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Gerry Anderson – the first famous TV producer? Part 1 - Page 2

© Allan Lee

Again the series was a success, and Anderson tried to sell Granada on his next project, Supercar, about a vehicle which could fly, travel on the ground or go under the sea. Granada weren't interested, but ATV's Sir Lew Grade (later Lord Grade) was, and the first linked was forged in a working relationship that was to last through two decades and half a dozen hit series.

Supercar was the first of Gerry Anderson's productions to employ his trademark hardware. His modelmakers produced hi-tech looking equipment that looked real. Compared to some of his later creations, Supercar was relatively low tech - but it was a taste of things to come. The realistic look of later series such as Thunderbirds was heralded by Supercar. It also marked another milestone - the series was sold to the all-important US market. With that sale safely tucked under his belt, Anderson was given the go-ahead to produce a second series of Supercar by Lew Grade.

Anderson by now realised that he was tied to the puppets just as surely as were their strings, after a couple of live-action projects failed to take off. (He made a low-budget thriller called Crossroads to Crime but it was nowhere near as successful as Supercar, even though it starred the undoubted talents of British movie stalwarts Miriam Karlin, Harry Towb and Victor Maddern). Anderson once said "I started out doing puppet films because at that time I couldn't get any real actors for a halfpenny a week. I never had any real trouble with them - if any of the puppets talked back I could toss him into the furnace and that would be the end of that."

In a 1980 interview, Anderson admitted that the hardest trick his puppeteers had to master was making the stars walk. As his series became more sophisticated, and the puppets became less caricatured, the designers came up with more and more ingenious ways to stop the characters having to walk anywhere.

By the time the second series of Supercar was underway, Anderson was now irrevocably on the road to Supermarionation. Along the way, he would become a household name with his own fan club... he would make repeated success sales to the US market... and become the first producer to see the potential profits in TV-related merchandise - as we'll see in the next instalment.

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