Lady Penelope creator in Wolverhampton for talk

Since the mid-1960s, the Thunderbirds star featured in two feature-length films and two series alongside her butler and chauffeur "Nosey" Parker.

But without puppeteer and the creator behind Penelope, Mary Turner, the show simply would not have been as FAB as it turned out.

She has been making and performing puppets for television since 1958 and was at the forefront of developing the puppets' technology on top of bringing them to life.

As part of Wolverhampton Art Gallery's exhibition 'TV Puppets: Icons From 80 Years of Entertainment', a sold-out audience was treated to an intimate guest appearance from Mary at the gallery on Saturday afternoon.

Starting on Torchy The Battery boy for AP films, she worked altogether on nine of Gerry Anderson's iconic shows including Stingray, Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet as well as her own series including Rupert the Bear.

Her passion for puppets stems from her mother, who first started designing puppets during the Second World War.

"It's all my mother's fault actually," she said. "After the Second World War she went to a class to make puppets.

"I didn't really know what a puppet was then. During the war, when I was a child, there was no entertainment for children or anything like that.

"And eventually she came home with this little figure on strings and I was just taken away with it – that's where it all started. Since then my whole working life has involved puppets.

"I am still fascinated by puppets as I always have been, especially the marionette type.

"It was all hard work operating Lady Penelope but very interesting to do because it was all new stuff then that we were working on."

She was also responsible for sculpting what were to become many of history's most enduring and iconic puppet characters even seen on television, including the likes of Steve Zodiak, Marina, Troy Tempest, Captain Scarlet and of course, Lady Penelope.

The exhibition, which features its very own Lady Penelope and Parker, as well as other puppets on show including Bagpuss, the Clangers and Basil Brush runs until April 29.

Mary, who had travelled up to the Black Country from London, was impressed with the collection on display.

"Working on the puppets for the Thunderbirds shows was very nice and friendly most of the time," she said. "I made puppets right through from Torchy to The Secret Service – one of the puppets I made was Captain Scarlett, amongst others. I enjoyed the making of them just as much as the working of them.

"The Captain Scarlett puppets were so much smaller so the surface had to be so much smoother. It was difficult because when they ended up on the screen, a close-up showed every flaw. So it had to be very particular.

"During the show, the puppets sometimes got a bit damaged and had to be touched up here and there but they survived pretty well really.

"We had to work on very long strings and wires, because there was a bridge over a stage and the strings had to be about eight foot long. When the puppets are on long strings it's difficult to control them of course, but you just get used to it."

Mary added: "It's a very nice exhibition that's going on here at the art gallery. There's some interesting puppets in the exhibition, most of which is from the old days – some I can remember but not all of them.

"There's not many exhibitions like this around the country I don't think, which are all focused on television puppets."

Five decades on from when Thunderbirds premiered on British television, the series remains popular around the world.

Mary would never quite anticipate just how popular it would become – but the millions who turned on their screens to watch the show certainly didn't faze her.

She said: "We didn't really think about what we doing at the time, we just got on with our work. We didn't think about how popular the show was or anything like that.

"We were glad that it was on television, so that the work could be seen.

"Most of children's programmes today seem to be CGI or different sorts of animation from what we did at that time. If it's done a computer I'm sure it's just as enjoyable as the work we did."

The TV Puppets: Icons From 80 Years of Entertainment exhibition will continue until April 29.

For more information or for future events go to www.wolverhamptonart.org.uk