A message at the start of Gerry Anderson: A Life Uncharted (BritBox) explains that new footage of the Thunderbirds and Stingray creator has been generated “with artificial intelligence known as Deep Fake”. The producer and director who devoted his career to fantastical puppetry has become a sort of fantastical puppet himself.
This feels a strange way to tell Anderson’s story. And unnecessary too, as the fake Anderson doesn’t turn up until the end when the simulacrum walks over a bridge at the cemetery in the Netherlands where his brother is buried. Is it a bizarre attempt at homage – TV’s ultimate puppet-master transformed into computer-generated marionette? Or did ITV, which produced the documentary for BritBox, simply fancy trying out its new technology on the sly?
Happily, the “Deep Fake” fakery is generally noticeable by its absence over the course of this more-or-less conventional feature-length documentary. It traces Anderson’s life from his unhappy childhood in London to his tempestuous marriage to Thunderbirds collaborator Sylvia Thomas (they parted on such bad terms, on the night of the wrap party for Space: 1999, that he went on to model a latex villain on her) and his descent late in life into dementia.
A Life Uncharted is framed as a personal journey by Jamie Anderson, youngest of Anderson’s four children, who begins by says he never really knew his father, who passed away on Boxing Day 2012 aged 83. By the end, as he walks across that bridge in the Netherlands, followed by a CGI version of his dad, he says he has gained a deeper understanding. But viewers may not feel likewise – at least not so far as Anderson’s work is concerned.
Anderson is revealed to be a flawed maverick – a loyal son to dysfunctional parents, a unfaithful husband to the first of his three wives, a cold-hearted colleague who dropped friends and business partners as soon as they ceased to be of use. Alas, the film sheds little light on his creative instincts: landmark sci-fi series such as Joe 90 and Space: 1999 – the Marvel movies of their day – are referenced largely in passing and only in so far as they impacted on Anderson’s personal life. Thunderbirds are no.
