The Last Station is a new TV series created and written by Sylvia Anderson, co-creator of Thunderbirds and a host of iconic television shows, with her actress singer daughter Dee Anderson. Crowdfunding is now being sought for the project, and Dee chatted with Paul Simpson about the new show…
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Can you tell us something about the set up for the series?
The Last Station been developed over the past four years and is set around a futuristic planet island called Shikoba which is a centre of rescue for music and creativity.
We have fantastic characters like Delaney the beautiful astro-scientist who owns the island and monitors space activity from her observatory on the island; the Hakitans are an alien race who are the genius of music and who have set up base on Shikoba making and breaking music codes. Then we have Zarius who is the walking encyclopaedia of music who is rumoured to be from planet Earth.
The vampire species the Spyrons are the enemy race, who do not suck blood but live off people’s creativity and music. They go from planet to planet pillaging as they go.
Finally we have Rainbow Baby, the colourful space craft which rescues the exiles from the war torn zones invaded by the Spyrons.
The two robot DJs have set up their radio station on the spacecraft and they relentlessly play out their shows regardless of their surroundings – bringing an uplifting quirky element to the shows.
We will also be going back in time with some iconic music clips and introducing new talent in the Magical Astro Music Arena (the MAMA) on the Planet Island. We have sourced Cass Lewis of the famous band Skunk Anansie who has the right attitude to the music, and is currently finding new music talent.
It’s a massive project and has been a long road, but we’re feeling confident that at last we can bring it to fruition, with industry leaders like Sir Richard Taylor giving us his backing.
Why go the crowd funding route?
We became aware of crowd funding when we spoke to various producers who were pursuing various forms of finance. Crowd funding seemed to be the way to go. I didn’t know how effective that was. When I thought about it, I realised we needed to raise money for the quality of animation that we want. We’re going with an animation house who are fabulous – they’re doing The Clangers. They’re organic and coming from the right place. We need to raise the money for them to be able to give the project their best shot.
Supermarionation is very much associated with puppets; why go an animation route rather than what Sylvia’s known for?
We feel we can do more with animation. We can stretch the boundaries of the imagination.
I was around when Thunderbirds was conceived, and I do remember Gerry and Sylvia writing it together. I remember the input they both had; they were a fantastic team. Sylvia had, and she still has, a brilliant brain, and it was the magic of them together. She was very much the creative entity; that was known by most people in the business, but not everyone knows, because in those days, the guy’s name came first.
I’ve been working with Sylvia on this for the last four years. She does have some incredible ideas, and I’ve learned a lot from her. She also has some really ‘outside the box’ ideas, and she always had a thing about Hollywood movies, so she based all the storylines and structure on Hollywood movies when she created Thunderbirds. I am convinced that was one of the reasons why they worked so well. She brought the human element in – someone said to her once, if you don’t have the human element, you don’t care about the characters. There’s no hook. You don’t feel engaged with it. That’s what we’ve done: we’ve made everything very human and engaging.
We have 12 scripts prepared and we want to be funded for the first six episodes: £660,000 which we think can get us sorted. Whatever we raise, we can still do a certain amount of animation.
Watch the initial concepts for The Last Station here:
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