When Gerry Anderson saw the live-action film of Thunderbirds a decade ago, he described it as the “biggest load of crap I have ever seen in my life”. Alas, the Thunderbirds co-creator didn’t live to see ITV’s update, but I like to think he would have been kinder to its small-screen reboot.
Updating a children’s TV classic is fraught with danger, as anyone who saw the revived Mr Men will testify, but Thunderbirds – renamed Thunderbirds Are Go – has somehow pulled it off.
Of course, there will always be diehard fans who struggle with the concept of a new Thunderbird called Shadow (Thunderbird 6 would presumably have ruined that famous countdown) or the new, all-action Parker.
Despite a large portion of the show being computer-generated, Thunderbirds Are Go stays pretty faithful to its Tracy Island roots – no, honestly – with the adept use of models and miniature sets that closely resemble the original. But don’t ask me – ask my four-year-old, who comes bounding into the bedroom every Saturday morning shouting: “Thunderbirds, Thunderbirds.” True, she is also a devotee of the Octonauts, but one show at a time, please.
She is at the lower end of the age range for Thunderbirds Are Go, I’d say, seeing as we have to skip forward every time the Hood appears even vaguely menacing, which makes the plot occasionally tricky to follow. Even worse was the moment it looked as if Parker was going to brain a hoodlum, ominously cracking his knuckles, Jack Bauer-style, before it turned out a few minutes later to be a big joke. On reflection, I probably should have skipped that bit as well.
But Parker is the star, voiced, just as in the original, by David Graham, an unlikely pairing with Hollywood star Rosamund Pike as Lady Penelope. It works a lot better than you would think from the pictures, which had me fearing the very worst.
The best episode so far, Tunnels of Time, saw the pair trapped in an ancient Amazon temple in a barely disguised Raiders of the Lost Ark rip-off/homage along with a dodgy explorer who may or may not have been the Hood. Another episode, EOS, set entirely on Thunderbird 5, came over like a preteen 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Fireflash, a retelling of the original series’s Trapped in the Sky, about a hijacked plane, was a bit of a letdown, despite the addition of covert ops specialist Kayo (a welcome female voice to complement One Direction, sorry, the madeover Tracy brothers).
At 22 minutes an outing, the new series is unable to ratchet up the tension quite like the 50-minute originals, but who has got 50 minutes to watch telly these days? The storylines, as has been observed elsewhere, are at their best when they offer up something new.
If there was a missed opportunity then it is Brains, who feels oddly diminished from the original, despite being voiced by Kayvan Novak (with an Indian accent). He is the source of occasional comic relief, but perhaps it would have been more fun to let the Fonejacker star entirely off the leash.
But there is no need to call International Rescue. It is still a winner, from the moment you hear the voice of the late Peter Dyneley – Jeff Tracy in the original – doing the countdown at the start of the show (and about three times each episode after that).
Plus, imagine the joy in discovering that the voice that sounds like Rhys Darby in Skyhook, an episode about a weather balloon gone wrong, really is Murray Hewitt from Flight of the Conchords. Virgil? Present. Gordon? Present. Childhood memories of watching cherished TV favourite with Sunday lunch on my lap? Like my Thunderbird 2 toy, just about intact.
