In the past, many of the world’s most talented adults had a troubled childhood. He made Thunderbirds and Stingray and all of their shows have no main character. Now Gerry Anderson, who made them, can be added to the list as well.
Anderson’s work didn’t have any matriarchal figures because he was so traumatised by his own relationship with his mother.
A new documentary is based on more than 30 hours of interviews with Anderson that were recorded years before he died in 2012, but only now have they been made public. Anderson died in 2012.
He had made a name for himself around the world with 18 TV shows and four movies, including Space: 1999 and Captain Scarlet. The death of Lionel, Anderson’s older brother, was hard for him to deal with. He also never got over hearing their mother, Debbie, say: “Why did Lionel die? He was so handsome and brave.” “You should have done it.”
During the Second World War, Gerry was 12 years old. His brother, who was 20 at the time, died when his plane was shot down in 1942. Their mother always had a special place in her heart for Lionel, not Gerry or her husband, Joe, whom she shamed over and over again during their marriage.
That is what Anderson said in those interviews: “My mother was always complaining about how much she didn’t like the marriage.” The mixture was very dangerous. I had the worst childhood.
Also, he said that his mother used to make fun of him. When he was a child, he was told that he looked more like his father every day. As a child, I thought my father was ugly. When she told me that I was ugly, I would get very angry.
“I always think I have failed.”
Jamie, Anderson’s son, is in the documentary Gerry Anderson: A Life Uncharted and is one of the people who made it. His troubled childhood had a big impact on his work, and while there aren’t any mothers in any of his shows, the heroes are pilots and strong people who look a lot like his brother.
It was Lionel who made Anderson want to go into space. “I remember my brother saying, ‘if it were possible to fly across the universe, you would eventually come to the end of the universe and, if so, what is beyond?'” How could that kind of question not make me think? It has kept me going all the way to today.
There were no plans to put the recordings on the internet: “It was my choice to let them be out there.”
It was “unforgivable” for Debbie to say something like that to her son, he said, adding that “you’ll never forget someone saying something like that, and we have footage of him repeating it almost verbatim.” He’d thought about it so much. There is a strong father figure in every single show. Jeff Tracy and Colonel White are two of the men. But there aren’t any moms.
“His mother played a game with him.” His whole life, she made it seem like Joe was useless and lazy, as well as ugly and slutish. He thought that way when he was a child because his mother told him that. It was because of his parents’ flaws that Dad would make a movie of his childhood filled with toys and gadgets, but no mothers.
My brother should have lived and I should have been the one who was killed in the interviews. ” That’s just how I feel. I think he was better able to deal with this life than I could have been. I would have gladly swapped places with him.
However, Anderson’s work is so popular that it can reach up to 15 million people a month on social media. Jamie said: “We’ll see clips go viral on Facebook and then they get one million views.” The fans are still out there. Amazingly, the shows are very old.
The documentary, Gerry Anderson: A Life Uncharted, will be available on BritBox from 14 April. It premieres at the BFI Southbank on April 9 and will be shown there for the first time.