Sylvia Anderson, co-creator of Thunderbirds, Space: 1999, Captain Scarlet, Stingray, and more was born 99 years ago today. Between 1960 and 1981, she and her then-husband Gerry Anderson co-created some of the most iconic and beloved science fiction television series ever.

The pair formed a unique creative partnership where they would originate the premise for each of their creations before syphoning their duties off into different areas. "All the series we did were created jointly, from the early days right up to Space: 1999." Sylvia recalled in 1992. "Most people ask me this, and it's very difficult to say how the collaboration worked exactly, but basically Gerry was more on the technical side of things, and I was more on the character side. I would think up the human situations if you like, and the characters."

In her flourishing influence across the spectrum of A.P. Films/Century 21's output, Sylvia worked closely with casting directors, costume designers, scriptwriters, puppeteers and art directors in ensuring the likes of Thunderbirds, UFO, Fireball XL5, and more were armed with colourful and imaginative visual style and characters who were likeable and believable. In celebration of what would have been her 99th birthday, let's excavate deep into the archives and discover what Sylvia had to say about her various co-creations across puppetry and live-action throughout the 1960s and 1970s!

Supercar & Fireball XL5 (1961 & 1962)

"Initially, Gerry and I would come up with a basic idea or concept for a show and we'd talk to the others who sometimes added ideas too. Once we were happy, Derek (Meddings) or Reg Hill would begin to put together some sketches for the craft and I'd sit down with the puppeteers and talk about the characters. For example, the leading men were always good looking, but I made sure they were always different. Steve Zodiac of Fireball XL5 was blonde in contrast to the hero of the previous show Supercar, where Mike Mercury was dark-haired... We had Paul Maxwell who was brilliant as Steve Zodiac; he had a great voice which matched the strong looks we'd created for the puppet." Action TV, 2001

Sylvia's earliest efforts with A.P. Films began with 1957's The Adventures of Twizzle, but as her relationship with Gerry blossomed, the company shifted more into science fiction, and their approach to puppetry grew more sophisticated, Sylvia soon played a vital role in developing the characters that would inhabit the hard sci-fi concepts initially devised by Gerry.

Stingray (1964)

"Gerry and I would regularly go to the States and see all the different heads of networks and because he liked what we were doing, Lew (Grade) thought of us as his ambassadors. This particular time we were in the US and we saw colour television for the first time and we were just stunned, it was wonderful. We came back and said to Lew, we've just got to do the next show in colour and that was Stingray. It was going to cost him a great deal of money and in many respect we were going into unknown territory with a kid's puppet show. Once word got around the industry that Stingray was being filmed in colour, people would ring up and ask our advice because they wanted to film something in colour. We felt quite pleased with ourselves because of the advances we were making in television in this country." Action TV, 2001

"I really think we all just took on the jobs we were best at. Reg did art, John (Reed) did cameras and Gerry did direction and editing. I did scripts and voice casting. I created all the characters, so I had everything to do with them, the look, the voices and so on. I had done stuff like that when we made commercials, it was my side of the business. I did lots of weird voices and accents for the shows, although I wrote myself out of a part in Stingray, but I directed the dialogue so it was quite easy to add odd voices when necessary." TV Zone, 1991

Thunderbirds (1965)

"The first thing about Thunderbirds was the fact that it was an hour long programme. Initially it was to be a half hour like Stingray and the others, but it soon became apparent that the wonderful characters and the stories were just too big for that. You couldn't get viewers to care about the trapped people, the regular characters, develop a story and do some humour with Penelope and Parker in half an hour. I think Stingray and Captain Scarlet would have been better as hour-long programmes, as it allows you to build up a storyline and do things you couldn't in thirty minutes." Action TV, 2001

"I was really inspired by Bonanza, the big Western TV series with Ben Cartwright and all of his sons. It occurred to me that you could have more than one hero, so that if viewers didn't like one, well, next week, their favourite might star. That worked well and so Scott and Alan became the most popular. But that realisation only came with time, once we'd seen the first few we could see which way things were going. Once the characters were created, given a look, you could see how they were going to go and quite soon I could say to the rest of the team 'Look, Scott's got to do this' and 'Hey, Scott really ought to do that!' Again, The Hood goes back to our past, to all the villains we'd had before, like Masterspy from Supercar. We didn't want to maker him Russian, though, so I decided he was Oriental, and made him the half-brother to Kyrano, who worked for Jeff Tracy and was under The Hood's spell." TV Zone, 1991

Sylvia's reflections on the benefits of Thunderbirds' 50-minute runtime are certainly reflected in how the series handles its ensemble cast. Her comments from TV Zone are arguably more fascinating, capturing a more definitive insight into which specific components of Thunderbirds' premise were individually devised by Gerry and Sylvia, respectively. Her comments on devising the character set-up would certainly match with the overall summary of Gerry's mechanical eye and Sylvia's creative flair. 

Thunderbirds Are Go (1966)

"Lew called us to say that he had been talking to United Artists and they were interested in a Thunderbirds feature film. We were obviously very pleased because they were saying they could see it being bigger than James Bond. The problem was that audiences, or rather potential audiences, just thought that they were seeing something they could already watch on TV." Action TV, 2001

It's intriguing to note that Gerry and Sylvia held the same reasoning for why Thunderbirds Are Go failed to ignite the box office in much the same way the TV series had done so for the small screen. 

Captain Scarlet (1967)

"Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons should have been one of the most successful puppet shows and it wasn't. I think it was too perfect. There was a lack of humour. It was too mechanical and needed humanising." Time Screen, 1992

"The puppets for Captain Scarlet were the best we ever did. The heads were in proportion and we thought we had everything right. But we weren't what I call 'hands-on' producers on that. We were off doing a show called Doppelganger at the same time, and although the team that did it were excellent, we rather let it get away from us and the result was that the puppets were too perfect and the cast too big. There was a coldness about the show and it didn't work. But I'm proud of the fact that I created the Angels way ahead of Charlie's Angels. I sometimes wonder if they got the idea for that programme from Captain Scarlet!" TV Zone, 1991

"Spectrum was a military organisation with no room for emotions and all of the things we'd seen in Thunderbirds, which was basically a family as were many of those earlier shows." Action TV, 2001

Sylvia's nuanced comments on the darkness of Captain Scarlet do its darkly entertaining appeal a disservice, but her reflections in TV Zone in particular at least prize open why the series boasted such a grim atmosphere. If Sylvia's presence had a greater tangibility on the making of Captain Scarlet, would we have seen a much different depiction of the war of nerves?

Thunderbird 6 (1968)

"Thunderbird 6 was beautifully made, but I think it lacked the glamour and fun of Thunderbirds Are Go, which was a hard act to follow." Action TV, 2001

Joe 90 (1968)

"With Joe 90, we did try to get back to family values, but by then we had really decided that we had to get into live action and the puppets had become a little out of date and truthfully we were bored." Action TV, 2001

"It was charming - going back a little towards Supercar. We realised that we'd maybe gone too far with Captain Scarlet with the look, the uniforms. It was all rather mechanical. We went for charm in Joe 90." TV Zone, 1991

Gerry and Sylvia's involvement in their post-Thunderbirds TV productions were minimal, as they concentrated on expanding Century 21 Productions' growing slate of film efforts. However, Sylvia's reflections on Joe 90 certainly read like she held a closer involvement than her time on Captain Scarlet, and that Joe 90's comparatively restrained cast and humour-driven characterisations were a deliberate reaction against Captain Scarlet's darker qualities.

Doppelganger (1969)

"For me it was a marvellous breakthrough, as I was getting very fed up with the puppets. There was no feedback! Now I was able to go out and cast interesting people, and I loved it because you could bounce off the actors. I loved discussing scripts with them. I mean, as a film-maker, what would rather do, make films with wooden characters or real ones? For better or worse?" Time Screen, 1992

The Secret Service (1969)

"We were in a rut - and of course, we only started doing puppet shows by accident, it certainly wasn't what we'd intended all those years earlier - and we lost interest in The Secret Service very early on. It had always been a bugbear of Gerry's that we couldn't mix live action and puppets successfully and we thought The Secret Service was a good things to try it out on, but it just didn't work." TV Zone, 1991

UFO (1970)

"The things Derek Meddings was doing on UFO were just amazing. They are without doubt some of the best things he ever did and those boys in his unit were just so talented. Although all of the series were team efforts, if I were to be pushed to attribute the success of the programmes to one person it would be Derek. He was doing things that nobody anywhere in the world was doing and it was no surprise to me that he was to go on and be such a big name in special effects." Action TV, 2001

"I was happy with (Ed) Straker. There was something interesting there and I'm certainly not ashamed of the series, I enjoyed being able to go out and cast interesting people, dress them well and give them a look." Time Screen, 1992

The Protectors (1972)

"I wrote the first episode, but really that was Lew Grade's show with Gerry. It wasn't really my sort of thing at all." TV Zone, 1991

Space: 1999 (1975)

"In UFO you had a conflict that gave the series an edge. You didn't have that in Space: 1999 because Koenig took all the lines and all the decisions. Other people were relegated to nothing. I think we had a marvellous opportunity, it looked good, but I think you underrate the audience's intelligence when you have a commander who's always right." Time Screen, 1992

"Gerry and I had some very bad times and some very good times, all marriages go through that. I don't think that we were sort of inspired to do something great. We were both imaginative people with clever people around us and we came up with Space: 1999, another good idea. The show was certainly the most ambitious thing we'd ever done, the most expensive and brought some of the biggest problems, too." Action TV, 2001

In the decades after Space: 1999, neither Gerry or Sylvia would conceal their dissatisfaction at the casting of Martin Landau and Barbara Bain as the leading pair in the series. Sylvia's comments however capture the fracturing state of hers and Gerry's relationship by the time Space: 1999 went into production. Subsequently, her creative input shrunk. The unrealised desire for Space: 1999's commanding figure to be more in-tune with UFO's coldly determined yet emotionally fragile Ed Straker was evidently a major aspect of Space: 1999 struggling to meet her creative expectations.

Sylvia's fascinating insights into many of her co-creations offer a compelling perspective on the precise mechanics of how hers and Gerry's collaborative efforts functioned. They're also a reminder of how far-reaching the collaborative nature of making a television series or a film can extend, and that different individuals, such as Sylvia, brought many separate creative skills to make shows like Thunderbirds, Space: 1999 and Captain Scarlet as thrillingly brilliant as possible.

The winning partnership of Gerry's keen technical eye for various aspects of film-making and Sylvia's creative ingenuity in storytelling and characterisation, along with the multitude of talented crew members under their leadership, is what ensures that these retrofuture worlds continue to entertain and inspire. Sylvia Anderson's efforts in humanising hers and Gerry's hardware-heavy concepts are defining example why the likes of Ed Straker, Troy Tempest, and Lady Penelope remain such iconic heroes in sci-fi TV.

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