Things had started to look up for Gerry in his private life, even though the bitterness between himself and Sylvia Anderson had spilled over to the extent that Gerry was no longer able to speak to his son, Gerry Junior, following a particularly painful letter in which the boy had told him he never wanted to see him again. Gerry blamed Sylvia for this and said quite categorically that he’d never forgive her.

However, in spite of the pain Gerry felt he had started to see Mary Robbins, a secretary who had been working on a project with Gerry called ‘The Day After Tomorrow – Into Infinity.’ Their relationship was going really well which was more than could be said of Gerry’s career at that time.

Maybe it was the divorce from Sylvia or maybe it was the lack of a new series on the horizon, but Gerry was suffering from a lack of confidence. The only offer of work at this time was from a Swedish company who wanted Gerry to make a promotional film for them. Money started to run out and Gerry found himself living on the breadline. In 1978 Gerry was invited to co-write a screenplay for a film called ‘Operation Shockwave’ but it fell through at the last minute when the promised financing proved to be unavailable. 1979 was not much better and another attempt to make a movie, ‘Five Star Five’ also fell through. But in 1981 Gerry was to see his fortunes take a turn for the better with a project that had its roots in a 1977 proposal.

Gerry and Reg Hill had been approached by Banjiro Uemura, the head of Toboku Shinsha, the Japanese arm of ITC, to create a new animated series for Japanese television. The series was entitled ‘Thunderhawks’ but did, like so many other of Gerry’s late 1970s projects, fall through before it got too far. But in 1981 Uemura came back with a revamped version of the proposed series entitled ‘Scientific Rescue Team Techno/Voyager.’ It would later air in both the UK and the USA as ‘Thunderbirds 2086.’

At the same time Gerry had entered into a new business partnership with Christopher Burr who was able to secure financing for a new puppet series based on the abortive Japanese series. The title was changed to ‘Terrahawks’. Gerry approached Derek Meddings to do the special effects on the series but was astounded when Meddings turned him down with the curt response; “Gerry, you couldn’t possibly afford me!” Instead Gerry appointed Steven Begg as Special Effects Director and was very pleased with the result.

'Terrahawks' was set at the end of the 21st Century after mankind had developed interstellar travel. This brought humankind into contact with alien races and led to the foundation of the Terrahawks Earth Defence Squadron, which would defend the home planet, should any of these alien races prove to be hostile. The hero of the series was Dr Tiger Ninestein and the villain of the piece Zelda, Imperial Queen of the planet Guk. For the series a new style of puppetry was introduced, a sophisticated form of glove puppetry which was dubbed ‘Supermacromination.’

The problem with the earlier Anderson puppet shows was that the features of the characters faces were fixed solid. If a shot required a different expression to be shown on the puppets face, such as smiling or grimacing, a different head had to be created and shot. The new puppets had soft rubber faces and were manipulated by the puppeteer putting their hands through the neck of the puppet and into the heads. The puppets eyes were radio controlled and with all this going on it was necessary to make everything on a much bigger scale. The biggest puppet stood 30 inches tall.

The series also featured the customary Anderson hardware such as craft appearing out of secret bases and a group of droids known as Zeroids. Characters and vehicles were designed with a very conscious eye on the merchandising toy market. However, everyone involved in the show agrees that the series did not live up to their expectations.

In 1983 Gerry Anderson and Christopher Burr met with US TV executives in order to sell 'Terrahawks' to North America. The series had not been an immediate success when it had initially aired in the UK but after a slow start it began to receive a very respectable audience of around 9 million viewers, and that was enough for London Weekend Television, together with Japan’s Asahi Tsushin Advertising Agency and Anderburr Pictures (a company set up by Anderson and Burr) to finance a further 13 episodes on top of the original 26. Although changes in ITC’s management meant that Gerry no longer had the backing of Lew Grade, he quite naturally thought that the show’s healthy viewing figures combined with Gerry’s own reputation would be enough to land a deal. However, this proved not to be the case.

Disappointed and a little disillusioned, Gerry and Christopher returned home to the UK via Concorde, and on the flight discussed the type of show they could make that might get the American’s interested. It seemed that the objections against 'Terrahawks' was that, according to the US execs, puppet shows were generally ill received by America’s viewing audience. This claim was hardly backed up by hard facts, after all the 'Muppet Show' had been a huge success in the USA just a few years before and recent blockbuster movies such as 'The Empire Strikes Back' and 'E.T.' relied quite heavily on both puppets and animatronics. No, the problem they decided was not with the puppets themselves but with the facts that the puppets were depicting human beings and US audiences preferred their puppets to be distinctly non-human.

Out of this was born an idea for a show that would use human actors for the human roles and puppets for the alien ones. Gerry and Christopher decided to set the series on a space station crewed by both alien and human police officers (cop shows were hugely popular at that time) and set round a ‘precinct’ that had a distinct New York feel to it. It would be called 'Space Police'.

A 53-minute pilot was made but in spite of an initial interest by TVS Gerry failed to raise the necessary finance and ultimately the series was dropped and consigned to the vaults under the heading of ‘nearly but not quite’.

Gerry went off and made another series called 'Dick Spanner' using stop-motion animation as opposed to marionettes. However, the series which was based on Raymond Chandler’s down-at-heel private eye character Philip Marlowe and told in the same narrative style as Humphrey Bogart’s interpretation in the classic move ‘The Big Sleep’ got a very limited showing on British TV although certainly enough to elevate it to ‘cult’ status. The 'Dick Spanner' episodes were shown as only four minutes long segments (cut down from the original 55-minutes) and were broadcast by the fledgling Channel 4 within another show, 'Network 7', presented by Janet Street Porter and aimed at the 18 – 24 age group. ‘Spanner’ quickly became the only highlight of 'Network 7' and C4 bosses soon became aware of this. In an attempt to stop viewers turning off as soon as the ‘Spanner’ segment had been shown the pictures were overlaid with graphics advertising forthcoming items in what ultimately turned out to be a futile attempt at keeping viewers but which, with hindsight, can now be seen as the genesis of today’s style of pre-programme advertising.

But 'Space Police' wasn’t finished yet. Eight years after the pilot had been made Gerry got an unexpected call from John Needham of Mentorn Films who was keen to develop new television programmes. Needham was currently producing a three-minute segment called ‘Comment’ whereby somebody was invited to talk about a current event. On this occasion the event was the Motor Show and in particular the launch of the new Bentley Continental. Needham thought it’d be fun if Lady Penelope and Parker could be ‘interviewed’. Later, Gerry returned to Mentorn’s studios and Needham asked Gerry if he had any ‘properties’ that they might be interested in. ‘Well actually,’ said Gerry ‘I’ve got a pilot for something called ‘Space Police’.

Needham and his managing director, Tom Gutteridge, managed to secure a commission from the BBC to develop a 13 part series on a budget of £750,000 per episode which included a remade pilot with a number of format changes. The aliens would no longer be played by puppets but by actors wearing masks. Then, with production set to commence in early 1993 the BBC pulled out citing budget cuts as their reason. Another problem that they came up with was that they could no longer use the original title as it had been registered as a trademark in the US by toy manufacturers LEGO. Alternative titles were suggested such as ‘Precinct 88’ and ‘Demeter City Blues’ before ‘Space Precinct’ was finally decided on. However, it was a title that Gerry Anderson never liked.

American actor Ted Shackelford starred as former NYPD detective Patrick Brogan, now a lieutenant with the Demeter City police force on the planet Altor. Brogan and his partner Jack Haldane (played by Rob Youngblood) must adjust to living in another solar system, and investigating crimes being committed by aliens as well as humans. Also co-starring was Danish actress Simone Bendix as Officer Jane Castle, the only other human on the Demeter City force and Haldane's love interest (Brogan being happily married with a wife, daughter and son who made the move to Demeter City with him). Space Precinct' was one of the highest-budgeted shows Gerry Anderson ever produced, but the series had taken many years to come to the screen and even then it was beset with further problems.

In spite of the BBC’s pull-out funding was found from a company called Grove Television. But after going into full production the money began to dry up. “We were constantly running out of cash’ Gerry recalled years later. “Sometimes just managing to continue production by the skin of our teeth.’ Eventually, around episode 18 the money stopped coming through altogether and the company ran up huge debts. Eventually enough money was found to complete the series but Grove Television was put into liquidation.

The show got its first UK showing on the satellite/cable channel Sky One airing at 700pm on Saturday 27th May 1995. Then, Sky had a much smaller audience than it has today but still backed it with a huge launch party and a press conference with a photo call for the national press. However, on terrestrial television it didn’t get the best of deals.

The show aired on BBC2 and was given a 6pm broadcast slot. Gerry was not overly happy with this as the show was intended for a more adult audience and still feels that it would have been better received had it been given a primetime showing. Furthermore, because of its early evening transmission the BBC ordered that scenes of explicit violence be completely removed from the show. These included threatening or sadistic behaviour, all traces of blood and post-production special effects were ordered to turn bladed items into laser style weapons. In some cases certain scenes had to be re-shot to comply with the BBC’s requests. The result of this was that many viewers only ever saw a watered down, sanitised version of the show. The series was also shown in syndication in North America but it was often scheduled in late-night/early morning time slots and consequently made little impression on American ratings.

Vivid Imaginations released 12 figures for 'Space Precinct' in 1994. Each figure included an ID card, but there was little else in the way of merchandise. The series was released on DVD format in September 2000 as is currently still available, although not in North America.

There was one more Gerry Anderson produced series to be screened before the end of the 20th century, and that was 'Lavender Castle'. Whilst working on 'Space Precinct' Gerry was approached at Bray studios by the science fiction and fantasy artist Rodney Matthews, who showed him a collection of highly detailed and, in Gerry’s opinion, sometimes bizarre illustrations. Gerry and Rodney became friendly and would often meet up and discuss a number of topics. On one occasion Gerry said to Rodney that he had been inspired to create a new series based on the artists’ drawings but they needed to be developed further.

Rodney went away and came up with some characters and conceived a concept based on the lyrics of an old song he had in fact written himself back in 1973, when playing in a progressive rock band, for which he was the drummer. Together, he and Gerry conceived a stop motion animated series. 'Lavender Castle' tells the story of a daring band of misfits. Travelling in their space ship, the Paradox, a half timbered craft with a thatched roof, and their quest to find the elusive Lavender Castle, a city floating in space, a place of harmony and peace, of purity and power. And find it they must before the evil megalomaniac Dr. Agon gets there first to destroy it.

Gerry took the proposal to the BBC who promised to back a 26 episode series. However, soon after, the Corporation withdrew its backing without explanation, and Gerry was unable to get Carlton to back it because their then head of children’s programmes didn’t like science fiction. The series remained on the shelf for the next few years, but that wasn’t an altogether bad thing. By 1996 technology had moved on and the development of CGI graphics meant that Gerry could better realise Rodney’s original concept.

Craig Hemmings of Carrington Pictures International agreed to finance a full series which was made at Cosgrove Hall, which was not unfamiliar with bringing surreal concepts to life having originally created the uniquely British animated cartoon series 'Chorlton And The Wheelies', which was followed by such children’s classics as 'Jamie And The Magic Torch', 'Count Duckula' and 'The Wind In The Willows'.

The series, which consisted of 26 ten-minute episodes, was first broadcast on 7th January 1999 on the ITV Network as part of the ‘Children’s ITV’ strand and became the first Gerry Anderson series to be fully networked since ‘Four Feather Falls’ in 1960.

As the decade, and indeed the millennium came to a close, Carlton Television approached Gerry with a view to recreating some of his famous Supermarionation series of the 1960s for a 21st century audience. In fact, the series chosen for testing purposes was the first to have originally gone out under the Century 21 banner 'Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons.'

Having created 'Lavender Castle' with CGI graphics it was quite evident that this was now the way forward in animation and there was never a chance that 'Scarlet' would be a puppet remake. Even before the approach by Carlton, Gerry had already begun experimenting with 'Captain Scarlet' using the new technology. A short script was written which was titled ‘Captain Scarlet – The New Millennium’ which was set some years after we has last encountered the Spectrum agents. Former Anderson performers Francis Matthews (Captain Scarlet), Ed Bishop (Captain Blue) and Gary Martin (Captain Black) lent their vocal talents -plus a little bit more. Each actor was fitted with sensors that recorded their facial movements when speaking so the data could be imposed onto cyber-scanned heads.

The resulting film, now retitled ‘Captain Scarlet and the Return of the Mysterons’ was shown to Gerry Anderson fans at a Century 21 convention in Coventry on October 7th 2000. The enthusiastic reception that the short film received was enough to encourage Anderson to secure the television and film rights from Carlton, who had acquired them (as well as Anderson’s earlier series such as 'Stingray' and 'Thunderbirds') from ITC. (Carlton, in actual fact was soon to be taken over themselves by Granada Ventures who bought the first Anderson produced TV series way back in the 1950s). With a 26-episode plan and a £22 million budget, the Indestructible Production Company was formed to produce the new series of Captain Scarlet in the state-of-the-art Stanley Kubrick Building at Pinewood Studios in Buckinghamshire, England.

Round about this time, Gerry became (loosely) involved with a movie project that would bring ‘Thunderbirds’ to the big screen only this time using real actors instead of puppets. However, as he never actually owned the rights to the series he had no artistic control over the new Thunderbirds movie and was only employed as an advisor. It soon became apparent that Gerry was intensely dissatisfied with the project and he very soon distanced himself from it, refusing to even comment on it. In an interview with ‘The Stage’ Gerry told their reporter, “I had absolutely nothing to do with it. Someone acquired the movie rights, and that was it. To say that I was a little surprised when Lady Penelope’s pink Rolls-Royce was turned into a pink Ford is something of an understatement. I heard a story - it’s probably hearsay - that they built the damn thing, and when it was finished it was so huge that the actors could hardly get into it. But, enough said.”

Before the new series of Captain Scarlet went ‘before the cameras’ as it were, there was a change in casting. As veteran director David Lane explained: “We started of thinking about using Francis Matthews for the voice of Captain Scarlet, as to me, he sounded just the same. But when we got it on tape it just didn’t work.” Rather than trying to copy the old voices, which Lane felt would have seemed unnatural and would have diminished the actor’s performances, the production team decided to go for completely new voices. Even so, both the actors who voiced Captains Scarlet and Blue had previous connections with Gerry Anderson. Wayne Forester (Scarlet) appeared as a number of different characters in Anderson’s 'Space Precinct' as well as appearing on stage in the Mime Theatre Project’s production of Thunderbird’s 'FAB-The Next Generation', and Robbie Stevens (Blue) had provided voices in 'Terrahawks'.

Following 12 weeks of pre-production, animation work on 'New Captain Scarlet' began on 5th May 2003, but by Christmas Anderson was not happy with the way it looked. It turned out that the software being used on the series was totally inappropriate for television work and by the time Gerry realised this they had spent half the budget and only had about 60 shots ‘in the can’. Gerry quickly got on the phone to Emmy Award winning visual effects expert Ron Thornton who a decade before had worked on the hit US sci-fi series 'Babylon 5'. Thornton arrived at Pinewood in early 2004 and immediately took charge of the digital work, streamlining the production and using the experience he’d gained on the animated series’ 'Dan Dare' and 'Max Steel'.

One of the problems the original production team had run into was the design of the new Cloudbase –now renamed Skybase. The model was so huge that they couldn’t render it in one go. “The biggest model we ever made at Foundation Imaging”, said Thornton referring to the company founded 10 years ago to provide groundbreaking computer-generated visual effects for shows like 'Babylon 5' and 'Voyager', “was the Enterprise, and I think that was just shy of a million polygons –Skybase was originally three million which was way over the top.” The other advantages that Thornton bought with him was a good working knowledge of the tools required to make the characters seem as real as possible, which had already been created as a result of research done for films such as 'Final Fantasy' and 'Shrek', and were now readily available.

Another innovation for 'New Captain Scarlet' is that it was the first Gerry Anderson series to be filmed in the 16:9 widescreen format and also the first to be made in HD, (high definition video), described elsewhere as the most innovative breakthrough in broadcasting since the advent of colour. HD boasts a picture quality and sound that surpasses that of cinema presentation and is currently available in Japan, the US and the UK.

The two-part pilot episode, 'Instrument of Destruction', was completed on April 16th 2004 and work on the remaining 24 episodes commenced in early May with a completion date set for June 2005, so it came as a big surprise when ITV announced that the series would premiere on it’s Saturday morning flagship show 'Ministry of Mayhem' (MOM) in early 2005.

Introduced by children’s presenters Holly Willoughby and Stephen Mulhern, 'MOM' was very much in the style of the classic 1970s series 'TISWAS', featuring kids games, appearances by pop and TV personalities, much bucket-of-water throwing and a series of popular cartoon shows.

The first episode to feature 'New Captain Scarlet' was broadcast on February 12th 2005 and although it was quite obvious that this was a brand new and innovative series, many fans enthusiasm was dampened by the way in which the series was broadcast, being divided up into two segments with a ten minute breakaway in between featuring 'MOM' style games. Once again, poor programme planning by ITV seemed to have scuppered Gerry Anderson's chances of a successful comeback to prime-time viewing. However, ITV listened to the dissenting voice of the public and the series was shown in subsequent weeks in two halves either side of a commercial break.

For Gerry Anderson now a sprightly 75, the series must come as a welcome relief to years of making puppet series. “I hated ruddy puppets. There was a ghastly thing on TV once called 'Muffin the Mule' and I found it both crude and inept. All those strings and grimacing faces. It made me shudder - and almost physically sick. And 'Twizzle' wasn’t that much better, or our successor, 'Torchy, The Battery Boy' - dreadful papier-mâché faces and fixed expression. The thing was - beggars can’t be choosers.” Like it or lump it from the early days of Supermarionation Gerry has overseen many puppet worlds. In fact, to stress the marked difference between his old puppet series’ and his latest CGI one he had to invent a new term: Hypermarionation. And the future? “If technology goes on advancing the next series I do will probably be filmed in Uberhypermarionation - but, come to think of it, that word may well be too wide for the screen.”

Gerry Anderson has created a world of children’s characters that stand tall alongside the giants of the literary world. Like Alice, Snow White, Oliver and Mary Poppins, Gerry’s characters are simply timeless in their appeal. And in creating these characters he has carved a unique place for himself in the heart and consciousness of the television watching public that spans the generations. The kids of the 1960s who grew up watching the thrilling adventures of International Rescue can only marvel now as they watch their own children and grandchildren rediscover the magic of 'Thunderbirds' and other Supermarionation series each time his productions are re-shown, which is quite often. And as we move into the 21st Century of his beloved fantasy worlds, the man shows no signs of retiring. “That is just not anywhere in the plan,” he says, “the only way I’m going out, I always tell people, is when someone finally cuts the strings.”