Brian Viner: So what price Zebedee or a pair of clackers?

The world has gone mad, and far from International Rescue being deployed to lead us safely back to sanity, International Rescue is itself the cause of the madness. On Tuesday, Lady Penelope Creighton-Ward's loyal yet overwhelmingly plastic chauffeur, Parker, was sold at auction for £38,000, more than 100 times the amount he cost Gerry Anderson to make in the first place. Cor blimey, m'lady. There are parts of Britain where you can still buy a house for £38,000.

And for the money that someone paid for the original Alan Tracy – handsome pilot of Thunderbird 3, as if you didn't know – they might have bought, say, a barely-used Saab Turbo. Now, I always liked Alan. I liked the insouciant way he carried on with that foxy Oriental chick Tin Tin. He preferred to date a girl with no strings attached which, for a Thunderbird puppet was a laudable, if ultimately forlorn, objective. But I don't like Alan enough to pay £19,000 for him. Somebody does.

And a mere cast of Lady Penelope, albeit from the original mould, was snapped up by a telephone bidder in America for £16,000. True, Lady Penelope remains a puppet of rare distinction, not least because she is one of the very few to make mastered the art of smoking, but all the same. Who are these people?

The headline in all the best newspapers, notably this one, was an irresistible "Thunderbirds are going, going, gone". And the Thunderbirds auction was indeed a great silly-season story. Yet it was also rather disturbing for those of us who come from the 1960s, because it slapped a precise value on our childhood memories. If Parker is worth £38,000, then what price Captain Scarlet, or Zebedee from The Magic Roundabout or, for that matter a pair of clackers or a packet of Spangles?

According to the old one-liner, nostalgia ain't what it used to be. That's nonsense, of course. Nostalgia is more, much more, than it ever was. And television is the trough at which the nostalgia frenzy feeds. Those "I Love 1970" clip shows are 10 a pre-decimalised penny, while hardly a week seems to go by without some old Lew Grade production being either dusted down and repeated, or given a 21st-century makeover. That too is unsettling for those on whom decades-old episodes of Randall and Hopkirk Deceased exert a strong Proustian influence. In our mind's eye we want to see Mike Pratt, Kenneth Cope, iffy plots and wobbly sets, and not have them obscured by Reeves and bloody Mortimer.

Even Lew Grade himself wanted to get in on the act. I conducted the last newspaper interview with the great man, shortly before he died, and he told me excitedly that he had worked out a way of updating Joe 90. "Everything is about genes these days," he said, waving his Monte Cristo around. "So we could inject him with the genes of the strongest man in the world, the greatest surgeon in the world, and do it that way."

Bless. There was something hugely uplifting about a very old man working out ways to modernise Joe 90, and yet the nostalgia boom is on the whole a depressing phenomenon, suggesting dissatisfaction with the present and uncertainty about the future. But perhaps there is less to it than that. Perhaps it is just that the generation that watched Thunderbirds first time round is now the generation with television programmes to commission and £38,000 to chuck away.

Either way, I console myself with one thought. It is too late to update that other Gerry Anderson series, Space 1999. So we are left with unsullied memories, such as my horrifying realisation, sometime in 1975, that 1999 was likely to fall well within my lifetime and how the hell would I and the universe cope with that cosmic gas cloud?

b.viner@independent.co.uk