External links
- "30 Minutes After Noon" at IMDb
- "30 Minutes After Noon" at thunderbirdsonline.co.uk
- "30 Minutes After Noon" at TracyIslandChronicles.com
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| "30 Minutes After Noon" | |
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| Thunderbirds episode | |
| Episode no. | Series 1 Episode 18 |
| Directed by | David Elliott |
| Written by | Alan Fennell |
| Cinematography by | Paddy Seale |
| Editing by | Harry Ledger |
| Production code | 18 |
| Original air date | 11 November 1965 |
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"30 Minutes After Noon" is an episode of Thunderbirds , a British Supermarionation television series created by Gerry and Sylvia Anderson and filmed by their production company AP Films (APF) for ITC Entertainment. Written by Alan Fennell and directed by David Elliott, it was first broadcast on 11 November 1965 on ATV Midlands as the seventh episode of Series One. It is the 18th episode in the official running order. [1]
Set in the 2060s, Thunderbirds follows the exploits of International Rescue, an organisation that uses technologically advanced rescue vehicles to save human life. The main characters are ex-astronaut Jeff Tracy, founder of International Rescue, and his five adult sons, who pilot the organisation's main vehicles: the Thunderbird machines. In "30 Minutes After Noon", International Rescue become involved in thwarting the Erdman Gang, a notorious criminal organisation, who first force an innocent worker in a bomb plot and later must save a British secret agent caught up in their next scheme.
Drawing inspiration from the spy film The Ipcress File , Elliott decided to realise Fennell's script through the use of what commentator Stephen La Rivière terms "quirky visuals". [2] Elliott and camera operator Alan Perry experimented with original camera angles and movements, choosing to open one scene with a long tracking shot. [3] The episode's incidental music is largely recycled from earlier APF productions. [4]
Commentators including media historian Nicholas J. Cull have noted that Elliott and Perry's cinematography emulates the visual style of 1960s James Bond films. [5] Stephen La Rivière argues that this visual homage is not evident throughout, commenting that the episode's first half uses more conventional filming techniques. [2] [6] "30 Minutes After Noon" was released as an audio play in 1967 and serialised as a comic strip in 1992.
Driving through Spoke City at night to go home to his wife, government employee Thomas Prescott picks up a hitchhiker, who locks an unbreakable bracelet made of hydrochromatised steel around Prescott's wrist, telling him that it contains a powerful explosive charge that will detonate within minutes and that the key to unlock it is in his office at the Hudson Building. Racing back to his place of work, Prescott unlocks the bracelet and leaves it in the filing cabinet. While descending in the elevator, the bracelet explodes, obliterating the building's top floors; the lift cables are severed and Prescott plunges to the bottom of the lift shaft deep underground.
With the Hudson Building's sprinkler system sabotaged, the fire rages out of control and the Spoke City fire department is unable to contain the blaze. John Tracy on Thunderbird 5 , reports the events to International Rescue on Tracy Island. Jeff dispatches Scott in Thunderbird 1 , along with Virgil and Alan in Thunderbird 2 and tells Tin-Tin to monitor all the broadcasts about the Hudson fire. At the scene, Police Commissioner Garfield excitedly assists International Rescue for landing at the back of the building and agrees to a guarantee of secrecy during the whole operation. Virgil and Alan descend into the lift shaft in International Rescue's new firefighting apparatus: a specially cooled Dicetylene protective cage fitted with grabs. They recover the elevator car and rescue Prescott. Garfield realises that Prescott's story rings true, noting that files on several criminal organisations, notably the Erdman Gang, were destroyed in the explosion and that the Hudson Building's Automatic Extinguishers had been sabotaged. In light of the discovery of the bracelet remains, Garfield decides that in order to draw the Erdman Gang out, a story is released to the press that Prescott died in the Hudson Building inferno.
The case is turned over to the British Security Service, and top agent Southern is assigned to deal with the Erdman gang. He infiltrates a meeting in Glen Carrick Castle in Scotland, posing as one of three men hired, the other two being Dempsey and Kenyon; All three men have been locked with bracelets to their wrists. The gang leader radios them to explain they are to drive to the Nuclear Plutonium Store, which holds the isotopes for Britain's nuclear power stations, and destroy it with explosive charges timed to detonate at 12:30 pm, causing a massive nuclear explosion that will devastate half of England. To ensure that the men carry out their task, the charges are in their bracelets and are already set; the key to unlock the bracelets is in the box near the vault door.
Driving to the store, Southern, Dempsey and Kenyon bypass the security doors and use a ray machine to disable the store's guard robots. On arrival in the storeroom, Southern pulls a gun on Dempsey and Kenyon, ordering them to proceed to the scheduled rendezvous with the leader and capture him. However, a surviving robot sneaks up behind Southern and traps him with its steel arms. Dempsey and Kenyon escape, trapping Southern in the storeroom with their bracelets, then set off for the rendezvous, jamming the security doors behind them to ensure that Southern dies in the nuclear explosion.
Southern contacts his boss, Sir William Frazer, who calls International Rescue. Scott and Virgil arrive at the store in Thunderbirds 1 and 2, and use the Laser Cutter Vehicle to burn their way through the series of locked security doors. Penetrating the main storage area with just five minutes to go, Scott takes off in Thunderbird 1 with the bracelets and dumps them in the sea, where they detonate. Jeff assigns Lady Penelope and Parker to intercept the gang's leader helijet at the rendezvous point in FAB 1 bringing down the craft with the car's cannon as it takes off. Lady Penelope takes the unconscious Southern to hospital. Later, after fully recovered, Southern is given hospitality at Creighton-Ward Mansion, Southern explains that his cover is now blown, none the wiser about Penelope's secret activities.
Director David Elliott was unenthusiastic about realising Alan Fennell's script until he saw the spy thriller The Ipcress File . [3] He remembered that the film "used all the old-fashioned shots –looking through a lampshade, etc. On Monday morning, Paddy [Seale, the lighting cameraman ] came in and said, 'I saw a film this weekend,' and I said, 'So did I.' 'Was it The Ipcress File?' 'Yep. Right, that's what I want to do.'" [2] In homage to the film, Elliott incorporated what commentator Stephen La Rivière terms "quirky visuals" into his direction of the episode. [2] Elliot frames Southern and his robot captive through a clock face showing the countdown. [7] The robots were played by the puppet that played Brains' robot Braman in "Sun Probe". [7]
The Glen Carrick Castle scene opens with a tracking shot covering all three walls of the puppet set, for which Elliott co-ordinated the camera movements with operator Alan Perry. [3] In a pioneering move for a Supermarionation series, this scene also uses forced perspective to show a human hand and scale marionette puppets in the same shot: while the hand, intended to belong to Southern, plays with a pen in the extreme foreground, the puppets of Kenyon and Dempsey appear in the background. [1] A visual illusion ensures that Kenyon and Dempsey appear correctly scaled in relation to the hand, even though Thunderbirds puppets were only 1⁄3 adult human size. [1]
The miniature model representing Glen Carrick Castle was a reuse of the model of Castle McGregor from the Stingray episode "Loch Ness Monster". [4] It later appeared as Glen Garry Castle in the Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons episode "The Trap". [8]
Much of the episode's incidental music was originally composed for earlier APF series, particularly Stingray. Reused tracks include the Highland theme from "Loch Ness Monster" and "March of the Oysters" from "Secret of the Giant Oyster", another episode of Stingray. [4]
Sylvia Anderson noted Alan Fennell's "vivid imagination" and suggested that "30 Minutes After Noon" was "more a vehicle for live action than for the limited emotions of our puppet cast." [9] [10] According to Nathalie Olah of The Independent , the episode's plot highlights the "sense of drama" that made Thunderbirds popular: "Sure, most kids didn't understand the workings of a plutonium bomb, but the fact that the show was capable of sustaining their attention, as well as that of their older siblings and parents, meant they had some idea by the end of said episode." [11]
Media historian Nicholas J. Cull links the episode to another of Fennell's Thunderbirds scripts, "The Man from MI.5", which features a British Secret Service agent called Bondson. For Cull, "30 Minutes After Noon" is one of several Thunderbirds episodes that includes visual homage to the James Bond films. In particular, he comments on Southern's briefing scene, in which the characters of Southern, Sir William Frazer and an unnamed aide are represented not by puppets, but by shots of their hats on a hatstand: "Southern's hat is a trilby, tossed onto the stand in best James Bond fashion." [5] (Another of the hats – a bowler – belonged to Keith Shackleton, APF's head of merchandising.) Marcus Hearn praises the "densely plotted" story and suggests that the title was borrowed from the film Seven Days to Noon (1950). [12] Tom Fox of Starburst magazine also praises the "hatstand homage" and names the robot guards and the Scottish castle as the episode's other highlights. He gives "30 Minutes After Noon" a score of 4 out of 5. [13]
Stephen La Rivière acknowledges Elliott's decision to use an original visual style but argues that the first half of the episode is "filmed as normal". [2] La Rivière also comments on the editing, noting that the plot of the episode is effectively split into two parts (the explosion at the Hudson Building followed by Southern's infiltration of the Erdman Gang). [6] He suggests that this makes "30 Minutes After Noon" similar to the earliest episodes of Thunderbirds, which were originally 25 minutes long and subsequently extended to 50 minutes through the addition of secondary rescues and character-based subplots. [6]
Marcus Hearn notes that the Erdman Gang's scheme "feeds off post-war unease about nuclear power" and that the episode gives "several recognisable nods" to the Bond films, especially in the hats conversation scene. [7]
In July 1967, Century 21 Records released an EP audio adaptation of "30 Minutes After Noon" narrated by David Graham as Parker. [14]
In 1992, Fennell and Malcolm Stokes adapted the episode into a comic strip for issues 18 to 20 of Thunderbirds: The Comic. Later that year, the strip was collected in the graphic album Thunderbirds in Action. [1]
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