I SAW THREE SHIPS COME SAILING IN [379]

You never question what you are watching on television when you are only five or six years old, and I saw absolutely nothing wrong with watching a children’s drama series set in a 1920s New York-like city about a fleet of anthropomorphic tugboats.

“Tugs” was created by Robert D. Cardona and David Mitton, the former an American TV scriptwriter and producer working in the UK on shows like “Crimes of Passion” and “Emmerdale”, and the latter a special effects technician for Gerry Anderson’s Supermarionation series turned director of TV advertisements. Their production company, Clearwater Features, developed the TV version of “Thomas the Tank Engine & Friends”, producing the first two series – one thirteen-episode series of “Tugs” followed, using the periscope camera system developed for “Thomas” that could film at the models’ eye level.

I remember being enraptured by “Tugs”, watching it every week on its run from April to June 1989, because I like ships anyway – I think it might be the crossing of the eternal sense of adventure, elegant design, and a massive scale of engineering. I have always lived in the Solent area of the UK, with the Royal Navy and car ferries of Portsmouth Harbour on one side, and the ocean and cruise liners in Southampton on the other side. Tugs are naturally found in both harbours moving the larger ships around, and here they were on TV, doing exactly what I saw in real life.

I saw the premise as what I now know is a Hitchcockian “MacGuffin”, the driver of the plot that is not important in itself. The Star Fleet, owned by the human Captain Star and comprised of main character tugs Ten Cents, Sunshine, Warrior, Top Hat and More, are competing for contracts with the villainous Zero Fleet, comprising of Zorran, Zug, Zip and so on. Captain Star, also the narrator of the series, is represented only by a megaphone talking to Star Fleet from a harbour building – no humans are seen on screen in “Tugs” perhaps to distance itself from the set-up of “Thomas the Tank Engine”. The stories took place in and around the Bigg City (spelt with two g’s) port, and essentially was a workplace comedy.

I don’t remember seeing any merchandise at the time, although figurines, annuals and VHS cassettes did appear, and while a second series of “Tugs” never materialised, I had two Lego ships to be getting on with, and real tugboats a matter of minutes away. Every so often, a mention of the show would appear, or a picture would come up, and my love of the show as a child became a running family joke. 

Then the YouTube videos appear asking the same questions they did of “Thomas the Tank Engine”, questions I never thought about: because the ships have faces, are they alive? Do they procreate? Does Captain Star use the tugs as slave labour? Isn’t Captain Star’s voice the same used for the “Protect and Survive” videos and “Two Tribes” by Frankie Goes to Hollywood? (Yes, the last one is Patrick Allen.) The faces never bothered me, as I was already used to trains with faces by then, and the tugs were painted in the correct colours – you may as well ask why they were all wearing hats.

Fortunately, I still think of “Tugs” as being a great show, with high production values and breezy storylines, so long as you don’t think about it any harder than that.

A POINT IS ALL THAT YOU CAN SCORE [187]

[NOTE: This is a look at the film version of “Protect and Survive” – for my original article about the original UK Government booklet “Protect and Survive,” please see here: link]

“When you hear the attack warning, you and your family must take cover at once. Do not stay out of doors. If you are caught in the open, lie down.”

OK, so if there is going to be a nuclear attack, and I am living above the 5^th floor of a block of flats, I must make arrangements with a neighbour further down the building, so I can build a fallout room there – and, if I didn’t get my booklet from the Government in the post by now, I will have less than 72 hours, from when I saw the message on TV, until the bomb drops.

I know I have covered comedies about nuclear war before, in “The Bed Sitting Room” and “Whoops Apocalypse,” but I cannot think of anything more horrifying than this. It was the threat into which I was born, until the Cold War thawed out at the end of the 1980s. However, games like “Fallout 76” return to the well of satirical laughter. The difference here is how “Protect and Survive,” a series of twenty instructional films about what to do in case of nuclear attack, was the official UK Government advice: its comedy comes from its po-faced tone, the practicality of the advice given, and the fact it would never be needed.

The films, mostly around two minutes each, were made in around 1975-76 by Richard Taylor Productions, an animation company best known for the whimsical “Crystal Tipps and Alistair,” and the “Charley Says” series of road safety films – this time around, the colourful cut-outs are replaced by blueprint-blue backgrounds, wooden models of houses, still photography, rudimentary flashes of hand-drawn animation, and a squelchy theme tune by “Doctor Who” composer Roger Limb. The authoritarian narration is by Patrick Allen, who reprised certain passages for Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s “Two Tribes,” sounding even scarier than Vincent Price did for “Thriller.”

The shorts are very easy to find online, and on DVD. I wouldn’t recommend watching all twenty in one go, even if they only add up to fifty minutes – they were designed to be shown at intervals, and the bone-dry tone will not allow you to sit back and watch. As bizarre as some of the advice is, such as preparing your fallout shelter’s toilet, and preparing bodies by wrapping them in brown paper and attaching a label with their name and address, this would have been what you were asked to do. Just think about building up the walls of your fallout room with boxes and bags of earth and sand, but also flammable things like books and clothing. However, I did notice you are told you need at least two pints of water each day to live, which has since gone up to two litres.

The only reason the films entered public consciousness was because in 1980, when they were still classified, some of them were leaked, and the BBC broadcast a few seconds of them in an episode of “Panorama,” investigating what civil defence strategy there was in the UK following Russia’s invasion of Afghanistan. It was deemed woeful: the accompanying booklet, also titled “Protect and Survive,” and also classified, was to be posted to all households three weeks ahead of a possible attack, when it would have taken four weeks to print them – the Government put the booklet on sale once enough people were asking questions. Today, the advice seems woeful, and just a way of keeping the public distracted and busy. I assume there are current plans – while they are not public knowledge, I hope they will be more effective than what they gave us last time.

THE AIR ATTACK WARNING SOUNDS LIKE [48]

[Cover for "Protect and Survive" - 2016 reissue by Imperial War Museum]

I count myself lucky that, while remaining vigilant, I live in a place and time that is relatively free of danger. However, seeing the muted colours, strikes and flared trousers in old videos or pictures of the late 1970s, you forget that the average middle-aged couple of the time would have grown up during the Second World War, then live through the ongoing Cold War between the USSR and the West, under the very small, but still possible, threat of a nuclear attack.

You would hope there was plan in place if, or when, something happened - there was, but it had not been published. Previous examples of “civil defence” leaflets date back to 1938, when people needed advice on protecting their homes against air raids, but apart from some public information films in the early 1960s, nothing more was heard. Eventually, word got out that the Home Office had a booklet, already sent to official bodies, titled “Protect and Survive,” to be issued to homes if an immediate threat of attack appeared. Public interest led the Government to publish it for the general public in May 1980, costing 50 pence.

Reading in 2017, the booklet itself is hilarious, coming across as a way to help people busy themselves, distracting them from almost certain death. There are tips on where to locate your fallout shelter, how to build it, what provisions to keep there, and the siren warnings to listen out for. It is the grim side of the Blitz spirit on which we pride ourselves, but carrying on through anything and everything is the game the book requires you to play. I wish I knew how many people bought it on its original release, and what they made of the illustrations: drawing instructions makes them more functional, but I imagine photographs of real people readying themselves may make a hypothetical situation much too real.

Discredited on arrival by anti-nuclear campaigns, “Protect and Survive” was criticised for making nuclear war look like something that could be survived, leading to a second booklet, “Civil Defence: Why We Need It” (1981), explaining why a plan was even needed, likening the keeping safe of the country to wearing your seatbelt in your car.

Images from “Protect and Survive,” and the accompanying set of public information films, also originally meant to be classified, were co-opted in the cultural fight against nuclear arms, including “Threads,” the bleak TV drama depicting a Britain post-attack. Most effectively, the authoritarian voice of Patrick Allen, as used in the information films, was peppered through Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s song “Two Tribes,” with Allen re-reading the original words to ironic effect.

To me, this still feels like history, only just overlapping with my own lifetime, with debates over the UK’s nuclear deterrent submarines a small reminder of the Pandora’s Box that even the idea of nuclear weapons has proved to be. However, the United States Department of Homeland Security’s website, www.ready.gov, still advises that, despite the diminished thread since the end of the Cold War: “the possibility remains that a terrorist could obtain access to a nuclear weapon. Called improvised nuclear devices (IND), these are generally smaller, less powerful weapons than we traditionally envision.” Oh great, thanks for that.