Where fantasy meets reality
Last updated 09:07, Friday, 20 June 2008
The spare bedroom is the workshop – filled by a long and cluttered bench, walls covered with photos, drawings, tools, and shelves of magazines.
On the workbench is a fat, heavy fibreglass milky-white model that has been sanded smooth .
To kids of a certain age, it is instantly recognisable as the fat, beetle-like shell of Thunderbird 2.
It is missing the iconic green paintwork and windows need to be fitted.
But there’s no mistaking one of the TV stars of millions of childhoods from the Sixties and Seventies.
The finished article will be shipped over to Japan where a collector has agreed a £4,000 fee for the model.
Keith Scaife has produced the 2ft-long figure from a mould and is now painstakingly hand-sanding it.
His tie-dye T-shirt is dusty, his hands are white, as are the upper parts of his kneed black jeans.
Keith spends a lot of time thinking and daydreaming about space – but there’s not a lot of it in his tiny bungalow home.
His small living room is crowded with books, figures, spaceships, pictures, magazines, old ‘prog-rock’ albums.
A windowsill, a table, a chest of drawers and any available shelf space are home to a Japanese Thunderbird model, a Star Wars spaceship, a World War Two tank, a silver woman reclining on a motorbike and some strange-looking alien creatures.
Scantily-dressed figurines pose along bookcases packed with history and geography tomes, others on military hardware and astrology and a galaxy of sci-fi film and TV series reference books.
On the floor, framed pictures of Keith’s futuristic artwork lean against a chair.
One of his own model spaceships sits on the floor, while another is suspended in mid air thanks to a bracket halfway up a wall.
“What is it? That’s a good question. I’m not entirely certain,” says Keith, rubbing his goatee beard.
“I painted it first, then my friend Martin made this model from the painting and we swapped artwork!
“The backstory I have for it was invented after the painting...it’s a tug ship used for shifting round bigger spacecraft but it has been stolen by thieves or terrorists.
“They are trying to get into a sealed off area which captures solar energy and then beams it back down to earth.
“While they are trying to break into this restricted area, the energy beam powers up and slices through the tug and the head section comes off and spirals down...”
Blimey!
Keith regularly dreams up mini movies in his mind’s eye, but has never thought of writing stories or books.
He scratches his head: “I don’t write any of it, I just think it.
“I don’t have a word-based imagination, as soon as I put something down on paper, it disappears again.
“I can’t tape my ideas because I can’t stand the sound of my own voice.”
He admits his fascination with space and science fiction is obsessive. “It’s my way of life,” he explains.
“For as long as I can remember, I have been into science and science fiction.
“It was fuelled from an early age by Dr Who and Gerry Anderson programmes, starting with Fireball XL5.
“I think I would be classed as eccentric, a little off the norm.
“But that is what Britain is all about,” he smiles
Stamp-sized splodges of paint colour-tests are stuck on a wall because they remind him of spaceships.
His other favourite pastime is cloud-spotting and imagining the clouds as giant machines and cities.
Keith trained as a model-maker at university with the aim of working in the British movie business. But there was not much of an industry in the Eighties and he was advised to try his hand at book-cover design.
His imagination and deft touch kept him in demand, especially for sci-fi novels.
He produced covers for the likes of Iain M Banks, Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury, as well as thriller writer Jack Higgins and a Puffin print of Peter Pan.
He painted “80 or 90” covers over a 15-year period, but the arrival of computers and Photoshop software killed off the work of artists like him.
“Instead of paying someone like me £800 to spend a week or 10 days creating artwork, the editors could get a graphic designer to do something in an afternoon for about £120,” he explained.
Keith had grown disillusioned with the business anyway.
“In the first couple of instances of going into a bookshop and seeing the cover you’d go ‘Wow! I’ve made it!
“After that, I went in and just looked at the mistakes compared to other covers.
“I saw the things I should have done, but did not have time for.
“As time went on, the more self-critical I got.”
His favourite jacket design is for the book The Little Country by Charles de Lint.
“There is something about that image, it all just hangs together and it turned out the way I wanted it to.”
When the computer-generated images took over, Keith found work as a modeller for Lilliput Lane and moved up to Calthwaite, near the company’s Penrith HQ some 20 years ago.
The 47-year-old has also worked for Border Fine Arts, but now his artistic drive is confined to helping his friend Martin Bowers make one-off models for collectors and TV and film productions.
He has cast a range of spaceship bodies which are sent on to Martin who paints them and adds the final details.
As well as a range of Thunderbirds and the odd Stingray or two, Keith has also produced a model of the Narcissus – the escape pod from the first Alien movie – and The Liberator from the cult Blake’s Seven TV series.
While wall shelves are wedged tight with his collections of old model catalogues and books, he needs steps to reach up and reveal just part of his collection of plastic model kits that are stowed in the false ceiling of his home.
Boxes of unmade planes, rockets, trucks, cars and buildings from makers such as Airfix and Revell as well as German, French and Japanese firms.
He studies models and works out which pieces, or sections, come from which model kit, or even an everyday item.
So he can spot how a Star Wars ship has used caps from Bells whisky bottles and parts from a Formula 1 car model kit.
It’s all research for his own model-making.
He made the ‘Starlander’ spaceship down on the floor by moulding and carving, as well as using bits of old model kit and plastic mini filter coffee tops.
Ideally, he’d love to join a friend of his who works in America, painting and designing models for the TV and film industry.
There’s a good chance it might come off, but for the time being, his ambitions are a bit more down to earth: “I’d really like to build some replicas from the film 2001 A Space Odyssey.
“That and a model of the car from the old cartoon TV series of The Pink Panther.”
