Hallo Spaceboy

 Firstly today, I'm going to look at British comics and the influence they had on me as a reader.

Gerry Anderson's TV21 was actually really part of my pre-reading days. I had models of Stingray, Thunderbirds1, 2 , 3 and 5 when my brother was born and my dad took me to see Thunderbird Six at the Ritz in Strathaven or perhaps the Odeon in Hamilton ( my mum says he was enbarassed by my blue Scott Tracy hat). My interest in Supermarionation really waned with the publication of Joe 90 Top Secret, and the nickname for any specky kid through the Seventies. I only really remember the covers of TV21, although I did have a Joe 90 Coder Pass:

My introduction to Batman, as I've said before was, in part, through the text stories in TV Tornado. I also discovered the Phantom and Magnus Robot Fighter in that comic, as well as Disney properties, the Fighting Prince of Donegal and the Scarecrow of Romney Marsh.

Free Gift were the first words I could recognise

 My first encounter with The House of Ideas came through Odhams Power Comics. I was probably led there by the campy Batman colour newspaper strips by Al Plastino, which were cover-featured, as above. Smash introduced the FF to a wider audience of British kids in the autumn of 1968, starting with the wedding of Reed and Sue and its galaxy of Marvel stars. Pow featured Spider-Man, Nick Fury and a homegrown humour strip,Mike Higgs' hugely inventive "The Cloak."
I only read a sparing number of the other titles- Wham and Terrific (perhaps because Namor and Dr. Strange seemed too sinister and Giant-Man was such a dud.) My favourite was Fantastic which featured Thor, the X-men and Britain's Johnny Future. For decades, I remembered leaving Martin Southern's fifth birthday party to watch Dr. Who in The Invasion and play with the Fantastic free Star Target Pistol. Thanks to the internet, I find this is completely wrong. It had to be The Krotons and the comic was discontinued by then. The memory cheats...

While the Power Comics were an occasional treat, traditional UK comics were ordered for me on a weekly basis in Simpson's, the village shop. Fleetway's Buster came out on a Monday, as I recall. The strips I best remember were the kelp-clad Fishboy (a British Aqualad)  and Galaxus, the harried, Kong-like innocent  from another world (whose name caused great confusion when I first read Reed Richards bemoaning the space-warping powers of the purple planet-eater!). Every Thursday, I got The Topper. I'm ashamed to say that it was only last year that I discovered His Majesty King Gussie was named after a town! As a child, my favourite strip was the adventures of spaceboys Krik and Krak, the Whizzers from Ozz and their rivals the Kett Cadets.

I remember the debut of Cor! (as in "Cor Blimey/ God blind me"- a suitably comical Cockney exclamation) with its free sachet of  the equally appositely named Gulp! powdered drink. 1970 was the mid-point of the era of Space Age processed food. I'm such a product of that time- I remember Vesta Chow Mein with fondness and as a teen I could almost savour the whipped cheese in Death of a Salesman.
Aside from Pop Guns, the most regular free gift in comics would be this item:

 The highlight of Cor was the Kalahari Crimebuster, Kid Chameleon:

1970 also saw the debut of the short-lived Thunder. What a line-up though: vampiric WWI air ace Black Max; Steel Commando, the British secret weapon of WWII; the cursed time traveller Adam Eterno; and my favourite, The Terrible Trail to Tolmec.

During the early 70s, I picked up the odd copy of my cousin Jim's Lion and Valiant, so I was familiar with Jerry Siegel's Spock-like crook The Spider,as well as Kelly's Eye, Spellbinder, Robot Archie and The Steel Claw.
 There were super-villiains too who seemed to draw upon British sci-fi and horror films: Ezra Creech, a victim of the violent White Eyes nerve gas plague or Dr. Krait, The Snake:

I had an order for Whizzer and Chips for a couple of years but I preferred Shiver and Shake, especially when it printed gory b/w photos from Hammer films. Despite well-intentioned parental effort, I never warmed to the dry, improving imperialism of Look and Learn. I got ITV kids magazine Look-In for several years. One of my favourite features was the two-page regional tv listings: I wanted so much to be able to watch the FF cartoon on Grampian Televison, never suspecting I'd eventually live up here.

 I can picture reading that text feature on The Tomorrow People in the entrance to Chapelton Primary: would their mutant powers be like those of Quicksilver or Mastermind?  In the shadows, with their secrets and doomed romances, the Marvel Super-Heroes still lurked: conflicted, irradiated, mutated.

The parti-coloured infiltration of British Marvel began in 1972 but it wasn't until the launch of Spider-Man Comics Weekly that  Brit kids felt like a genuine part of the Merry Marvel Marching Society. It was this comic that gave us the opportunity to become Friends Of Old Marvel and subscribe to FOOM magazine.

Truthfully, in my head, the show IS actually called Dr. Who and The Daleks

Meanwhile, as they say in the comics, I followed a parallel path with tv's top time traveller; from the rather juvenile pages of TV Comic to the glossy but untimely Gerry Anderson vehicle Countdown. The free space wallchart was on my bedroom wall for years. I have something similar in my classroom today:

Had UFO been a bigger hit or mutated more quickly into Space 1999, perhaps Countdown might have continued but it morphed into TV Action. In the Arches Coffee Shop in Stranraer, in the summer of 1973, TV Action gave me my first glimpse of the Mechanoid (sic).

 The Mechonoid . Not a Xmas best seller in 1965.

 I bought a VHS copy of The Chase for the first time about twelve years ago in Lost in Music in Cresswell Lane in Glasgow's West End. It was in a very rusty, battered, presentation tin and it is of course, the third Dalek story: The One Where They Develop Time Travel: the Secret Origin of the Time War.

This week, thanks to T*sc* DVD, I watched The Chase again. It begins with a lengthy scene about the Time Space Visualiser; the ethereal Maureen O'Brien makes Vicki charming and likeable, despite the childishness and clumsiness written into the part. I'd forgotten that Vicki is intended to be a brainy future girl because she doesn't have Susan's undercurrent of the alien. Maureen is a better actress too.

 However, the mood of end-of-term silliness is encapsulated by Ian's Dad Dancing in the Beatles scene. Russell goons about like Roy Castle which badly undercuts any tension in the story. Jacqueline Hill's sensible Barbara also gets into the act toward the end of the serial and even the Doctor's taken to calling her "Barb" Hmm? What? Chatterton? Hmm?
I suppose Ian's buffoonery annoys me because I prefer the grittier, worldly Ian of  David Whitaker's books. Later, Cribbins manages to make Tom Campbell work as a bloke rather than a ninny but Russell's flippancy grates here. Is he just demob happy?

The tone of the serial is all over the place, right from the jazzy incidental music by Dudley Simpson. The fey Aridians appear to be eaten alive by the carnivorous Mirebeasts while one Dalek coughs and stutters as it surfaces from a dune; another stammers and can't count. In their previous storyline, the Daleks were explicitly identified with the Nazis. Here, they're presented as comedy aliens: falling into a pit, falling overboard, hoisted overhead by Frankenstein's Monster- figures of fun.
Hick cariacture Morton Dill (Peter Purves) makes metatextual reference to ITV rivals The Beverly Hillbillies and Cheyenne (a tv western featuring Clint Walker, who should've played Superman in the Sixties); then a baby drowns in the Mary Celeste incident and there's yet another scene where Barbara is sexually threatened. And what the Hell is the White Barbary Terror anyway?

The girls behave like idiots in the Haunted House episode and the Doctor ("things that go bumpety bumpety in the night") is shown to be completely wrong in his assumption that they've landed in "an area of human thought". Ian calls it "uncanny, strange and weird" which is a fair description of the terrifiying Grey Lady ("Unshrrrrriiiiivennnn!").

The penultimate episode is The Death of Doctor Who. I wrote a 12-episode synopsis for that very adventure in my notebook, circa 1979. It was a Daleks-Blake's Seven crossover into the bargain. The fungoids are Lovecraftian creatures and a bit like Triffids, but as with the Mirebeast, they look like Yoko Ono in a bag. For Peace. Terry Nation later reworks the idea more successfully as the Vaaga plants. The Daleks have an odd chant:" Destroy and Rejoice" and they call their geodesic rivals Mechons. Even the script-editing is sloppy and careless.

 Check it out on Youtube. Charlie Hawtrey is the funniest guest star we never had

The Doctor makes a joke that proves his surname is, in fact ,Who; oh, and he constructed the Tardis. He says so.
Fortunately the whole enterprise is saved by the last-minute appearance of castaway Steven Taylor (aka Mike aka Roger Bruck.) He plays the part of the isolated, cynical pilot truthfully, given that it's effectively a cameo and there's pathos in the moment when he risks death to save his panda mascot.

The story ends with an archetypal Sixties photo- montage of the kind used in the credits of The Avengers and The Likely Lads. The adventures of Ian and Barbara conclude with charm and poignancy but the serial is, for all its Pop Art designs, aimed at an undemanding matinee audience. It's not as bad as I remember but it is rather patronising and silly. There's more fun to be had in the fan film trailer.

Next: Ice, Ice Baby (and soon: POTA , The Titans, 2000 AD and Dr. Who Weekly/Monthly)
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