Never since Poochie, the proactive rapping dog with a backward-facing baseball cap, debuted in the Simpsons’ Itchy and Scratchy, has there been a character so evidently the product of algorithms and focus groups as the new woman in Thunderbirds.
In Thunderbirds Are Go (Saturday, ITV), the 21st-century revamp of Gerry Anderson’s 1960s puppet sci-fi show for kids, Kayo contemplated her new ride, the Thunderbird S, doubtless savouring all the adventures in store for her during this 26-episode series. It’s only taken half a century, but finally a woman is deemed fit to fly one of International Rescue’s weaponised aircraft.
But does it really advance the cause of humankind’s oppressed majority that an animated woman with an English accent is joining the all-American Tracy boys as a member of an unregulated private strike force operating from a plutocratic paterfamilias’s island lair?
In any case, as feminist historians know, the glass ceiling was broken in Anderson’s other leading 1960s puppet drama. In Captain Scarlet (1967-8), it was women flyers – Harmony, Rhapsody and Melody – who provided airborne support for the good captain’s ground-based offensives against the diabolical Mysterons.True, they were minimally different rubber puppets pulled by the Man’s strings (and thus prototypes for Charlie’s Angels), and, yes, Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch (1970) is unaccountably silent on their contribution to women’s liberation, but they were true outliers.
As a prepubescent boy, I used to love Thunderbirds and dreamed of piloting one of them. Only now do I realise that in aspiring to be Virgil at the helm of Thunderbird 2 rather than Scott blasting off in Thunderbird 1, I wanted to drive what, if you think about it, was really an airborne emergency rescue womb rather than patriarchal phallic rocket. Would remedial testosterone injections have made me want to emulate Scott rather than his less butch, even crypto-maternal, sibling? It’s possible. Hold that thought.
It’s traumatic when your favourite children’s franchises are upgraded for a new pint-sized demographic. I’m still in shock over the moment Bill and Ben the Flowerpot Men went verbal. The day they stopped saying “flopadopalop”? That was the day I realised, heartbroken and 37, that I was a child no more.
Sensibly, the new Thunderbirds treads softly, for it treads on its older viewers’ memories. Many of the old devices – the avenues of palm trees parting as Thunderbird 2 proceeds down the runway; the narrative requirement that every Thunderbird, even the orbiting Thunderbird 5, be involved during each rescue mission; the superbly urgent speeches (“We’d better think of something fast!” shouted someone at this premiere’s climax. “Taipei is about to get cooked!”) – remain, happily, intact.
The British class system too remains in place, with Lady Penelope as posh American lickspittle in a pink Roller driven by Parker, her ever so ‘umble liveried chauffeur. There are some astute changes. Brains, the Tracy family’s techie underling, is no longer American but Indian. Which, you’d think, is a reasonable projection of race-based genius parameters come 2060, the year this drama is set. Similarly, International Rescue’s scarcely credible evil nemesis, the Hood, who was originally Asiatic like Kayo’s 1960s prototype Tin-Tin Kyrano, has now been given a racially non-specific physiognomy, which, unless you’re of Prince Philip’s temper, seems wise.
Admittedly, the dearth of puppet strings in the new series means that when I reprise for my daughter the Gerry Anderson puppet strut I finessed in playgrounds of yesteryear, she gives me a thousand-mile stare, but you can’t have everything. While we await the retooling of other kids’ shows – Homoerotic Stingray? Blaxploitation Rhubarb and Custard? Rastamouse: the Bullingdon Years? Teletubbies go Ukip? – this new Thunderbirds will do nicely.
No-depth vaginoplasty? Bottom surgery? Transition is a verb now? During Louis Theroux: Transgender Kids (Sunday, BBC2), I went on a learning curve steeper than the trajectories of the penises the Californian reconstructive surgeon showed his clients in brochures.
But do children experience gender dysphoria and if so should their desires to change sex be indulged by their parents? That was this documentary’s bracing question.Many of the parents interviewed here were struggling to ensure their transgender children both grow up happy and yet not fodder for bigots. Tough gig.
We saw five-year-old Camille, born a boy and originally named Sebastian, voguing in a dress to Lady Gaga and putting on lipstick. Sure, boys want to play at being girls, and vice versa, one might have thought. But her parents thought more was going on. It’s not out of the question that when she hits puberty, that psychically deranging time for all of us but especially for those who want to be transcend the sexual identity on their birth certificate, Camille will be asking her parents for hormone treatment so she can transition from boy to girl.
Fourteen-year-old Nicky, born Nick, was doing just that. Theroux interviewed Nicky four months into hormone treatments that are helping her develop breasts. But Nicky was conflicted: while she was happy to see her authentic self emerge in the mirror, she worried she would grow to adulthood without a uterus, and so would not be able, as her clinical psychologist put it, to fulfil any desire to be a mother. “I’m a girl with a penis,” Nicky told Theroux glumly.
Theroux’s documentary was rich in such existential paradoxes, but most thought-provoking when considering a young American called Cole, who sometimes dresses as a girl and self-describes as Crystal. She/he has an unfulfillable desire to be both boy and girl. Quite possibly, then, despite all that pills and surgeons can do, the right to be ourselves is sometimes unrealisable and gender more fluid than we allow.
I was looking forward to a nice break at a Northumbrian caravan park. But the latest Vera (ITV), with its exploding chalets, cannabis factories, stag-partying oafs, and suicidal staff has put me right off
