The Intrusion Of The Fantastic Into The Mundane No 1: The Thunderbirds Of Edinburgh

1.

My wife and I honeymooned in Edinburgh. We had a truly fine time. We slept in luxury the likes of which I never had experienced before, and which I fear I never shall again. It was more than expensive, but it was worth every penny we'd been blessed with by our parents as their wedding gift. We went back to Currie, where I'd grown up back when there was still a railway line and a paper mill in the town. We dutifully, and contentedly, trooped our way through all the tourist traps, and all the tourist whiskeys, and we capped it all by being terrified by a gang of wall-climbing youths who drunkedly hunted and surrounded us in Greyfriars Graveyard after sundown one night. It was an experience. Good times.

But of the things I saw during that too-short honeymoon, the thing which impressed me most deeply, and which I've thought about the most over the five long years of ordinary life spent since in merely adequate bedrooms, is the Scott Memorial. Not for its' history, its architecture, its cultural meaning, or even because it was so nostalgically splendid to see it after 30 years of being in exile among the English. No. I now recall the Scott Memorial with such intensity and fascination because it looks not unlike Thunderbird 3.

I know it's not very romantic. And I would want you to know that I came away from my honeymoon with a fine collection of romantic moments fondly secured in my memory: it wasn't just the remarkable similarity of the Scott Monument to Thunderbird 3 that made those honeymoon days so memorable. And, yet, consider the picture below in comparison to the one above; can you honestly say that you wouldn't have been taken back and intrigued by how alike the two structures are? Honestly? Isn't it the sort of association that would have had you speculating to yourself about it as you negotiated your way through the exceptionally expensive menu at The Witchery? Wouldn't it have distracted your historical imagination at the precise same moment when the guides to the Catacombs turned the lights out to show you just how dark "dark" really can be? Wouldn't your eyes have naturally dragged themselves off to fix on the sight of the Monumentl when staring down on Midlothian from the vertiginous heights of the Castle, anxious least the first firing of its orbital jets be missed? Wouldn't you start to dwell on the secret, mysterious, lost connection between Tracey Island and Princess Street? Well, wouldn't you?

2.

I've since occasionally imagined, in idle moments, before sinking into sleep, or while walking mile after mile of flat muddy countryside, that, if I could just have looked at the Memorial in the right way, at the right angle, I would've seen through its outer shell and perceived all the secret and fantastic technology within it, as though a real-world Graham Bleathman Thuderbirds cutaway were suddenly being revealed before me. As if the unreal world of comic books had intruded upon the prosaic real-world of Monday-morning-wandering-down-Castle-Hill. As if reality was a choice, a strange static place that could be stepped in and out of, like a roadside motel, there for weary travellers recovering from their amazing journeys in irreality, who'd all be far away from here by tomorrow noon. Far away. Travelling by spaceship.

I worked on inventing several different mythologies to solve the mystery of Edinburgh's Thunderbirds architecture as we wandered round Auld Reekie. There was the narrative founded on some cribbed steampunk ideas, that had Edinburgh dotted with Victoriana which could switch to high-tech space weaponry if disaster approached. There was the conceit which linked the Scott Memorial, and other imagined public-memorial spacecraft, as coming from a previous incarnation of the International Rescue organisation, though I could never make that speculation work. Nobody had ever seen the Scott Memorial blast off into space, so either that had to be explained away or I should move on. I failed to spin an explanation, so I moved on. Lastly, I imagined a future Edinburgh where super-science had been applied by some great secret organisation to create secret super-weapons and craft inside the existing frames of Thunderbird-like historical buildings. This last one had the most attention crafted into it, but it only resulted into something which smelt somewhat like an awful Japanese puppet show, which in itself was something like an awful Anderson show, which would have been "Terrahawks", then. I let it be.


3.

Long ago, when reality and I were less familiar to each other, when I was a lad of just 4 and 5, when the last train to and through Currie had just been and gone, the most remarkable examples of the fantastic intruding into the mundane were to be found in the weekly comic book TV21. It was full to a child's notion of bursting with strips detailing the further adventures of the characters and their machines - their incredible machines - from the Gerry Anderson sci-fi puppet shows. Those TV shows had existed for me briefly, had been blazed onto our black-and-white screen just the once and were then lost forever, like radio signals aimed outwards on an inevitably one-way journey into emply silent space that had passed through our living room and been caught but by chance. But the comic books about those shows stayed in my possession, accumulated in number by one every seven days, and the comic books were in colour too. (Who'd have known Thuderbird 3 was red if not for TV21, and from the boxes of enticing toys that could never be afforded?) Nothing, and I really do mean "nothing", captured, focused, demanded my attention like those two-dimensional comic strips about the great spaceships and submarines and rocket-powered rescue craft of the Anderson universes. Some powerful technological fetichism, storming through the years from the hopeful days of the early Industrial Revolution, was incarnated in those machines. They shook with the force of their engines as they were launched, you could see they did. They were blackened and cracked by explosions, they stood powerful and dependable in everyday fields and airports as their pilots saved lives. They could be imagined landing across the stream at the bottom of the hill, ready to save us all from whatever terrible thing might happen in Currie. They were realer than reality and I could summon them up to fill the football field before the chip shop, and then walk around them as my mind held them there, noting how their landing legs had sunk into the white lines marking the edge of the pitch, imagining how their engines were still singing as they stood temporarily idle. Familiar and yet magnificently strange, the machines of the future were easy to imagine, to summon up and superimpose over wherever I was.


It felt as if the future was already here, or rather that it was almost here, waiting just a second beyond where we were, and that the near-future was already designed and primed to be born in Thunderbird-form. As if the ordinary technology of today was just aching to be re-created as an manned underground rescue drill, or an interstellar space patrol craft complete with tame robot, or who knows what exotic mutation of super-science? This future was almost here, it had nearly happened. It was a damn sight more exciting than the today it was having to wait through.

4.

Russell T Davies once wrote that he'd spent his childhood praying for Dr Who to arrive in his street and whisk him away on some fabulous adventures. I couldn't have done that. Travelling with Dr Who is a dangerous business. I spent my childhood hoping to see the Tardis wink in and out of existence in the distance, at the bottom of the road, at the top of the multi-story car-park across from school. That's about as near to the Tardis as I would've have wanted to venture. But machines, human-designed machines, machines so obviously built from the same industrial materials and technological traditions as I could see around me all the time, super-machines, weren't frightening. They were the promise of that even more remarkable world to inevitably come, still safe like today, but more exciting and more grand. I wanted machines to become super-machines, I wanted it now. The pages of the educational comic "Look And Learn", bought for me by my parents in the hope it would make me less imaginative and more academic, showed me the innards of the proto-future machines of contemporary times in wonderfully unsensational cutaway diagrams. Combine harvesters! Hovercraft! Fire Engines with really big rotatable ladders! Harrier Jump Jets, taking off vertically just like Thunderbird 1! The future was recognisable all around me. It was almost here. It could be here in a second. It could have arrived in the time it takes me now to write a short sentence.


So when I was a boy, when I was that boy, the mundane seemed incredibly close to the fantastic. It was practically congruent to the world I lived in, superimposed over it so that the basic features of both could be clearly seen in a distinct, yet familiar, contrast to each other. And in TV21, those fascinating spaceships were drawn with such craft, with the professional care of artists like Frank Hampton and Mike Noble, that they were made simultaneously mundane and fantastic too, drawn in perspective, throwing shadows in the neon light, set to scale, ready to become real. Just to see Thunderbird 3 drawn competently convinced me. Look! It's real because it looks real. To a four year old.

5.

Now, the balance between what might be and what is has shifted considerably. It's no longer enough of a foundation of belief for me to note that a science-fiction space-craft has had its paint scheme charred and burnt by combat, that a chunk of a wing has been shudderingly removed by an asteroid collision, that a pristine design has been hammered out of perfectness in the way that convinced me as a child that rockets were real. The Scott Monument Spacecraft moored in Edinburgh High Street now requires me to incorporate every humble detail of Scotland's capital to allow me to ground it in fantasy, every cloud of petrol fumes and last night's garlic, every vein on spring's leaves, every crisp packet in the newsagent's window, all must be in its expected place. The whole world needs to be dragged into the fantasy now, as if one detail of the unincorporated real might fracture the illusion just by existing. To momentraily slip back into the habits of a child's imagination is easy, and comforting, and pleasantly involving as a passing digression. But to now suspend disbelief even over the slightest period of time, I have to work hard. Three convuluted back-stories to ground it all in a narrative just so I can prolong my daydreaming? Just the beginning. I can't just watch, say "Wow! and imagine ray-guns firing. Because that's daft now, and I know that the science-fiction future is not superimposed over Princess Street this week, or that week, or any week. Because the mudane eats swiftly away at the fantastic, and the fantastic shrinks and dissolves until it has little power left, diluted in that solution of bills, stomach aches, satellite TV, pension payments, and plastic recyclable coke bottles.

But there is a homeopathy of the fantastic too, even as there isn't in the real world. No matter how diluted it may be, the fantastic is still there, no matter how much we're told that grown-up minds turn away from it. And the mundane contains within it the seeds of its own occasional unravelling. The more I focused on grounding my fantasy about the Scott Monument in the everyday, the more real it became. The trick was not to concentrate on the spacecraft. The trick was to concentrate on everything that wasn't a spacecraft and pretend that it was all connected, all dream and truth mangled deliberately together. First, the narratives that helped to explained what that damn disguised spaceship was doing there. And then the threads of the real, as I wandered around, knitting it all together until the impossible point "A" was actually quite inescapably linked to the definite, empirically-testable points "B", "C", and so on. Ah, there was the Marks and Spencer's supermarket, where secret doors led no doubt not to food freezers and staff canteens, but to the lifts to the huge weapon hangers below. There, in the Scottish National Potrait Gallery, were the pictures of generations of secret spacemen and women, supposed footballers and politicians, but something much more if the signs were read correctly. The areas of the Castle where tourists could not go? Well, what could be more obvious if you knew what you're looking for? Out of the mundane, despite itself, with a little shaking of the solution, reappears the fantastic. Until Edinburgh only looks like a modern capital city, but is, in reality, a garrison town long established as Earth's first and only line of super-scientific defence.

6.

But against what? Defence against what? Ah. I never got that far. It's harder to ground that degree of reality, off-world reality, when you're sitting in Burger King sneaking a very inexpensive bite of bacon and burger. I couldn't imagine the Burger Kings of alien empires. I only had a week. It was time to go home.

7.

The fantastic dissolves within us, within our lives, fades away from our focus, as we learn just how grey "grey" can be. Even more destructive to the fantastic is the discovery that the mundane is pretty fascinating too, if the circumstances are right and we're strong enough to rise above the aches, the irritations, the stresses and the tick-tick-tick of the passage of todays that never become that splendid once-expected tomorrow. So it can take a comic book, seeded and locked deep inside a memory of childhood, and the details of an entire city's mundane everyday existence, and alot of work, to permit a flicker of the old imaginations to rise into view again.

But they do rise. And with work, and the habit of work, the faint outlines of the vapour trails of interstellar spacecraft coming in to land after light years away on patrol in distant galaxies become somewhat more distinct again. Is that snow at the back of the wardrobe, a slide to a jet aircraft behind that full-length portrait? Is that old public school really full of magicians? Look at the Scott Monument. Has it moved slightly since we stood in this bus queue yesterday? Did it roar powerfully into the sky, techno-lasers primed, driven by old Scottish engineers with bristling sideburns and superior steampunk know-how? Did it land back in just a slightly, slightly different place?

Well? Did it?



There are 3 volumes of "Century 21" reprints edited by the ubiquitous Chris Bentley, available on Amazon, all of them containing strips lovingly restored from '60's editions of TV21. The splendid "Thunderbirds Classic Comic Strips" and the "Supermarionation Cutaways" and "Thunderbirds Cutaways" books, by the redoubtable Graham Bleathman, are on sale there too. We'll be discussing Mr Bleathman's charming cutaways here in the very near future.

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