After Thunderbird 5 is attacked, International Rescue face a foe from beyond the Earth.

I first read John Theydon’s novel, the basis of this enhanced audiobook, back in the 1970s, after picking up a copy of his three Armada books based on one of my favourite TV shows in a second-hand store. Although it expanded the canvas of International Rescue’s adventures, it didn’t always quite ring true (there were some odd errors, and from time to time it was hard to imagine the characters speaking in quite the way they did). But it was the first novel – simply called Thunderbirds at the time – and it tried to bring in everything that the kids of the day would recognise from the series.

Jump forward over 40 years, and we’ve gone past the recasting for the 2004 movie and the same (mostly) for Thunderbirds are Go’s three seasons (David Graham being an honourable exception). Unlike those, Anderson Entertainment aren’t creating new adventures for the Thunderbirds team, but instead have struck a deal with ITV to look back to the hinterland of the original series, starting with this novel. And unlike Big Finish’s Avengers series, which has used the contemporary comic strips as a jumping off point for new stories, this is a very faithful rendition of the story, albeit with some gender-swapping and removal of archaic language use to make it more acceptable in the 21st century.

Big Finish merit a mention as there’s a lot of their freelance personnel involved here – from director Samuel Clemens to sound designers Toby Hrycek-Robinson and Benji Clifford – and they’re distributing the digital version. Composer Joe Kraemer provides the score, which seems designed to pastiche Barry Gray’s incidental music (although it’s a shame that certain parts of the original couldn’t have been reused for authenticity), and of course Nicholas Briggs is executive producing the project with Jamie Anderson.

There’s a whole new cast (Graham having decided aged 95 that it was high time Nosey Parker was played by someone else) and as the extras reveal, the actors had differing approaches to presenting their parts. Some opt for full renditions, some are more influenced by the cadences on certain words to evoke the originals, while others try to reflect their characters’ backgrounds. This does mean that some characters sound much more like the originals than others, but as with any recasting, the core question is whether the actors embody the spirits of the characters – and on the whole, under Clemens’ guidance, they do.

It’s an enhanced audiobook rather than an adaptation to audio so producer and adaptor Andrew Clements opts not to pare back Theydon’s text, perhaps thereby losing some of the opportunities that the audio medium brings in its storytelling. It would be great if for future projects maybe that balance can be reworked with the Theydon text fully adapted into the audio format– I suspect this story could have been told in rather less time (e.g. the detailed description of how Scott gets to Thunderbird 1 from the living room…)

Verdict: This will be an original adventure to many, and it shows the potential that is there to bring Thunderbirds to audio. 6/10

Paul Simpson

Click here to order the download from Big Finish

Or here for the CD set  from Anderson Entertainment

A hardback reissue of the book with the new artwork can be ordered here