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Sylvia Anderson

Sylvia Anderson

Grimsby Evening Telegraph, Thursday 14 July 1983 p8

Sylvia Anderson will never admit she felt like a puppet on a string when her marriage collapsed. But as one half of the creators of the successful Thunderbirds TV series, and the voice of Lady Penelope, she does confess she dangled in limbo before picking up the pieces and plunging back into her career.

And the vivacious blonde whose creativity also helped to put Stingray on the small screen is still smarting from some of the barbs fired her way when the Sylvia-Gerry Anderson partnership crumbled -professionally and personally -after 16 years.

"I possibly had the strength to cope, although people over-estimate that," she said. "They say 'It's all right for you, you're strong' and they don't know that inside you're very vulnerable and you're only strong because you have to be, you've no choice. If not, you'd go under extremely quickly."

Sylvia, who is now UK consultant to Home Box Office, part of Time-Life and the leading pay cable television service in America, didn't swim around too long in a sea of self-pity before she was writing and producing a children's TV series and writing books.

Her latest, Love and Hisses, is the diary of a young career woman of the 70s whose ambitions disappear into the background when she marries. It's a fascinating chronicle evoking a by-gone era but there's more of the fighter in Sylvia than in her hapless heroine

The heroine says Sylvia is a composite of people she bas met and who couldn't cope with getting on with survival.

"It's no more autobiographical than with any writer or actor who puts parts of themselves into a situation-but there were sections of the book that were easier to write than others," she admitted.

"In life you tend to find that all the nasty parts come together. What happened to me was that a 16-year marriage broke down and, although it was creaking, when it finally came it was an amputation. I went through all the various problems and mine were perhaps compounded by the fact that we had worked together as a team, and therefore, when I was an my own, a lot of people didn't want to know me.

"The automatic thing is to go to the man, although when we made all our shows we were Gerry and Sylvia Anderson. When we were married it didn't occur to me to question the fact that Gerry put his name above the titles because I was too busy doing it all-so that rebounded.

"When we split up we had done one series for Space 1999 and things were so bad we decided to split. I told Lew Grade I couldn't work under those circumstances and, in retrospect, it was a big mistake. Why should it have been me to walk away from a lucrative series, with a Rolls-Royce, a beautiful home, a big salary and prestige?

"I just knew the two of us couldn't work together and i was the one to give it up although I wouldn't now. So as a result the second series was made, Gerry immediately knocked my office into his and I was gone -then I had to fight to get my name on the titles as the creator. And when a book was written about the making of the series I got a one-line mention, so I was not only losing out emotionally, I was losing out all along the line"

Although Sylvia's book doesn't wave the banner of women's lib- she hates labels- she does believe that many women are capable of far more than the cosy stereotype of housewife and mum.

There is no reason why, if you get the right chemistry and the right balance, of two people, one can't enhance the other she said. There are givers and takers, both male and female. The trouble comes in when you have these female instincts anyway and you're a very giving sort of person - you very often attract the opposite and then perhaps the next time around, in the next relationship, it gets a little more balanced because one recognises the symptoms.

"But I think it would be a shame for everything to be divided right down the middle. There are certain things that come very naturally. Although it depends on the couple, I think there are certain things a woman enjoys doing. I, quite frankly, get very irritated with a man trying to do things in the kitchen. It's just a question of getting the right balance in a relationship."