Derek Freeborn was kind enough to write to us and give an account of how he came to be in the industry, leading to his work on Space Patrol and beyond. Derek Freeborn - in his own words, Part One. Unfortunately any stills that we had of the models we made for Space Patrol were thrown out, without my knowledge, during one of our periodic clear outs of the studio some time in the 1970s. One colour transparency that Kit found may or may not have been connected with the series but life was so frantic at that time turning out work for various Thames Television children's sci-fi programmes and for B.B.C.s 'Doctor Who' that one's memory confuses one with another. In fact our connection with Space Patrol came through the models, props and special effects that we were doing for Thames at that time. I say Thames, although more accurately it was A.B.C. TV who later became Thames. (SP-TW Note - The transparency depicts a model set unrelated to Space Patrol but the dome is similar to one seen in the Space HQ miniature, adorned with a rotatng dish antennae. If anyone can identify it, please contact us.) To give you the background. I was a sculptor and my wife, Pat, a theatrical costume designer who had first met as very young students at Wimbledon School of Art in 1943. We had with a blind and totally naive self-belief set up to do work for exhibition, museum and pretty well anything else we could lay our hands on. We had borrowed money to buy a W.W.2 Landing Craft to live on and were scraping money together to convert it into a Houseboat. It was moored a little up river from Teddington where Thames TV were situated and we had rescued a derelict Victorian summer house in the boatyard to use as a studio. Chance led to a meeting with an old Art School chum who had become a set designer with A.B.C. TV. Television was very much in its infancy and the film industry looked down its nose at this new upstart media so there was very little cross over of talent, and by and large they were having to train a lot of their own people and there was room for new talent to get involved. My friend asked if I had any experience in special effects and with the courage born out of desperation, since we were scraping the barrel for work at the time, I said yes and found myself on a steep learning curve making all sorts of bizarre special effect props for a pilot Spike Milligan show. The business grew from this first contact and for the next six years we more or less exclusively produced every model, prop and special effect that the studio needed. They had the weekend slot which included the prestigious "Armchair Theatre" the "Avengers" and a series of children's programmes which were more often than not sci-fi. One has to remember that programmes went out live in those days. Although video tape was in existence, for various technical and cost reasons it was not used and although it now amazes me to recall the things we got away with going out live there were some things that had to rely on the ability to do a retake, and film inserts were used for this. It was through these film sessions for special effects sci-fi model sessions that I met Arthur Provis, the film cameraman who was a partner in a small London based Film Studio. I had known Arthur for a couple of years when he said that he would like me to meet Roberta Leigh, the producer of an earlier puppet series called, if memory serves me right, "Torchy" . Roberta was putting together ideas for a puppet series based on space travel and we agreed to produce the models. It would be difficult to describe life at that time. If you start a business without capital there is a tendency for your finances not to catch up with you. Unable to stretch my resources to employ an adequately large full-time staff of talented people, Pat contrived to do whatever work she could manage while having her hands full with a young family (Kit and twin daughters). With just one full-time assistant we stretched the working week by bringing in talented friends, who were working full-time elsewhere, to work evenings and weekends to turn out an amazing amount of work. We were all young, of course, and had plenty of energy. Most models or props were turned over in one week. It would be typical to get a brief on Monday and have the model in the studio the next Saturday. A two week brief was a tremendous luxury. Of course the end result only had to be good enough for a black and white small TV screen, nothing like the later demands that we had to meet, but we were always trying to push the work to better finishes and quality. Ingenuity was often the only way to make it possible and we used every trick in the book to make things work. I had helped out a plastic moulding company by doing some timber patterns, and this proved to be an invaluable contact. On a mutual help basis they often produced acrylic mouldings for us at short notice and at reasonable cost, when normally they would have only considered production runs or loaded the cost to make it viable. So there were often strange shaped clear perspex objects within our models. It was, in retrospect, an exciting time because we were continually pushing ourselves to the limit and none of it had been done before. What had been done for the big screen world of the cinema had almost no bearing on what we were doing because they were working to budgets and time scales that were out of our world. There were hilarious moments in with the stress and panic of it all but unfortunately I can't talk about them because those involved are possibly still around and it might cause hurt. However there is one thing I can mention. Gerry Anderson had started into production on his puppet series at much the same time as Space Patrol. Roberta and Gerry had worked together earlier and it was inevitable that there should be some rivalry. Our production team thought that the big weakness in puppets was their inability to walk properly. No matter how skilled the puppeteers were they always floated over the ground. It was thought that if the Space Patrol puppets could walk properly we could steal a march on Gerry Anderson's outfit. Pat had reluctantly agreed to produce the costumes for the puppets. Reluctantly, because she is not a sci-fi fan and puppets are a nightmare to dress anyway. The production team found a boffin who after months of work and struggle managed to produce a walking mechanism. One would have to say that it was ingenious, however the down side was that the waist size had to be increased to accommodate the workings to the point where we thought they were gross and Pat, I think, still holds it against me that I let her in for it. The series never managed to raise the budgets that were required to challenge the supremacy of Thunderbirds and it was inevitable that it would become the poor relation. Eventually we ourselves were asked to do work for the Gerry Anderson Studio and finally the frustration of never being able to have the time or money put into the work found us moving away from TV into film work, moving towards big budget productions like Alien. I still look back with nostalgia to those days. The experience stood me in good stead for the years ahead and I don't think anyone has ever heard me say that something was impossible. 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. In Part Two, Derek Freeborn expands on his work for Space Patrol.