-fated 2004 feature film,
you can see that that these two may well shape up to be the best thing about
the revival, as they have a devious edge that the clean-cut Tracys lack.
The stories themselves are straightforward
enough for kids, with the occasional self-aware touch to keep parents chuckling
as they watch alongside their children (if they’re up at 8am on a Saturday, but
more of that in a minute). The Tracys can now sit at home watching their
siblings’ missions, just like we’re watching them on television, and, in the opening
two-parter, the Hood showed the maturity of a latter-day Bond villain when he
announced, ‘I don’t want to rule the world: I just want to own it. Let someone
else run the place.’
Ah yes, the scheduling. ‘Whaaat?’ Mum
squealed, nearly dropping the sponge fingers on that Easter weekend when Thunderbirds are Go debuted in ITV primetime.
‘8 o’clock on a Saturday morning from next week!? Kids are still in bed!’ I’ve
no doubt that their parents would like to be too, and it is rather mystifying
that having clearly spent a small fortune on a new 26-part series, ITV are
relegating the successfully reinvigorated Tracys to the early hours of the
weekend. Mum may have enjoyed wallowing in a bit of nostalgia at 5pm on Easter
Saturday – she was always reading to me back in the day from TV 21, the comic that Thunderbirds appeared in – but she
certainly isn’t going to get up at 8 in the morning to do it, and neither am I.
Of course there’s ITV player, but it’s not the same, is it?
Why not have a primetime repeat on ITV
(in what’s now universally regarded as the Doctor
Who slot) or, better still, just keep Thunderbirds
are Go there, particularly as the series revolves around a family working
together, a commendable idea that you don’t see much these days in TV fiction
(soaps aside).
Anyway: Thunderbirds are still go. Hurrah
for that.
No comments:
Post a Comment