OH SHIT!..IT'S FINALLY HAPPENED....I AM NOW FIFTY YEARS OF AGE !!!!....OH SHIT!........

AAAAAHHH!.....ITS FINALLY COME TO PASS , ITS HAPPENED , ITS OCCURRED ...YOUR BELOVED FINGER ON THE PULSE, EYES N' EARS OF THE WORLD...(And all the other bits attached, of course..) HAS FINALLY HIT THE BIG FIVE OOOH!..50...(sob ,sniffle ,snort)....
I went to my bed last night a young fresh faced young 49 year old and was awakened about 6.00 a.m .this morning by my excited daughter. Not, i hasten to add that she was excited for her beloved father. No! It was because we share the same birthday and shes hit the big 12.... The Lovely Lynne ,even at that ungodly hour, wished me a happy birthday. I replied , not unreasonably i thought, "Sod off ,its not my birthday ,its too early." But over the next 10 minutes or so a mug of tea was supplied, my first as a 50 year old. I opened a couple of presents and a heap of cards, which cheered me up a little. The lovely Lynne and the not so sweet 'Little 'un went off to school n' work or whatever, whilst i slobbed on the couch in a dressing gown guzzling tea watching 'Randell and Hopkirk; The saint; The Proffessionals, all good 50 fare. I might even put on some SUPERCAR,or FIREBALL XL5 dvd'ds later with a touch of MAN FROM UN.C.L.E.; With a smidgin of VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA dvd's before me mam n' the mam n' dad in law descend this afternoon.As they'll watch some of those antique afternoon things and COUNTDOWN and DEAL OR NO DEAL, not on DVD ,i hasten to add.As we wait the return of the Lovely Lynne before we go off to a local boozer for a bit of scoff. I'm not drinking, i cant take it at my age!..(But i'm still a guy who can't,but should a little more often, say no!)... I'd politly inquire as to wether they'd prefer to watch GERRY ANDERSON'S U.F.O. but i dont think they'll go for it. Ah well ,i s'pose i'll be off i've got to get me over 50 tablets and new walking stick n' stuff , oh and get a moth eaten cardigan that buttons up wrong with the few buttons left. Age is a terrible thing.

"DAD, DAD, THEY'VE LANDED ON THE MOON N' ITS UPSIDE DOWN !!"

Long ago in the days of the old steam television, as the wonderful SPIKE MILLIGAN(spine Milligna, the well known typing error.) might've said. The steam telly was a huge wooden box full of valves which took about an hour n' a half to heat up and display a crappy old black and white picture on a tiny screen. The buttons were huge clunky things that you had to twist with both hands to turn channels, never mind turn on or off. It was just as well that there was only 2 channels in those long gone days as the levels of hernias would've been a lot higher. Do you remember horizontal and vertical hold; 405 and 625 lines, etc. Ahh in the days of digital telly, this is how proper tellys worked. But it was on one of these steaming box of valves that a nine year old(just, 5 days past the birthday)space mad, schoolboy watched the most mindblowing thing he'd ever seen. The MOON LANDING.

I would wait with mounting excitment every Tuesday night for the paperboy to deliver the TV21 comic, with all the GERRY ANDERSON-based comic strips exquisitly drawn on quality glossy paper ,a wonderful comic. Telly had PATRICK TROUGHTON as DR WHO; LOST IN SPACE; VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA; TIME TUNNEL; So, rockets, space and science fiction was 'it'. So, when the APOLLO boys started their 'stuff' it was great. I always remember being most excited when APOLLO 8 went off around the moon for the first time. I was stunned, and still am by the photos of the moon and the approaching darkness of mountains and crater walls as they orbited the darkside and then earthrise. A few months later PATRICK MOORE and JAMES BURKE are talking us, in great lengths through this grainy lousy telly(live from the the moon') ,mostly black, with a white chunk,at the top of the screen. The picture was,it turns out, upside down."Dad,dad,they've landed and the moons upside down"... I pondered on the possibility that they had landed at the south pole,or the moons bottom. Then the picture rightened up and cleared up a little and NEIL ARMSTRONG stepped on the moon. And a 9- year old schoolboy busting a gut with excitment, in his grey school sweater and black school shorts on a bright sunny morning was yelling for his dad ."Dad,Dad, he's walking on the moon!!!"When i got to school we we're moon skipping around the playground for weeks.

Even today the conspiracy theorists are still blathering on about shadows; Reflections in visors; Flags waving; Multiple shadows; Lack of blast craters and on and on. As i've said before the yanks cant keep a secret among a few people for long ,never mind thousands for 40- odd years. It must be frustrating for the astronauts. I had to laugh when i read about BUZZ ALDRIN giving somebody who claimed he'd never gone to the moon, a 'smack in the gob.'Good on yer, Buzz. I've been watching programmes over the last week or so and some of the re-digitallised lunar footage is ,to me ,truly mindblowing, after all this time .The 9-year old schoolboy is now a 49 year old schoolboy. And to complete this nostalgia fest. I recently mentioned DANNI and DISHI(over on the links)These are the people who supply the comics on disc. They sent me a disc with all the old COUNTDOWN comics on.Countdown was a sort of extension of the TV21. But they used to feature a lot about the APOLLO programme. I remember the first issue with , GERRY ANDERSON'S ,U.F.O.Thunderbirds, Fireball, Stingray;JON PERTWEE'S Dr Who, and stuff ,but with a huge free gift. A poster that you had to add stickers over the weeks to, to show the whole Apollo moon shots n' stuff. I, of course filled it up and it held pride of place on my bedroom wall ,right up there with the BRUCE LEE posters.

THUNDERBIRDS ARE GO'ER'S!!!!!!!!

My beloved Lovely lady Lynne filled a questionnaire on the facebook thingey on the computer for me the other day. One of the questions was about favourite telly programmes and she tapped out basically everything a certain Mr GERRY ANDERSON has put out over the years...Supercar, Fireball XL5, Stingray, Thunderbirds, Captain Scarlet, UFO. She asked me to deny my love for these fonts of nostalgia for all us middle aged oldish farts, and i couldn't. What my beloved doesn't understand is that all human life is there, with strings! In the beginning it was simple. Supercar was in a garage in the desert with Proffessor Beaker, Mike Mercury and Supercar, never any women to cloud and confuse the issues addressed in the drama of SUPERCAR.

But, this was to change when the puppet sculptors managed to work out how to do women. So, in FIREBALL XL5 ,Our dashing hero STEVE ZODIAC had a thing going with the lovely VENUS. It was all very innocent, except Venus seemed to spend a lot of time with a monkey like alien ZOONY! But, Steve spent an unhealthy amount of time with a robot who always wanted to be "Going home!"


Next came STINGRAY. Now things started to get a little spicey Gerry and Sylvia Anderson introduced a 'menage et trois' situation into the breath-taking underwater adventures. The hero of the(half) hour was the James Garner look-a-like, TROY TEMPEST, beloved by the lovely ATLANTA. She was voiced by LOIS MAXWELL the lady who became beloved of JAMES BOND, as MONEYPENNY. The problem arose when Troy and his co-pilot in the supersub, STINGRAY, PHONES, Where out fighting Aquanaut baddies who spoke like they were gargling mouthwash. They met an underwater beautiful woman called MARINA.Marina couldn't speak, god, i love her already! Poor ol' Phones never got a look in all the women seemed to have only eyes for that two-timing bastard Troy Tempest.



Then things got really complicated with THUNDERBIRDS. There was a much bigger cast in this one hour extravaganza and as a result things happened which caused eyebrows to raise even without the aid of strings. The whole of INTERNATIONAL RESCUE lived on an island in the middle of the ocean unknown to the rest of the world who depended so strongly on the hi-tech equipment built by a strange character with speech and visual impediments, called BRAINS. He had no sex life as he wa in his lab building thing and mixing chemicals. GEOFF TRACEY, was the daddy of the family and somehow with his bespectacled stuttering friend built a house on top of a series of rocket pads and silo's. I think health n' safety would have had something to say about it all, so i suppose thats one good reason for keeping it all very quiet. Geoff was very friendly with an English Lady, the lovely LADY PENELOPE.She ,with her machine gunning, rocket fireing,flying, sailing bright pink Rolls Royce, driven by her faithful sidekick PARKER, were International Rescue's British agents. Now, the fine ladyP', i could never figure out if she was up to something with Geoff, or The eldest son SCOTT. ALAN(Thunderbird3-spaceship),the youngest fancied his chances. But he was having a fling wih a girl who lived on the island ,TIN TIN.Now, was she being seen too by Alan or being 'gangbanged' by the the Tracey brothers with all this time on their hands between missions?

One of the brothers JOHN, was in a satellite listening to the radio all the time picking up people in trouble. He must've been a sad lonely fellah, what did he do to pass the time? The poor fellah didn't seem to have a chair to sit on, even. The rest back down on Earth, on the paradise that is Tracey island, sat around drinkink, painting and swimming. Normally it was THUNDERBIRDS 1+2 that went on the jobs. Scott(T1) would land and tell VIRGIL(T2) what to do. It was poor ol' Virge who got his hands dirty and his arse scorched while Scott(T1) sat drinking coffee telling him what to do, and once he's doing it, hurry it up.

T1 blasted off out of the swimming pool which could put you off your breaststroke. T3 blasted off through a gap in the cicular living room, their window cleaning bills for scraping the equivalent of 3 SATURN 5 rockets blasting off every weeks carbon deposits off the living room window must've been suitably astronomical. And just be careful if you want to climb some palm tree's when T2 is readying to launch.,