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came knocking at the studio. Their first question was, ‘Who is Lady Penelope based on?’. I called Mary in and to my amazement she said, ‘I based her on Sylvia’.” Of course, Thunderbirds went on to be one of the most popular children’s TV shows in history and Sylvia an international celebrity, but the production company that she and husband Gerry Anderson founded almost a decade before hadn’t always been so successful. “I was on a summer holiday from LSE [university] when my father told me I needed to go and find something to do. I saw a card that said, ‘Small production company looking for holiday PA’, so I rang them up and was told to come in for an interview on Berry Hill, in the small Buckinghamshire town of Taplow. “It was a very hot day and I was wearing a suit. I climbed this wretched hill that went on forever to see a big gate and a really dilapidated old house at the top. I thought it was something weird, you never did know in those days, but I’d come that far, so I walked up and rang the bell. Seconds later a face appeared at the window and the door creaked open.” Sylvia stops and leans in, “This is just like a movie isn’t it?”. Drama still looms large in the mind of this storyteller, who widens her eyes for emphasis and howls after each punchline to reveal big dimples, which even in her mideighties, retain a certain doll-like quality. The house wasn’t haunted, she explains, or at least only by the company’s shy and
disorganised board of directors – “Oh they were like babies,” she jokes, “didn’t even know how to look after petty cash! “But they gave me the job and we soon started having fun, using the great ballroom on the ground floor of the house to shoot titles and commercials for TV.” Sylvia’s role was providing tea, filing expenses and if she was lucky, doing the odd bit of logistical work on set; but it was here that she first met Gerry, who she would eventually marry. Together with co-founder Arthur Provis and two other colleagues – producer Reg Hill and cinematographer John Read – they formed Anderson Provis Films, the breakaway company that would go on to create Thunderbirds (whereupon it changed its name to Century 21 Productions), moving to an office in another house further down the river without the guarantee of any paid work. Until a woman called Roberta Leigh dropped by a few weeks later. “It was just like something out of a very old movie, set in an orphanage or something, where the wealthy woman comes in a big car with a chauffeur and looks around and says ‘Oh yes, I think I can do something here’. She said she’d written some children’s books and wanted to make puppets of her characters. Well, we’d never thought about using puppets before, but because we were desperate we agreed to do it.” Cue the arrival of the rather sinister-looking and aptly titled, Torchy the Battery Boy. f
‘Being one of the few successful female producers, I did get a lot of attention’
graham franks/camera press
orget Pattie Boyd, Twiggy and Anita Pallenberg. If there was one blonde who spearheaded British style in the Sixties, it was Lady Penelope, a woman who never let size, stature or latent patriarchy stand in her way of saving the planet. Across the two series and two featurelength films that were made of Thunderbirds, she prevented the destruction of a dam, the take-down of United States Air Force and the detonation of an apocalyptic plutonium bomb, all the while teaching Jackie O a thing or two about how to wear a pillbox hat. Earlier this month it was announced that British actress Rosamund Pike will be lending her voice to an ITV remake of the show, entitled Thunderbirds Are Go!. Penelope’s loyal chauffeur, Parker, will be voiced by David Graham, who worked on the original show. But what of the original Penelope? Lady Penelope Creighton-Ward was based on Sylvia Anderson, the co-creator of the show, who also lent the marionette her voice. After the new series was announced, she invited me to her Berkshire home to discuss her career pulling the strings of Thunderbirds, Joe 90 and others. Situated at the end of a lane, through an overgrown wrought-iron gate somewhere in the vicinity of Maidenhead, it is only the bevy of garden-centre Aphrodites and Venus de Milos along the tree-lined path that give any indication Sylvia’s house exists. Their state of limblessness serving to reinforce the spectacle of the original Lady P, Parker and Captain Scarlet dolls, who are stood in place at the end of the hallway as I step inside. “I got them out for you!” she hollers in the same refined voice that once spoke to International Rescue via a Regency tea-pot, leading me into the kitchen. Today we drink Twinings infused with orange blossom – Sylvia liked the look of the packet so has bought three – before making our way into the lounge to eat ham and cheese sandwiches. Small, delicate and immaculately turned out in a multi-coloured blouse and beaded necklace, her hair in a carefully tousled bob, Sylvia is still every inch as glamorous as she was in the Sixties, if a little unsteady on her feet. A Lady Penelope birthday card is propped between family portraits on an oak dresser. “The puppeteer Mary Turner and I struggled with Lady Penelope for a while,” she explains, as we settle in. “It was easy to make the caricatures like Parker, but more difficult to create a human face. So Mary went away one weekend, came back on Monday morning and we’d finally got it – the plasticine model was moulded into silicone and then painted. “Well, when the press heard that Thunderbirds was going to be an hour’s show, they
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