In 2007, Thunderbirds creator Gerry Anderson was involved with the original release of his 1986 private detective series Dick Spanner P.I. and chatted with Paul Simpson about the project – and much more. This archive interview is presented in full for the first time.

 

Dick Spanner has a Round the Horne / I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again type of humour to it. What was the genesis of its tone?

Round about the time we started to shoot, we had a request from Janet Street Porter who wanted something which was a comedy and fairly short, which she could slot into her Sunday morning Network 7 programme. I had a writer by the name of Tony Barwick, we’d worked together for many years, and he had just the right sense of humour to write it. Essentially it’s a play on words.

We’ve always had a way in English with words. We all accept words for what they are but if you start stretching, many of them have a double meaning, and if you play on that, in terms of introducing those secondary meanings into a television show, it can be very amusing.

Have there been elements that went over people’s heads?

I don’t think so – obviously I don’t have the opportunity to talk to the whole audience. When the show went out, I was very surprised how well it was received. It was made in stop motion. The stop motion was fairly simple, it was made on a very low budget, and because I’d been used to spending huge sums of money on my series, I thought people might accuse me of being a cheap jack. I was really delighted when I heard that people liked it and wanted to talk about it.

Why did you go the stop motion route?

It was a new avenue for me, but of course the main reason was one of cost. I used to work with puppets and it was very slow, meticulous, painful work, and people don’t realise that it was hugely expensive to produce. There was no way that we could use puppets in the same way that we had been used to doing. We came up with the idea of stop motion, and I think that the fact it was stop motion added to its charm. It wasn’t something that we masterminded, it was just the way it happened.

And another change of direction after the glove puppets of Terrahawks?

Yes, it was, in a way, something different, and another way of producing the sort of programmes that I was known for.

Were you still looking for new things to do, or did you still feel trapped as “The Puppet Man”?

There’s no doubt about it that I was trapped, shortly after having made my first show. For many years I found that difficult to live with. At the time, I had an ambition to become something like what Steven Spielberg is today, and I found myself making puppet films. I made a tragic error: I thought that if I made the puppet films really good, and shoot them as one would shoot a movie, the broadcasters would show, “This guy has got talent, let’s give him a life action show to make.” Of course the reverse happened: the reaction was, “They’re terrific programmes he makes with the puppets. Let’s give him some more.” I was typecast and I was constantly looking for ways to make the puppets as near as possible to a live action show. It was a case in the one you just referred to: we made glove puppets and managed to get a certain amount of expression onto the faces. It was me trying to break out of my cage!

You’d done live action series like UFO, The Protectors and Space:1999 which are action/adventures. Dick Spanner is a different sort of show – was it an attempt to get away from that genre?

I have to say throughout my career, I’ve had very little to do with deciding what I want to do next. I’ve never been in the position of being a multi-millionaire so that I could say, “I am going to do this!” I have to have the backing of a broadcaster or a financier, and there are always strings attached. I always tried to do whatever I was doing to the very best of my ability but I suppose when I got to making Thunderbirds, for the first time, I began to develop a respect for the work I was doing.

There’s a different feel between Stingray and Thunderbirds – the latter is more realistic, and you’re visiting something that’s going on… When you were working on the scripts, how much did you have to be conscious of the format and how much did you work on the story with the characters primarily?

When I was writing scripts for puppet films, obviously I had to take into account the limitations of puppets. I remember one writer sending in a script that opened with the statement: “Picture fades in. 600 horsemen gallop in low gravity across the Moon’s surface”! That’s an extreme case but clearly I knew there were certain things that the puppets couldn’t do well, and so I had to script in such a way that we were able to overcome the problems.

Did you find when you moved onto the live action that you were still in that mindset? Or did you feel free?

There’s no question about it, when I first turned to live action, I had what people might consider to be silly thoughts. I was standing in the middle of a live action set, thinking “Aren’t actors wonderful because they can walk? Look, their mouth is moving in sync with their dialogue! And they’re looking in the right direction!” These weren’t serious thoughts but certainly I couldn’t help noticing things were easy.

There’s a lot of movement in the UFO title sequence…

I was trying to bring the science fictional ideas to the screen, and to be as realistic and believable as possible. If an alien was approaching Earth and it was something that could cause terrible destruction, it was very important for Interceptors to be launched quickly. Because they were on the Moon’s surface, they would have had to be wearing space suits to get across the surface to their craft, so I had to devise a way they could be injected into the cockpit quickly.

The 1980s shows like Terrahawks and Dick Spanner have a certain innocence to them that had gone from the live action shows. Was that the brief you were given?

I got very few briefs about the way I set up a show, but one thing I was always conscious of was that there were young people watching these programmes, and I suppose I was trying to project a cinematic role model. I lived through the last war and knew how terrible it was and how easy it is to turn violence by one group of people against another, and in all my storytelling I tried to avoid gratuitous violence. They say messages are for Western Union, and I didn’t think “This is a message, I must write it” but I tried all the time to say “This is the way we should think, this is the way we should behave” and if one does that, it does tend to look as if one is aiming at a lower age audience.

We kept all dialogue clean and if you do that, people think it’s intended for a younger audience. That was not by design. It was for a family audience. That was my trademark, I think. I think that families want their children to watch television to entertain them, and of course if mum sits down watching a children’s show, she can be bored out of her mind. I tried to make something that was always made on two levels: one level was for the younger audience, and the other level was humour or threats that were staged in such a way that they would go straight over the youngsters’ heads and therefore wouldn’t do them any harm.

The format of Captain Scarlet is predicated on violence happening so that the Mysteron threat can be carried out…

But in the case of Captain Scarlet, it wasn’t a case of war between man and man. I felt that it was necessary violence because the story was the people of the Earth were united against a common enemy, and the enemy was not human at all. I never saw that as being violent.

The 2005 version of Captain Scarlet has far more questioning by the team. When you were working on the scripts, were you consciously changing what you’d done in the 1960s, or was it just a reflection of the way storytelling is in the 21st Century?

I think one has to understand that television has moved on a long way, and I as a person have come on a long way too. I was thinking differently. [New] Captain Scarlet was a show that I was very proud of anyway, but unfortunately the broadcaster treated it like rubbish. I will never forgive them for that. It did me a lot of damage. It spoiled everything for a crew of 180 people who worked for two years on it.

Incidentally, you might be interested to know that ITV, who now own all of my shows, have recently informed me that they will… I have been trying to get the rights to remake Thunderbirds for three years, and finally a few weeks ago I was told that they had decided to give the remake of Thunderbirds to another producer. I think it is an appalling decision: the Japanese-made Thunderbirds cartoon, Thunderbirds 2068, failed; Polygram made a load of nonsense called Turbo Charged Thunderbirds and spent £650,000 on a pilot for Thunderbirds which was thrown in the trashcan, and of course the feature film, which I had nothing to do with at all, was one of the biggest turkeys of all time. In fact Universal Pictures were so embarrassed that I wasn’t involved, and all the protests that were coming from people, they offered me $750,000 to attend the premiere and say how wonderful the picture was. I turned that down. It’s a sad comment on today’s broadcasting, and it’s little wonder that when I get home, and sit down to watch television, there’s not a great deal that is worth watching.

Have you watched the new Doctor Who?

I was never a Doctor Who fan. I saw recently one of the episodes, just to see what they had done to it, and I thought that the new Doctor Who is very very good. Not the sort of thing that I would or could be doing but I think the success speaks for itself. It’s a great show.

Was animation something you considered before New Captain Scarlet?

I never considered CGI as animation. I thought of it as a brand new way of making special effects, and of making movies. There is animation involved but animation as we know it. All the characters that were built in CGI moved realistically because the scenes are all enacted before the picture is made. An actor on a stage moves as per the script and as per the director and that information is then attached to the CGI model of that character – push a button and that character then walks and does all the movements that that actor has done. You could call that animation; I don’t. There are a number of little bits and pieces that are true animation but you get that in all the modern movies.

Did you want to stay in live action?

I was always more interested in live action, but I spent some time directing commercials and some of the commercials had to be animated by virtue of the script. I’ve tended to be driven by other people!

What are you up to at the moment?

I’m setting up a new series called The Andermat Thunderbolt. This is animation, for an audience of 6-12 year olds, the top end of children’s programmes. The final result will look on the screen something like an earlier show I made, Lavender Castle. It will be my show, but it’s going to be filmed at Cosgrove Hall films in Manchester. They’re probably the top people in that sphere. The two names together should guarantee a lot of attention.

We’re in the process of talking to distributors at the moment. What will happen is that a distributor, whoever that may be finally, will put up enough money for us to commence production and as soon as the first picture is finished, their sales force will sell it around the world, thus raising enough money for us to finish the series. I’m aiming to do something as successful as Bob The Builder.

It’s really difficult to convey the format in words. The basis is two cartoon characters that travel to a planet called Andermat, and Andermat has a legend attached to it, which is that it’s a magic planet. It features the Andermat Thunderbolt, which is a steam railway engine of gigantic proportions – the engine is probably something like fifty feet high. We have two explorers who are constantly looking around the planet trying to find the source of the planet’s magic.

We have a villain, whose name is Genghis Khan, but he talks to his friends sarcastically and says, “You can call me Ken!” He has a flying machine which is quite extraordinary because it’s made of iron, it’s fired by coal, and as it says in the script, everything about it suggests that it couldn’t and shouldn’t’ fly, but the point is that it does. In every episode he gets up to certain nasty little tricks, and the stories are how they battle with them and overcome the problem.

I can’t do justice to the story by just talking about it. Although it’s made for 6-12s, it will be highly watchable by adults as well. It’s a family show.

Editor’s Note: Sadly, The Andermat Thunderbolt never went into production. Gerry Anderson died on Boxing Day 2012.