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Lady Penelope of Thunderbirds: the voice has gone





The voice of legendary female puppet, Lady Penelope, of the children’s science fiction show, Thunderbirds, died on March 16, 2016, aged 88. Husband and wife team, Sylvia and Gerry Anderson, created Thunderbirds in the 1960s. Gerry died in 2012, aged 83.

Sylvia was the producer and writer of Thunderbirds, a British production which ran from 1965 to 1968. She had many roles, including costume designer. The puppets were ‘Supermarionation’ – a term for the electronic marionettes.

The science fiction show was set in from 2065-2067 in which the organisation, International Rescue, would save the world from misadventures. The team from International Rescue had access to high-tech equipment, such as a fleet of 5 space rockets, called the Thunderbirds. The space ships were launched from the organisation’s secret base in the Pacific Ocean.

The catch phrase, whenever a new adventure commenced, was ‘5, 4, 3, 2, 1, Thunderbirds are Go’ – which became the name of a new series in the 1990s, and the computer-animated series in 2015.

Ex-astronaut, Jeff Tracy, a widower and the founder of International Rescue, has 5 adult sons who pilot the Thunderbirds (the space ships): Scott, John, Virgil, Gordon, and Alan. There was also an engineer called Brains. The Tracy brothers were named after real life Mercury Seven American astronauts: Scott Carpenter, John Glenn, Virgil Grissom, Gordon Cooper, and Alan Shepard.


The Lady Penelope Creighton-Ward character was a wealthy woman from London who moonlighted as a secret agent for International Rescue. The character wore pink suits and had a pink Rolls Royce car, chauffeured by Aloysius Parker. The two were known as Lady Penelope and Parker.

The program was shown in many countries. I wanted to be Virgil, the pilot of Thunderbirds 2 (since I was the second child in my family). Virgil piloted a supersonic spaceship carrier that took rescue vehicles to accidents in capsules called Pods. With myself and four sisters, we all had our own Thunderbird spaceship according to our position in the family. The oldest sister had Thunderbirds 1, a hypersonic rocket plane (piloted by Scott), and my other sisters had Thunderbird 3, a stage-to-orbit spaceship (piloted by Alan and John), Thunderbird 4, a spaceship that could go underwater (piloted by Gordon), and Thunderbird 5, a space station that receives emergency calls from people around the world in danger (with John and Alan looking after the station).







MARTINA NICOLLS is the author of:- The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).
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