nERIIAPS because they represent the master r race, their heads
are much too large for their bodies; handsome heads, none the less, in a rugged super-masculine way, with thick crisp hair and strong eyebrows. Their eyes are dark pools, shifting and flickering about a small bright seed of intelligence or, at least, of common- sense; they look efficient, experienced, a bit cynical. Their mouths are wide but rubbery and they speak with no more movement of the lower lip than will gently oscillate the cigarette or small cigar fizzing there. Their accents are American. At play their speech is jovial and kidding; when engaged on their professional duties they are laconic. They are most commanding when seated before a control panel or in a cockpit. They are, in fact, sedentary heroes—pressers of buttons and scanners of screens. When they walk they do so with a gliding motion which is somewhere between a sway and a plod, their meagre bodies revealing a puff of leather on the upper chest but practically no behind. This gives a compul- sive deliberation to their movements, or a queer jauntiness. Wobbling and gliding, they save civili- sation every Sunday afternoon. (Stingray, ATV.) Civilisation is represented by the opposite shore of the Atlantic Alliance—by Marineville, in fact, a chic slice of Florida real-estate one may suppose it, with lots of fancy architecture which disappears underground at the first alert. (As the houses go under, the rockets pop up.) And Marineville narrows itself socially to a kind of baby Pentagon consisting of the Commander, the Commander's enlisted daughter, the two mem- bers of the crew of Stingray—a super-submarine apparently unique—and a beautiful dumb mer- maid (tailless) called Marina who has gotten herself accepted in the biggest way'by the little community and usually sits in the back when Stingray goes out guarding. No politicians, you notice; no capitalists or trade unionists or Daughters of the Revolution or minority disrup- tives. Just a general's dream : press the button when you feel like it, the President isn't going to tell you not to. But as they said last week-- when they invented and supplied a new metal for their missiles `by chain reaction' in twenty- four hours—nobody likes war. All-out war would mean 'the end of civilisation as we know it today.' They just defend themselves. They are always right.
But who, you will ask, was the enemy on this occasion? Two solemn little men with fancy gills round their necks and not inartistic warts sprinkled over their faces, the leaders of an underground people of enormous technological sophistication, but defeated, humiliated, im- prisoned for indoctrination in democratic prin- ciples because—puppets being what they are—it always has to be more or less single combat and the enemy armies never appear, wilting away at the principals' first reverse. Each episode begins on the Brink—`Anything can happen in the next half-hour!'—and ends with gracious living and a sexy theme-song involving the mermaid, 'Because you enthral me so . .
Stingray is, of course, British, made by Gerry and Sylvia Anderson at APF studios. Successor to their Four Feather Falls, Supercar and Fire- ball X1.5, it's a great dollar-earner. Grown-ups adore it. But, like some nine-year-olds of mY acquaintance, I prefer the gills-and-warts people myself.
PATRICK ANDERSON
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