As a general rule, I really couldn't STAND all of the bizarre puppetry of that Gerry Anderson bloke. Captain Scarlet I could vaguely endure, I hated Stingray and Thunderbirds with a passion, and if voodoo dolls worked on OTHER puppets, Lady Penelope would have been torn limb from limb in the insane twinkling of a pre-school eye. However, as the exception which proved the rule, there was Terrahawks, a show whose popularity-dwarfing at the hands of Virgil, Brains and company was one of my earliest introductions to the inherent unfairness of life.

For those of you who don't know, Terrahawks was a sci-fi puppet show. I'm not sure why it was better than Anderson's other productions- it just WAS- but it may well have been because of the classy opening and closing scenes. Again, I commend you to go download the theme tune: by far one of the classics of the genre. The opening scenes were terribly involving, with games of Space-Invaders and barked commands to "Stay on this channel!", but it was the closing scenes which were most memorable. You see, predictably enough, the driving impetus of the show was an ongoing struggle between Good and Evil. On the side of Good were these robots with round heads: on the side of Evil, were square-headed ones. Whether this was sheer coincidence, an attempt to draw parallels with the English Civil War, or an understated lesson in geometrical ethics, only Gerry Anderson knows. However, in the closing scenes of the show, a big noughts-and-crosses board would appear, with round robot heads representing noughts, and square ones representing crosses. "Ooh! How clever!", you'd think. Unless you actually WATCHED the progress of the game, and saw that, not only did the squares cheat with impunity, they actually WON some of the games. To the observing youngster, completely shielded from and unacquainted yet with the idea that sometimes the BADDIES win, this was a pants-squelchingly terrifying denouement, and one which it seems the entire ITV-Football crew go through every year when Manchester United get put out of Europe.