ABOUT ME

Early 1965.  The Anglia region of ITV (part of the UK television network) is showing either first run or repeated episodes of Gerry Anderson's "Stingray" television series.  Settled infront of the black and white television set, I am sat on my father's lap, just turning two years of age, and enthralled for 30 minutes as the screen is filled with exciting action, tension, explosions, shoot-outs, terrific and appealing puppet characters, all manner of fantastic ships, aircraft, and the iconic submarine itself.  In those days, "anything could happen in the next half hour", and frequently did!

But my dad wasn't only sitting there with me watching it for my enjoyment.  He also had a fascination for the futuristic craft shown on the series.  At that time, he was in the Royal Air Force (RAF).  Originally an air frame fitter when he started his National Service in 1948, he signed up to stay on for a further 25 years.  His job was maintaining and repairing combat aircraft, but in his spare time he would drive my mother mad, taking apart her latest electronic gadgets such as food mixers, washing machines, toasters and kettles.  He said it was to familiarise himself with how the gadgets should look when they were working properly - so that he would know how to fix them if they ever broke down. 

Despite my father's abilities as a mechanic, I - unfortunately - never took after him.  Even today, the workings of engines under the bonnets of cars are the equivalent of hieroglyphics to me, and most tools in my hands are about as useful as Doctor Who's sonic screwdriver would be to a Neolithic caveman. I know a hammer can drive in nails - but in my case they never go straight and often get bent half way in.

(Images below show me in 1963, 1966 and 1973)

The series I remember watching next is Gerry Anderson's "Thunderbirds", one of the most wonderfully iconic British television series ever made.  The perfect combination of visual magic with puppet characters and fantastically exciting stories so much loved by children and adults alike. Of course, whenever he wasn't working, my father would be there watching it too, marvelling at the increasingly futuristic designs of the aircraft concepts showcased by the remarkable model makers and special effects teams.  

I also have vague recollections of watching subsequent series: "Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons", and "Joe 90" - who every young boy of that age wanted to be.  I don't think "The Secret Service" was shown in the Anglia TV region, but Gerry Anderson's "UFO" was clearly considered to be unsuitable viewing for me aged 7 in 1970 so I was never aware of its existence.  I also grew up watching "Doctor Who". I don't recall seeing William Hartnell as the hero, but I definitely remember the combination of Patrick Troughton's Doctor with his companions Jamie and Zoe in 1969.  My sister often hid her face behind a cushion when the monsters came on.  I didn't mind the monsters and the terror - but I will admit to waking up several times in the middle of night having had nightmares of being exterminated by a Dalek.

Another cult series I distinctively remember watching with my father was "The Avengers".  I would have been far too young to watch the Cathy Gale era, but I remember loving Emma Peel and subsequently Tara King.  Those series were not aimed at 6 to 8 year olds, but I was hooked even at that age on anything with action and adventure rather than the boring "A Family at War" which my mother preferred watching.  Amazingly, I rediscovered "A Family at War" - the WW2 based kitchen sink drama - in the early 1990s when it was repeated on Granada Plus and finally got to appreciate it as an adult.

In 1970, the RAF posted my father to Sharjah in the Persian Gulf for 12 months. He had to go alone for the whole year, leaving our mother with myself aged 7 and my younger sister aged 6 at RAF Wyton in Cambridgeshire where we had lived since I had been born.  Our dear mother became desperately lonely without him and developed a lifelong alcohol addiction problem.  I missed my dad too, and at that age developed a compulsive eating disorder which has resulted in skewing my metabolic rate and me battling with my weight my entire life. In trying to deal with and having to experience my mother's erratic behaviour whilst under the influence of drink, my comfort was food ....and watching my favourite television progammes.  In 1970 this included the BBC showing the classic "Star Trek" for the first time.  I loved that show so much that in my monthly letters I wrote to my dad so far away, not only did I plead with him to come home to "make Mummy better", I drew pictures of the iconic starship for him and talked about the series.  My father stuck all my letters in a scrapbook which he kept till the end of his life; I now have it somewhere in my loft and occasionally, when I come across it, I look with amazement at my 7 year old scribblings to him.

One thing I did have to remember him by, however, was a model train layout with model houses, roads and plastic trees laid out on my bedroom floor that he had bought for me.  I played with it for hours on my own, wishing he could be there to share it with me as he had when we first built it together.  Several of the houses were given to us by a neighbour breaking up his own display when he tired of it.  I still have all those trains and model houses over 50 years later today which you can see elsewhere on this website.

Other classic cult sci-fi action based television series I remember watching in the late 1960s and early 1970s were "Lost in Space", "The Time Tunnel", "Land of the Giants", "The Champions", "Randall & Hopkirk Deceased", "The Persuaders", "Jason King", "Timeslip" and "Catweaazle".  We moved to RAF Ternhill in Shropshire in September 1971 in the middle of Jon Pertwee's reign of "Doctor Who" with companions Jo Grant and Sarah Jane Smith, both of whom I adored and still consider to be the best companions on the show, ever.  By 1973 I remember watching the first series of ITV's "The Tomorrow People" on its debut, mid week, after school.

However, my love for that series and everything else was curtailed when Dad was suddenly posted to RAF Bruggen in Germany in August 1973 for a period of three years.  There were no married quarters for us as a family to live in available over there, so Dad initially went over to Germany alone. Our mother took us to stay with our uncle (her brother) on the North Wales border.  One afternoon, Granada TV screened an episode of "UFO".  The episode was "Survival".  I got to see some of it, but my uncle switched the channel over to sport (cricket, his ultimate passion and my pet hate) less than half way through.  I remember being disappointed as, at the age of 10, my fascination for sci-fi shows was well developed.  I would have to wait another 14 years until I would get to see "UFO" again. 

I also remember whilst we stayed with my aunt and uncle, Granada showing the film "Thunderbird 6" one Sunday afternoon. Although I hoped to watch it, unfortunately for me, my mother decided we were all going walking up a mountain at a nearby country park whilst it was on. I begged to be left in the flat so that I could watch the film on my own, but my plea was ignored and I sulked the whole afternoon in the big outdoors because I had to miss it.  In those days BEFORE video recorders, when something got shown on tv, you only ever got to see it ONCE. If you missed it, that was tough!  A repeat might happen in a few YEARS time, if you were lucky. 

We eventually joined my father in Germany in September 1973. The Germans always dubbed everything into German on their own channels, so for three years in those days before British forces television abroad, we watched a limited amount of British and American television shows broadcast in English on the Dutch channels which showed them with Dutch subtitles.  We saw series such as "Doctor Who", repeats of classic "Star Trek", "Freewheelers", "MASH", "Kojak", "Police Woman" and even "Planet of the Apes".  "The Six Million Dollar Man" was also a massive hit in Europe, as it was in the rest of the world.

Whilst living in Germany, from the age of 10, I began writing short stories and small novels which I illustrated as part of my school homework.  My stories were heavily influenced by my favourite reading material at that time: C.S. Lewis's Narnia chronicles and Arthur Ransome's "Swallows & Amazons".  Clearly inspired by "Star Trek", I wrote and illustrated several stories about a team of super intelligent mice who travelled through space in a star ship that resembled three conjoined wooden barrels. In one of the stories, the adventurous mice encountered a space phenomenon which was a direct rip off of the space amoeba brain in the episode "The Immunity Syndrome".  My fiction writing became so prolific that for Christmas in 1974, my parents gave me my first portable typewriter.

Significantly, in September 1975 - two thirds of the way through our living in Germany - the first series of "Space 1999" was aired on ITV in the UK.  Of course, we couldn't see it in Europe.  I remember reading about this "fantastic new series hitting UK television screens" in "The Sun" (we still got the British tabloid newspapers on the RAF bases in Germany, even though a day after they appeared in the UK). I was so disappointed that it was something I couldn't watch - and soon afterwards I even forgot all about it, resigning myself to the fact that it was a sci-fi series I would probably never get to see.

In September 1976 our family relocated back to the UK. Although my father had been posted to RAF Valley on the island of Anglesey on the North Wales coast, once again there were no married quarters available on the base for us to live in.  Mum, my sister and myself therefore had to go back to live temporarily at RAF Ternhill in Shropshire. As we began unpacking just the essentials, pending a subsequent move to North Wales at a later date, Dad set up the portable black and white set we had brought back from Germany.  It was our first full day back in the country, Saturday 4th September 1976.  ITV's "World of Sport" was coming to an end.  

And then my whole world changed!

We were in the ATV Midlands ITV region.  ATV was one of the regional ITV franchises owned by Lord Lew Grade, whose ITC company produced so many of the classic series which I had grown up watching including all of Gerry Anderson's shows amongst many others.  ATV was among the first of the ITV regions to debut the second series of "Space 1999".  I watched in awe as the episode "The Metamorph" was screened.  From that magical moment, "Space 1999" became a major part of my life and to this day remains my all time favourite television series.  From the jazzy music opening credits to the "futuristic" design of the Moonbase itself, the series was bursting with visual creativity, with stunning model effects that were so effective that you actually had to believe they were real.  Importantly, I fell in love with the characters as portrayed by the brilliant cast: the camaraderie between them, and the fact that Maya (the gorgeous Catherine Schell) could transform herself into any living thing.

With hindsight, I know the whole concept of the series was flawed - how could the Moon actually survive such a catastrophic disaster of being blown out of the Earth's orbit? And how could it travel such vast distances in space in such a short period of time that it encountered new alien planets and civilisations on a weekly basis?  But these flaws were always overshadowed by stunning set designs, the modelwork, the costumes, the technology, and the sense of adventure and wonder. The series had energy in buckets, and was unlike anything else being screened at that time.  It even looked bigger and better than "Doctor Who", and was perfectly pitched at me, an impressionable 13 year old who began to wonder what the near future world of 1999 would actually be like.  The series' depiction of modernistic and "futuristic" architecture ignited my own interest in that subject, and I began doodling sketches of what I perceived to be futuristic buildings whilst trying to build a model set of the Moonbase Alpha interior sets from paper and selloptape.

I loved the series so much that, in those days before affordable domestic video recorders, I placed an audio cassette recorder infront of the television and recorded the soundtrack of episodes 5 to 9 which I subsequently listened to over and over again in my bedroom: learning the scripts off by heart, keeping the visuals in my head, and loving every second of Derek Wadsworth's music which threaded each episode. 

I quickly discovered "Look-In". This weekly UK comic was an off-shoot of the TV Times magazine, aimed squarely at the youth market with its features on current pop music, films and mostly television series specifically created for children.  By late 1976 it had been featuring "Space 1999" for over a year.  As soon as it's cover featured characters from the series, I spotted it and began buying it every week, following the comic strip story from the series.

At the end of October, in WH Smiths in Market Drayton, I also spotted the Space 1999 Annual. Not prepared to wait to have it bought for me as a Christmas present, I bought it with my own pocket money to read straight away.  It was filled with magnificent colour images from the series - in those days before the internet and fan books, the ONLY way to get photos from any television series. It became my "bible" as I read and re-read it over again whilst listening to my audio tapes of the five episodes I had been lucky enough to preserve.  However, even though the second series was now on television, the stories and pictures were from the first season that I remembered reading about a year earlier, and which I had missed.  It was frustrating knowing how much of the series I had never seen and probably never would. But the images fascinated me and excited my imagination.

Then, disaster struck.  A house became available for us at RAF Valley, and after 9 weeks we moved to Anglesey where, to my horror, I discovered that we were out of range of the regional ATV signal from Birmingham and had to put up with HTV Wales broadcast from Cardiff. In my new school, Holyhead County Secondary, I excitedly asked if anyone remembered the first series (which I wanted to know more about), and told them it would only be matter of time until the new second series came to HTV.  

But it didn't!  To my annoyance, HTV was one of two of the 14 ITV regions who chose to avoid the series.  I even wrote to them in Cardiff asking would they screen it.  I got a standard response thanking me for my interest in the series, but that they currently had no plans to show it.  

My only way to stay in contact with the series was through the magnificent "Look-In" magazine which - as well as running an impressively illustrated comic strip of the series every week - began a regular half page feature from Gerry Anderson himself where he answered viewers' questions about his series.  In early 1977 it featured a competition asking fans to design their own Moon city.  With my newly-found interest in futuristic architecture and design inspired by "Space 1999", I drew a series of pencil drawings and submitted them.  A few weeks later I had a surprise when a parcel with a letter arrived for me in the post.  The parcel contained a Dinky Eagle Transporter (I already had one, and a white Dinky Eagle Freighter for Christmas 1976), so it became my third; and a copy of Tim Heald's paperback book "The Making of Space 1999".  More importantly, the letter told me that part of my winning the top prize was to travel to Blackpool to meet Gerry Anderson himself at the new Space City Exhibition.  

To say that I was a television addict by the age of 15 would be an understatement.  With the exception of ITV's "The Professionals", I avoided most detective drama serials, and all the soaps.  I loved some comedies such as "Dad's Army", "Are You Being Served?" and "'Allo 'Allo".  But my real passion was always cult and sci-fi.  After the "failure" of the second season of "Space 1999" to take off, ITV - with the exception of "Quatermass" and "Children of the Stones", tended to steer clear of making its own sci-fi and relied on buying it from America.  So in the latter half of the 1970s and early 1980s we were blessed with the likes of "The Bionic Woman", "The Man From Atlantis", "Logan's Run", "Buck Rogers in the 25th Century", "Battlestar Galactica", "CHiPS", "Knight Rider", "Street Hawk" and "V". Gerry Anderson made a return with "Terrahawks", but I found it a huge let-down after the high of Space 1999. The BBC continued with its own "Doctor Who", and also branched out to the excellent "The Tripods" and "Blakes 7", but also relied on imports such as "The Fantastic Journey", "Wonder Woman", "Automan", and by 1988 even began showing the newest from the Star Trek cannon, "The Next Generation".

Between 1976 and end of 1982, I audio taped all my favourite shows, 1 x C60 cassette per episode. I built up a huge collection in my bedroom.  In 1978, HTV began repeating the first series of "Space 1999".  Initially I got very excited, but I soon discovered that as HTV was split between two regions, HTV West  transmitting from Bath screened the first few episodes, while HTV Wales (my region!) elected to replace the show with Welsh language shows for pre-school children.  Once again, I wrote to HTV to complain, but this time - after a few weeks - they suddenly began to show the repeats, and I got to see my first episode of Year 1, "Alpha Child".  I was instantly both excited and disappointed.  Excited to finally get to see some episodes of the series, but gobsmacked that Year 1 didn't include Maya and Tony, had new characters who I had seen in the annuals but never saw on the nine Year 2 episodes I had watched in 1976; and the music was totally different.  I was gutted when the series was replaced with something else after just 5 weeks.  But my appetite to see more remained insatiable.

In 1979 I was able to find a fellow fan of "Space 1999" who lived elsewhere in the country who joined the first Space 1999 fan club as I had.  He had the entire second series on audio cassette tape and sent me copies of them all.  So I was given the unique opportunity of hearing the entire set of episodes without being able to actually see them. I adored the incidental music throughout, and would listen to the tracks over and over again until the flimsy tapes snapped or mangled inside my player.

1979 was also the year that, as I turned 16, my father sent my first proper novel to a publishing house  and they agreed to publish it.  Shortly before Christmas 1979, the postman arrived one Saturday morning with a parcel for me.  My father, who had finished in the RAF at the end of 1977 and then got a job working for British Aerospace in Saudi Arabia the following year was home for one of his rare holidays.  I opened the package to find 12 hard-bound and dust-jacketed copies of my novel "The Secret of Blackrock Falls".  When my school headmaster found out I had had a book published, he arranged for Radio 4 to come to my home to interview me about it.  And then, one afternoon after school, two guys from HTV (all the way from the Cardiff office rather than the Bangor studio) arrived at our house to interview me. They had rung earlier in the day whilst I was at school, and my mother had told them it would be okay for them to come to Anglesey to record the interview.  Needless to say, when I got home to unexpectedly find them waiting for me, I wasn't happy.  I told them straight that I hated HTV for the way it had treated fans of Space 1999, and I refused to give them an interview until HTV agreed to screen Year 2 of the series. They left, heading on the 4 to 5 hour journey back to Cardiff without the interview, and my mother giving me an ear-bashing for my "rudeness".  It was worth it for the principle!

I saved the royalties from my book in my bank account, and after passing my driving test in March 1981 whilst I was still in Sixth Form at school, I bought myself my first car, a metallic brown Ford Capri.  In September 1981 I drove it down to college in Dartford, Kent, to start a three year BA course in Landscape Architecture. My passion since the age of 7 when Dad was away in Sharjah had been gardening!  Whilst on holiday from college in early 1982, back on Anglesey, Granada TV began repeating the first series of Space 1999. Knowing that people who lived on the north coast of the island could pick up the Granada signal, I took a portable TV/cassette recorder in my car to the top of Mount Nebo on the north of the island, and sat in the car in a layby in the middle of nowhere, watching the episodes on the 4 inch black and white screen, most of them for the first time ever, whilst recording the audio onto cassette tape.  The series was later shown by London Weekend Television which I picked up in my room in college later in the year, so I was able to watch the first season episodes all over again.

The end of 1982 marked a significant change in my television viewing and archiving habit when my mother bought our first domestic video recorder.  At last I was able to video tape my favourite series, but - as those who were the same as me in those days will know - blank video tapes were very expensive to buy.  My dad was very supportive and always sent me additional money to fund my hobby when I needed it, as well as the money to keep my car on the road after the publishing company who had published my book went bankrupt and the royalties stopped coming in. Student grants only went so far!

It was on my course in Landscape Architecture that I got to build several model landscapes, and to photograph them.  As students, we were encouraged to build as cheaply as possible, and be as inventive as we could be in finding cheap (or no cost) materials to work with.  This experience would become invaluable in my more recent hobby of diorama building.

Easter 1984, I was home from college back on Anglesey and helping my mother redecorate the downstairs of the house which my parents had bought in the village of Caergeiliog after my father quit the RAF.  Imagine my astonishment when, on Tuesday and Thursday mornings at 10.30am, HTV suddenly started showing Space 1999's second season.  The TV Times billed it as a "repeat".  EXCUSE ME???? They got that VERY wrong!  It was definitely the first time it had been on HTV.  Fortunately, I had spotted it in the TV guide beforehand, so my trusty video recorder was there and I had to leave it with Mum when I returned to college so that she could continue to record the rest of the series over the next few weeks (along with my other favourite shows I was recording at that time).  HTV must have been narked when I complained to ITC about them having purchased the series "as a repeat" at half the original cost they should have paid, as - after just 17 episodes, they pulled the series to put on something else instead. Spoilsports!  Those final 7 episodes of Year 2 (although transmitted on the Bravo satellite channel across the UK in 1992), were not terrestrially broadcast for the first time in Wales until the BBC showed them in 1998/1999, some 23 years after they had been filmed.

At the very end of June 1984 I got the result of my BA(Hons) Degree course. I had passed, and was the first person on our side of the family ever to get a degree.  My proud mother immediately wrote to my father in Saudi Arabia to give him the good news.  My dad was always proud of me. Although I was never going to understand mechanics like him, he supported me all the way in my chosen career and always did his best to make sure I had whatever I needed, financially.  But it had been hard only seeing him for 5 weeks every year when he managed to come back to the UK for holidays inbetween his demanding job in Saudi Arabia.  

I drove home to Anglesey on Thursday 5th July .... but on the morning of Friday 6th July, a police officer turned up at the house to give Mum the sad news that Dad had died of a heart attack that very morning.  He was just 53.  When his belongings were brought back to the UK for us, the letter my mother had posted to him on Monday 2nd July telling him about my success was open. We could only assume that he had opened it and read it before he died.  We always hoped that was so, as the reason he had taken such a job away from us was to give us a good life, and myself the chance to do something with my life.  I will always be grateful for his sacrifice, as hard as it was to have seen so little of him in the previous 6 years.

His death was a major blow to our family.  My sister was living and working in Chester. I had my year out job to go to (near Preston), and Mum's alcohol problem took off with a vengeance, culminating in her accidentally setting fire to the house in December 1984.  All the new furniture and carpets in the lounge she had bought with the insurance money following Dad's death went up in smoke.  Mum never got over losing Dad so young, and her alcohol addiction stayed with her until she developed dementia after 2009.  She died in 2015.

Back to college between 1985 and 1986, I got my Diploma in Landscape Architecture and moved back home with Mum - now relocated to Connah's Quay near Chester - where I got my first regular job with Wrexham Maelor Borough Council.  In the Granada region, imagine my surprise in 1987 when they started repeating Gerry Anderson's "UFO".  I was there with my video recorder and got nearly all of the episodes - my first opportunity to see the series properly. I was as much in awe of it as I had been watching Space 1999 the first time over a decade earlier.  I had to take the video recorder with me to Market Drayton in Shropshire to stay overnight with an old friend of Mum's when the last - and most controversial episodes "Timelash" and "The Long Sleep" were screened at 11.30pm by Central ITV.

By 1990, I still had never seen the last seven episodes of the second season of "Space 1999".  But then I found someone who had them on video tape, and he made copies for me. The tapes arrived on the morning I was due to set off on a week's holiday in the Highlands of Scotland with the girlfriend I had at that time. We took the videos with us and watched them in the evenings at our cottage. FINALLY, I got to see the last unseen episodes of the series, some 14 years after seeing the first!  VICTORY!!!!!!!!!!!! 

Of course, I replaced all my video recordings of Space 1999 and my favourite series as they were (mostly) all released on commercial video tape through the 1990s, and then in 2012 I bought my first DVD recorder and began replacing all the videos with DVDs.  Today I have over 10,000 DVDs in my collection of all my favourite series and films.  More recently I have been adding Blu-Rays to my collection of my most treasured series. And of course, all the Gerry Anderson serials are at the top of my Blu-Ray list.

And so to my latest hobby.  When it isn't being used by unscrupulous people as a weapon with which to bully others from the comfort of their own keyboards, social media platforms such as Facebook can be a powerful tool to share common interests, tips, experiences and skills.  Having joined several Facebook groups where fans of Gerry Anderson's various series showcase their modelling skills, I began to think "Why can't I do that?"  Some of the work the fans produce is amazing.  

Of course, my own skills are limited.  There is no way I could ever scratch-build a vehicle or spaceship like others can cleverly do.  I have spent years collecting pre-built models, and in particular the models produced by Product Enterprise in the early to mid 2000s based on Gerry Anderson's early series.  My expertise is building landscape dioramas, so in the autumn of 2018 after the end of the re-enactment season, I started to construct my first purpose built diorama set - Woodland diorama 1 - on which to photograph the Product Enterprise UFO and Eagle Transporter from Space 1999.  I initially tested the tiny Konami UFO out on the model train layout I built into my loft between 1998 and 2000, but the area of flat woodland on it was limited.  I was impressed with the results that Woodland diorama 1 gave me, and posted them to the Facebook "UFO" and "Space 1999" groups where other fans were equally appreciative.  Having seen someone else build one of the Moonbase Alpha buildings from card, I decided to try the same and even amazed myself at the results. It all started from there.

My inspiration is very much the man behind much of the special effects work on Gerry's series - a guy by the name of Derek Meddings.  He led the team that built the model landscapes on which to film the various Thunderbirds and other craft his team dreamed up and built until UFO finished in 1970. After the series, he moved on to films where he won an Academy Award for his work on "Superman" (1978), as well as nominations for his other work on James Bond's "Moonraker" (1979), "Batman" (1989) and James Bond's "Goldeneye" (1995).  He died in 1995.

The special effects director on Space 1999 was Brian Johnson who designed the incredible Moonbase Alpha, inspired by his time working on the famous sci-fi flick "2001: A Space Odyssey".   After Space 1999, Johnson moved back onto film work and won Academy Awards for both "Alien" (1979) and "The Empire Strikes Back" (1980). He was further nominated for an Academy Award for his work on "Dragonslayer" (1981), and received a Saturn Award (for "The Empire Strikes Back") and a BAFTA Award (for the 1986 sequel to "Alien", "Aliens").

To both these men, and the teams who worked with them, to Gerry and Sylvia Anderson, and all the actors/actresses who gave me so much pleasure both as a child growing up and as an (aging) adult, my model diorama work of today has been inspired by you.  I thank you from the bottom of my heart.

To those of you who have taken the time to read this far about my inspiration, many thanks for hearing my story and enjoy your visit looking through my model work on this website.