My Favourite TV: Thunderbirds



I think that this is another TV series that I can’t imagine watching during its original transmission. Running for 32 episodes from 1965 to 1966 it was the story of a secret organisation dedicated to saving lives through the application of advanced technology. Based in 2065 it portrayed a world very like our own, peppered by amazing devices and rich lifestyles but also a place of armed conflict, crime and even terrorism. Watching it again over 40 years later – as I have been doing over the past few months – I was surprised that I remembered so much from the individual episodes (the rescue ones anyway) though I suppose that I must have seen some episodes many times over.


Of course watching the series with an adult mindset is a wholly different experience. Despite being very dated by now the show is still surprisingly dramatic – despite the fact that all of the characters and rescue victims are played by puppets complete with obvious strings attached. The production values, especially for what was a children’s show in the early 1960’s, are still fairly impressive and could probably still captivate a very young audience today. The effects are often completely over the top with explosions ripping apart buildings or mountainsides with great effect. Everything – and I do mean everything – appears to be atomic powered including trans-Atlantic airliners. But what made me chuckle more than anything else was the cause of many of the almost disasters. Nearly every call-out of International Rescue was because of failures in design or a practically non-existent Health and Safety regime. Be it illegal satellites being damaged by run-away rockets or gigantic department stores with faulty sprinkler systems to say nothing of automated (atomic powered naturally) mobile logging factories out of control and heading towards a newly constructed dam, it was the lack of foresight and simple planning that put people in peril and resulted in IR blasting off from their secret base in the mid-Pacific ocean to rescue them. It was, at times, almost hilariously funny.


The show did, I think, have a huge impact on my very impressionable young self. I think it taught me that problems – no matter their source of their cause – had technological, scientific, reasonable solutions. Not only were the heroes flying around in and driving technological wonders (as often were those being rescued) but problems were solved and solutions arrived at by the engineering genius behind the organisation – known naturally as Brains. It was Science that saved the day, even if it was sometimes Science that caused the problem in the first place (I’m thinking about the giant alligators here….). Anyway, if you have small children and access to the DVD box-set I’d check it out and see what they think. It might be a bit dated for the computer game generation, but the little ones might like it. I certainly enjoyed watching them again.