00:00Well, we're in Worcester Museum and it's a buzzman's holiday for me because I'm a massive Gerry Anderson fan
00:06and there's a major exhibition here and this gentleman here is going to tell us all about it.
00:11How did it come about?
00:12Well, Nick, it all started many, many years ago for me because I loved the shows when I was growing
00:18up.
00:20Collected even as a little kid, kept everything.
00:23And then when you get older, you watch them again with a bit of a nostalgia buzz.
00:27But for me, I got fascinated with how the shows were made.
00:33To me, they were works of art and the people who worked on them were genius.
00:37So we've got the exhibition. I believe some of the models you've had to recreate
00:41because they didn't understand the value of some of this stuff back in the day.
00:44As I say to people and people were shocked, they just threw them away.
00:49The ambition of Gerry and Silver Anderson was to do live action filming, not puppets.
00:54And I think that the fact that Gerry Anderson particularly didn't really want to work with puppets in the first
00:59place
01:00drove the production standards to get higher and higher.
01:02It was kind of like, well, if I'm going to do puppet shows, they're going to be the absolute best
01:05you're ever going to see.
01:06So have we got some originals here and some that you've had to...
01:09We have, yeah.
01:09How's that process then?
01:10I was fortunate enough to go to quite a famous exhibition that took place in the mid-90s in London
01:17where I bought a few original puppet heads.
01:19And I was like, oh, I actually bought a puppet head and it was Joe Ninter.
01:22And then you look at it for a bit and you think, well, I don't just want to see it
01:26on the whole thing.
01:28So I contacted people who worked on the shows, managed to obtain parts for puppet bodies and parts for outfits
01:35and went on a bit of a mission to build them back into complete puppets.
01:40And I guess the next stage from restoring them to complete puppets was making replicas for puppets that no longer
01:46existed.
01:47So if you look at, like, our Scott Tracy puppet, that's been made because someone...
01:51There isn't an original Scott Tracy puppet known to exist in the world, sadly.
01:55Which is unbelievable for something so iconic.
01:57But they were all destroyed.
01:58But what they did do was kept a plaster cast of the original Scott Tracy sculpt.
02:04So I was able to obtain that, make a mould from it, and then completely re-engineer the whole thing
02:08from scratch.
02:09Make new moulds, make a new head in fibreglass, put the electronics into it,
02:13use original fabrics for the costumes and original materials, original puppet body moulds,
02:18and basically build the whole thing as new, the same as it was in the mid-1960s.
02:23So there's some of those in the exhibition, as well as some of the originals that we're fortunate to have.
02:26Well, it's very popular. The place is full.
02:29What are people's highlights? What are they saying to you they enjoy the most?
02:32I just love it. I mean, it's...
02:34The lovely thing is seeing that it's multi-generational,
02:37so we have granddads and grandparents and parents and kids and grandkids all coming together.
02:44And because not only were the shows massive in the 60s, but you had a big revival in the 1990s.
02:49Well, congratulations for doing it.
02:51Thank you, Nick.
02:51It's absolutely fabulous, pardon the pun.
02:54And make sure you come along to Worcester and enjoy it.
02:57It's here till September.
Comments