Following from his previous correspondence, Derek Freeborn has kindly expanded on his work on Space Patrol. Derek Freeborn - in his own words, Part Two. I will do my best to answer your queries but although Space Patrol would have been important to us at that time, it was also part of a period when my feet hardly touched the ground and I frequently get frustrated by, for instance, not being able to remember the name of some big time film director that we worked for. Not, I hasten to add, because I have gone ga-ga but simply because it would have been part of an every day week and was not that significant at the time. We were involved from the very outset of the series and the Space City model was probably one of the first models. We linked one building with another with clear acrylic tube and moved small turned aluminium bomb like shapes through them with nothing more sophisticated than fine nylon line, so that they resembled vehicles transporting people from place to place. Low voltage lights were set into the buildings to illuminate them from the inside. The overall size I can’t remember but one frequently worked on an 8ft x 4ft module for no better reason then that it was a convenient sheet size. The transporter tubes I remember were one inch in diameter and so some idea of scale can be deduced from that. The overall cost of that model would not have been high by current standards because of our working practice at that time. We worked pretty well exclusively on a fast turnover value for money ethos. Although it was a policy dictated by our circumstances at that time it worked very successfully and enabled the company and our reputation to grow very quickly. We worked without drawings and built from ideas in our heads and from verbal briefs or meetings where we kicked ideas around and then went away and built them. Later on it became necessary for a designer to be involved for the construction of sets which we were not involved with and I introduced Roberta and Arthur to a friend. Ken Ryan was an assistant Art Director who had been working at Bray Studios on various horror films and knowing that he was “resting” at that moment it seemed to be a useful introduction. When Ken was asked to go back to Bray he passed the job on to one of his old Kingston Art School chums, Roland Whiteside, who may well have seen the series through to it’s conclusion. I worked with Arthur so frequently on sci-fi model shoots that I can no longer remember if they were for Space Patrol or for other current Thames children’s series. If we made a model and it required special effects during the shoot, then we were always in attendance. It is a sort of unwritten law that the people who make it, operate it. Apart from Pat doing the costumes we were not involved with the puppets. It is a pretty specialised field and there is normally little cross over in model making and puppet making, and we did not produce the walking robot model. When we started work on Space Patrol I was working in a very small workshop/studio in Teddington but we quickly outgrew this space with the volume of work we were producing for Thames TV and we moved to a converted stable yard in Hanwell near Ealing. It was at these premises that a large part of the Space Patrol models were made. It was during this period that we began to expand into film work. This was largely brought about by the fact that several of the set designers from Thames moved into the film industry becoming Art Directors and since we had been working with them for some time it was natural that they called on our services whenever they required a model or prop for the film they were currently working on. It was during this time that we made the bed for The Knack (1965) and the Gorilla for Morgan - A Suitable Case For Treatment (1966). They were very much cult films of the period and gained a good deal of interest. I had always kept one foot in the other side of our business which was producing a tremendously varied amount of work for Museum, Permanent Exhibition and what I would consider the less ephemeral areas of work, and this was fortunate when in the 1970s there was a sudden collapse in the film industry and by which time we had moved, for it was not at all difficult to switch our focus to this type of work and we did not suffer as severely as many. We still had our contacts in the industry and over the years they would contact us to do something special where they felt our skills would be useful, and so to this day it continues with Kit having taken over the business.. Space Patrol - The Website thanks Derek Freeborn for his time in sharing this with us, and to Kit Freeborn for the use of images from his website www.freeborns.co.uk.