When I was little I was obsessed with making spaceships.
I would use anything I could get my hands on to create my masterpieces and spent all my time thinking what I might needed for the next section.
My main projects were the Liberator from Blakes’ 7 and the Cygnus from Walt Disney’s The Black Hole.
The photo above shows me putting the finishing touches to my Cygnus model on the veranda of the Wendy House that my father built at the bottom of the garden. The structure in its turn became a bike shed and then the site of a much larger shed that Dad used as the base of his house plaque business for many years.
I think this model was mainly held together with tons of Humbrol’s yellow enamel paint, which lay thickly over a base of cereal packets, toilet rolls and random pieces of plastic that my Dad brought back from work.
I seem to remember my main problem was that I had no photographs showing all of the space ship from the film, and as I read the book first it took ages for me to actually see the film to get a better idea of how things were meant to be. There was no way for me at the time to own the film, to pause it on the space ship exterior shots, there was no Internet to search and no Youtube clip to find and pause. How on Earth did I exist in such a world!? It turns out it made me a lot more imaginative and creative.
I loved The Black Hole at the time, everything about it. As an adult I am horrified at just how terrible the Disney flop really is, and how I couldn’t see this as an 8 year old.
I still have this model. It’s dusty now and broken into a couple of pieces. In some ways it’s a testament of my patience and creativity, and the dreams of a small child to recreate what his imagination was gripped by in one moment in time. But often I look at it and the disappointment returns from when I was little, how much I failed to recreate the glowing jewel of engineering that I saw in the photographs from the film. I always wanted it to light up, rather than being painted yellow. I wanted it to be a perfect recreation of what I was intrigued by. But it never was.
Then there was the Liberator from Blakes 7. I had similar problems really getting to see what it looked like, as there were only brief segments shown on episodes, which again I had to wait to watch, and couldn’t replay, or pause, or take screengrabs of!
I think my models were more impressionistic than anything, they sort of captured what I’d seen of these visual delights, and the let me look at them for longer than I otherwise could with no other visuals to consume.
This was what was probably at the heart of my whole creative endeavour at the time – to have a sense of ownership over these mysterious, exciting, fantastical objects which only existed in momentary glimpses in elusive media I had no control over.
