I’m Certain To Fall I Know

Stingray: Treasure Down Below (ATV/ITC/APF, 1965).

On face value, the World Aquanaut Security Patrol’s Communications Officer Atlanta Shore would appear to have everything going for her. Daughter of legendary W.A.S.P. Commander Sam Shore, she had nonetheless risen through the ranks on her own merit and in a crucial technical and strategic capacity, frequently taking responsibility for the decision to put their headquarters Marineville into Full Battle Stations mode – in other words when it responded to a potential threat by essentially retreating into the ground – and regularly joining the crews of their fleet of hi-tech jet-propelled space-age submersibles on their various sub-aquatic missions, including frequent assignments with their world-famous flagship submarine Stingray. She was also more than capable of outthinking the assorted underwater adversaries and seafaring scoundrels they encountered, dressed flashily when off-duty with sophisticated taste in music, literature and food, and with her red bouffant hair and generous figure, was by the standards of the day what can only be described as something of a fox. There was one thing that Atlanta didn’t have, however – the heart of Stingray’s dashing pilot, Captain Troy Tempest.

Stingray, Gerry and Sylvia Anderson’s fourth ‘Supermarionation’ series and the first to be made in colour, was first shown by ITV in 1964 and part of the reason why it still enjoys regular exposure and great popularity to this day is just how remarkably forward thinking it was for an early sixties children’s television production. Although the real pioneering honours must go to Fireball XL5’s fearless and ferociously intelligent Space Doctor Venus, Atlanta – and her sketchily amicable love rivalry with fellow W.A.S.P agent and mute semi-mermaid Marina – was an early manifestation of Sylvia Anderson’s determination to pack her television series with strong female co-leads that any young girls tuning in for twenty one minutes of puppet-fuelled adventure could both relate to and aspire towards. Atlanta may not be as effortlessly elegant and capable – or indeed as well known – as Lady Penelope Creighton-Ward, and may not have been as aerodynamically vital to global security as Rhapsody Angel and her Mysteron-repelling company of kickass female fighter pilots, but Atlanta got more than her fair share of dialogue and plot development, tempered with her aspirational extra-Aquaphibian-trouncing enthusiasms and tendency towards hilariously jealousy-fuelled catty comments, which even saw her vie with Marina for the attentions of the inevitable conspicuously healthy-looking ‘sick’ child puppet in Stingray‘s festively-tinged episode A Christmas To Remember, and she could play the piano. All of which was apparently beyond the square-jawed attentions of Troy Tempest, who as a consequence of being a manly men’s man only had eyes for the exotic unattainable Brigitte Bardot-visaged beauty who crucially could not spoil his fantasy by speaking; it is fair to say, however, that Marina deployed a good deal in the way of non-verbal communication to suggest that she was not remotely interested. Presumably it wasn’t so much that she couldn’t whisper the words that his heart was longing to hear, more that she just didn’t want to.

Just in case none of this politely expressed puppet love triangle chicanery was evident enough from the contents of the actual episodes themselves, the point was memorably underlined in the montage of amphibious adulation that made up Stingray‘s closing titles, where the not remotely Venus by Frankie Avalon-inspired love song extolling the virtues of ‘Aqua Marina’ and the strange enchantments that start whenever she’s near came accompanied by the heartrending juxtaposition of a showily dressed-up Troy and Marina out on the town with Atlanta in her quarters in a swankily exotic blouse, staring with lovestruck longing at a framed photograph of the heart-disregarding submarine captain. What she has apparently failed to notice in the throes of her lovesick anguish, however, is that the adjacent picture frame to it is actually empty; or at least if she has noticed it, then evidently it has not caused her anywhere near as much alarm as was occasioned to Captain Scarlet by some boxes falling quite near him.

Arguably, nowhere was this hopeless lovelorn angst more ably illustrated than in Treasure Down Below, the twenty fourth episode of Stingray, originally broadcast on 14^th March 1965. Giving Titan and his fleet of Terror Fish an opportunity to put their feet up for a week, this episode instead has something of a piratical theme but as we join the action the Stingray crew are enjoying a spot of shore leave which variously takes in high-end dining, trying on fezes and, erm, reading a comic about the exploits of their in-universe associates from Supercar. This somehow leads to ‘Phones’ Sheridan coming into possession of a map purporting to mark the location of the doubloon-festooned purloined hoard of one ‘Captain Black’; if he is in any way related to the Captain Black that later sided with The Mysterons in a not remotely geopolitically analogous war of subterfugal attrition between Earth and Mars, then this is certainly not evident from their respective ideological standpoints. It will probably come as little surprise that this chance acquisition has in fact been engineered by the actual Captain Black, who is plotting to use Stingray to create an opportunity to distract two undersea shifty characters called Ebron and Trall who have intercepted his sunken riches and then escape in the confusion with the loot under his arm, but none of this is actually what concerns us here. Instead, let’s rewind back slightly to that shore leave and what Troy evidently thinks is a date despite Marina more than possibly not sharing this opinion. At least she doesn’t until Phones tries to manipulate Troy into agreeing to help him investigate the map’s veracity by reminding him in front of Marina that Atlanta has a ‘thing’ for him, causing the green-haired Pacifian to storm off in protest at the overwhelming display of toxically masculine pig-headedness… but – fittingly for a character who automatically tries to make everything all about him – we’re getting drawn too far back into the actual story there. It’s almost like Captain Black himself had set this up. No, not that Captain Black. He’d have tried to redirect a motorcade in Prague to divert attention away from The Mysterons’ bid to steal a ‘micro transmitter’ or something.

Before his navigator’s ungentlemanly interruption, Troy and Marina had been enjoying a candlelit bottle of wine at their lavishly-appointed regular hangout Restaurant Casablanca, where – in amongst the rustic throws, latticework window frames and conspicuously modish bright yellow telephone – a poster advertising forthcoming musical attractions at the presumably nearby ‘opera teatro’ Casa Alta is fleetingly visible on the wall behind Marina. Closer inspection of the otherwise wavy line-festooned advert reveals that the acts in question are named Donna Fiore, Aqua E Ceilo and El Submara, whom a quick spot of translation reveals are technically called Flower Woman, Water And Sky and, erm, The Submarine. It’s reasonably safe to assume that Flower Woman is some sort of prototype hippy dippy representative of the emergent folk rock scene with a small artillery of retooled traditional numbers about racing the wind and chasing the wind, while Water And Sky have all the bearings of a progressive rock duo formed by Ian Water and Ian Sky after they left the eight hundred and forty seventh line-up of A-AUSTR following a dispute about ‘bread’, and while The Submarine have a name that calls to mind either an early sixties jazz outfit or a late sixties hard rock outfit, it is also not beyond the realms of possibility that it is actually an ironically non-ironically ironically named band made up of W.A.S.P. personnel, in a similar gambit to that episode of Fireball Xl5 where Venus was seen celebrating a successful mission by blowing a mean saxophone at a gig. Honestly, was there nothing that woman couldn’t do?

Actually, Venus could probably even have successfully turned Troy Tempest’s over-inflated solenoid-powered Supermarionation head, unlike poor old Atlanta who was reduced to haplessly trying to ask Troy on a date via radio link and falling victim to the shortwave era’s equivalent of ‘just going through a tunnel’. Doubtless she then took out her off-screen frustration on her piano, bitterly rehearsing for that The Submarine gig where she would show him what’s what. In any case, while Troy was wasting his time with a lack of conversation a restaurant that looks like it saw everyone with more money than sense coming, it’s a fair bet she would have preferred a trip to Ronnie Scott’s.

Buy A Book!

You can find an expanded version of I’m Certain To Fall I Know, with tons more about the somewhat unique iteration of ‘pop’ music in the Supermarionation universe, in Keep Left, Swipe Right, available in paperback here or from the Kindle Store here.

Alternately, if you’re just feeling generous, you can buy me a coffee here. Atlanta will know where to get a really good one.

Further Listening

There’s tons more on Gerry and Sylvia Anderson productions in Looks Unfamiliar with Mic Wright on Thunderbirds Comic here, Samira Ahmed on Space: 1999 here, Tim Worthington on the Joe 90 Christmas Special here and Mitch Benn on Into Infinity here.