Many moons ago (1971 actually!) I was the proud, even privileged, owner of an original model from the 1969-70 TV series UFO. A visit with my friend to the studios, with the aim of getting a job there, met with dissapointment and shock! The once proud studios that had housed (and blown up!) all those favorite models I had grown up watching in awe on TV now stood derelict and empty. The studios had literally just closed down.

 Now only hollow, echoeing, empty corridors and stages with dirty floors with piles of trash heaped in corners met our eyes. Was this really the place where once aircraft runways and wonderful landscapes had stood?.

An old “gaffer” prodded a broom, moving dirt from one place to another. He seemed to know nothing (nor care) and sent us on our way, and then, there, among the piles of rubbish I caught sight of a wingtip. I pulled on the wing and low and behold I held in my hand a badly damaged and broken model of SKY 1.

 Which all leads me on to the fact that by pure chance 27 years later I was commissioned to build that self same craft! However this commission wasn’t for the smaller 12 inch version I’d once owned, he wanted one the same size as the large scale model they’d used , and the “Diver” section as well!

After some time on my part trying to talk him out of it: [“Do you realise just how big that original large model was? Where are you going to put it? etc] We agreed a price and I began work. I will not go into the problems I encountered getting enough reference material for the large model in order to begin work. Suffice it to say I found out through numerous photos in Japanese books, and my own collection, that the big and small models did not match each other.