This article was taken from theOctoberissue of Wired UK magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content bysubscribing online
Our beloved BBC, in its infinite wisdom, has decided that what Britain needs right now is another TV adaptation of the loathsome Just William books by Richmal Crompton. It will presumably be entitled Just William 2010: sod it, give the licence fee to whoever you want, we couldn't care less any more. This commission means that someone in Broadcasting House has decided that Just William has valuable lessons to teach the children of Britain. (Aside from the obvious "You may as well buy an Xbox, the BBC hates your face, now leave us alone to glop over hundred-year-old trash.")
Therefore, as an antidote to this audiovisual paraquat they intend to spray into our children's eyes, I say the BBC should re-run Gerry Anderson's Thunderbirds.
Bear with me.
Thunderbirdsis Rescue Fiction. All kids respond to rescue scenarios. Rescue Fiction is emotionally maturing - it removes the wish for magic, religion or flying people to zoom in to save the day; it confirms that it is a far more glorious and dazzling thing to invent ways to rescue ourselves.
It is also about astronauts. Real-life astronauts have become an unremarkable bunch. We only hear about them these days when they die. Hell, by the end of the 60s, the brilliant and imaginative pilot Scott Carpenter was selling crap on local TV. But in Thunderbirds, Jeff Tracy is an eccentric billionaire, able to convert his private Caribbean island into a secret cosmodrome for exotic aircraft and a re-usable space vessel, with enough scratch left over to support a cutting-edge skunkworks lab, servants and an inexhaustible volume of vermouth. Are you a government minister despairing over the seemingly unsolvable need to get kids interested in science? Thunderbirds says that science is awesome because you get to fly in space and live on a high-tech island full of booze. Beat that for incentive.
The Thunderbirds rescue people in trouble. That trouble usually involves some huge insane machine breaking down. There is a temptation to say, "Look, in the future people build big shit that breaks a lot." But a responsible parent sat watching Thunderbirds with such a mouthy, smackable child will say, "No. Pay attention. Firstly, you know full well that people don't always get things right first time, and you know that because not so long ago you couldn't eat or crap without a support crew."
But here's the important bit. Not that the stuff in Thunderbirds breaks and people need to be rescued - but that people thought of and built that stuff in the first place. Plans to move the entire Empire State building; nuclear-powered irrigation plants; rocket fuel derived from seawater; sending a crewed space probe to the Sun itself to steal a chunk of solar matter. That's some big thinking - like something I'd find in Geoff Manaugh's BLDGBLOG Book. As with all great children's fiction, it trades in vast, demented concepts - all presented as things people have thought of. That is incredibly important: immense and very beautiful ideas as solutions to problems. And those solutions just happen to be variable- geometry rocket-planes and VTOL megacarriers and space stations tricked out like 1950s ideal robot homes of the future. (Thunderbird 5, it does look a bit like it has wood panelling down its sides.)
Most importantly, it teaches children that, after saving the world, one retires to a bar where someone is tinkling out some cool jazz on the ivories, and everyone has a cigarette and as many vodka martinis as is necessary to blot out the soul-blistering stresses of yanking three people out of a haywire atomic-powered logging vehicle hell-bent on deforesting South America.
Now, some of you are saying (quite rightly), where is the role of women in all this? Thunderbirds was fairly male-dominant, but I commend two things to your attention. Lady Penelope may have been the only adult woman on the show, but whenever she showed up, she usually shot someone and was then driven off in a pink Rolls-Royce.
My own daughter still loudly demands that our next car be a pink Humvee, and she just won a Young Engineers competition for building something disturbing using radio tags and locative technology I barely understand. So I'm right and you're wrong. Put Thunderbirds back on, you bastards, and help grow a new generation of mad and frightening engineers.
Previous columns from Warren Ellis'The future isn't big any more. The future is small' 'We could all have swine flu by the time you read this' 'The Kindle is a mewling, crippled, pining thing...' 'I plan to invest in anti-carnivorous robot security' 'The future isn't big anymore. The future is small'
MicrobiographyWarren Ellis is a prolific comic-book writer for Marvel and DC, as well as a novelist and socio-cultural commentator, based in Southend-on-Sea. You can read his blog at warrenellis.com and follow him at Twitter.com/warrenellis
Want more Wired UK magazine? Get your copy every month bysubscribing online today
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
