Joe 90: Special agent on a string

By RUSSELL BAILLIE

There's that big spinning thing, pulsating oil lamps, flashing lights, crazy guitar music ... if you didn't know Joe 90 was made in 1968, the opening credits sure give it away. Like, groovy.

Yes, Joe 90 is where the 60s finally caught up with Brit puppet masters Gerry and Sylvia Anderson's Century 21 shows presented in - da-de-dah - supermarionation. It was also where the inspiration ran out.

After the uniforms, militarism and gung-ho action of Stingray, Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet, wee Joe was a virtual flower child.

Here, after all, was a kid getting his mind altered every week in that whirly thing in an effort to help to maintain world peace.

The odd thing was that he was still working for The Man. And his Dad.

As tonight's first episode explains, Joe's father, Professor Ian "Mac" McClaine, a nice English boffin who invented the spinning thingummy, reluctantly allowed his adopted 9-year-old son to work on occasion as a "most special agent" for the World Intelligence Network (WIN), an organisation apparently staffed by Captain Scarlet-lookalikes in mufti.

So when there was a crisis, up went Joe into the spinning Big Rat (Brain Impulse Galvanscope Record and Transfer), into his head went some expertise from a donor (top scientist, surgeon, test pilot, that sort of thing), on went the electrode glasses and it was off in the flying car.

Then it was just a matter of sending a boy to do a man's work and an ending that was inevitably a WIN-win situation.

The 30 episodes - titles include The Unorthodox Shepherd, Child of the Sun God and Viva Cordova - have frequently been dusted off for repeats in the decades since.

But even with that time-capsule appeal, Joe 90 doesn't quite manage to inspire the nostalgic fun that reprises of its predecessors can.

One reason is that the hardware wasn't as cool. The aerial Maclaine family car, for example, was a Skoda of the skies, part Harrier jump-jet, part Soviet topdresser.

Stingray, Thunderbirds, and Captain Scarlet had grand ambitions, vast plastic casts and - can you say this about the gal-puppets? - glamour.

But Joe 90 was the first of the Anderson productions that resigned itself to being just a kids' show rather than a special-effects laboratory. It was all about a kid, after all. Wee Joe was basically an Enid Blyton character in sub-Ian Fleming plots, with strings attached.

Maybe the Andersons were getting tired of the medium. It was their last supermarionation show (apart from the little-seen The Secret Service) and, technically, their most advanced (well, the heads are in proportion, you can't see the strings, and look in tonight's episode for the crazy jump-cut montage in an argument scene).

But after Joe 90 they started working with real actors in yet more hardware-heavy sci-fi series such as UFO and Space 1999.

You might say that after Joe 90, they, too, ended the 60s feeling a bit strung-out.

* Joe 90 6.25 pm, Prime