F.A.B.

Can you remember your gateway to the world of doll collecting? Puppets can be one of the many launchpads down the slippery slope.

As a kid, a favorite TV show was Thunderbirds. OK, I know they were not dolls but puppets – but surely puppets are just dolls with strings?

In fact I did have a childhood obsession with marionettes, too, and had a small number of them from the British company, Pelham Puppets, as well as a few home-made ones. So although I had a bit of a boy crush on some of the handsome Tracy brothers in the Supermarionation series, the star of the show in my opinion was Lady Penelope herself. Not least because of her impressive range of fashions. She really never did wear the same outfit twice.

I was fascinated to discover that her ladyship and Parker, the marvellous manservant-cum-chauffeur, were something of an afterthought in the series. Gerry Anderson, the creator of the show, initially saw them as incidental characters. The main leads were to be the all-American Tracy boys with Penny and Parker providing occasional color as the token Brits on the show. Interesting for a series that was entirely made in England. It seems it was felt that an American cast would more likely lead to an international audience, and foreign buyers, for the show.

It was only after the intervention of Sylvia Anderson, Gerry’s wife, on whom the likeness of Lady Penelope was modeled, that Parker and M’lady took on a more central role. Eventually, they had whole episodes based around them, and became perhaps the best-loved of the whole cast. To this day, Parker is by far the top fans’ favorite in Japan. By the end of the Thunderbirds adventures Lady Penelope was bereft of transport, her Rolls Royce FAB1 plummeted to the ground on board an ill-fated airship, and her luxury yacht FAB2 had been sold off by Parker to cover his gambling debts.

She suffered further indignities in Attack of the Alligators. Live creatures were used for filming and one of them chewed off her leg – complete with elegant pink sandal. This was obviously not shown on screen for fear of upsetting viewers!

On a more fashionable note, Lady Penelope was the world’s first puppet to have her own couturier. There was a dedicated member of the team who created the character’s outfits in close collaboration with Sylvia Anderson. She had the most extensive wardrobe of the whole cast. In The Impostors she packs light for what she describes as an “emergency mission” to the United States, but even this involves more trunks and luggage than Parker could squeeze into FAB1.

Incidentally, Lady Penelope was the first to utter the Thunderbirds’ radio code “F.A.B.”, meaning message received and understood. It actually didn’t stand for anything, it was just supposed to sound hip. When asked what it stood for, Gerry Anderson once replied, with some bemusement, “Fab”, as though it were obvious.

In The Duchess Assignment her ladyship goes through eight different costumes and many accessories. Sylvia Anderson also commissioned life-size versions of Lady Penelope’s outfits that she would wear for publicity purposes, including an iconic Mondrian dress. “That was my way of getting some nice new clothes”, she later joked.

In the 1960s each puppet was valued at about £250 British Pounds today they can sell for thousands.

Special permission was granted by Rolls Royce to use a puppet-sized version of their iconic car in the show (albeit in Lady Penelope signature pink), but it was stipulated that the car should always be referred to as ‘the Rolls Royce’ never ‘the Rolls’ and absolutely not ‘the Roller’. To make the car more distinctive, its driving seat was positioned in the center front of the car, and it ran on six wheels, four at the front and two at the rear, for a luxurious ride. Her stately home, Creighton Ward Manor, was modeled on Stourhead House in Wiltshire.

Scenes that date the show include those where Lady Penelope is seen smoking, not wearing a safety belt in the Rolls Royce, and wearing a mink coat. One of her mink coats took two weeks to make and was given the title of ‘Miss Minx’. Aside from this faux pas, she was always dressed in the best fabrics available at the time. Her character was designed to be aged twenty-six in the show, but she never wore the mini skirts so fashionable in the 1960s. This was not for reasons of decorum, rather that they would have revealed the ball-and-socket joints in her knees.

Apparently when staff returned to the Thunderbirds studios in the morning, they would sometimes find Lady Penelope had been arranged overnight in a compromising position with another of the characters. Naturally, this was never shown on air. But she did have an arguably kinky line that was broadcast, during a kidnap scene, her dialogue included, “Are you going to tie me up? … Oh, I don’t mind, really.”

Making a puppet dance is not easy. In the episode The Cham Cham, Lady Penelope, heavily disguised in a brunette wig, performs a slow foxtrot. This required one puppeteer to control her strings from a gantry above and another holding her feet out of camera shot.

Thunderbirds was early to enter the lucrative world of merchandising and licensing. In addition to dolls and puppets, there were many other toy spin-offs. For example the Dinky Toys factory in Liverpool, UK, produced more that two million die-cast models of the FAB1 car. In all about 20 million Dinky Toys were made representing the many modes of transport of International Rescue. Lady Penelope even had her own successful eponymous magazine.

See Duncan Willis’ SuperProReplication for replica Thunderbirds puppets and lots of information

This feature first appeared in Fashion Doll Quarterly magazine, Summer 2018.