Inch high club

One word. Decals.

It’s hard to imagine a time when we hadn’t heard of them; a time, perhaps, when we could see or think of RAF livery without immediately picturing one; a time before we soaked one in a bowl of warm water, slid it off its backing paper and placed it on the wing of a Spitfire or a Wellington Bomber. But that was in those elusive and pre-evocative days we tend not to concern ourselves with here at TVC Towers. So there it is: a word that only exists for us in the context of one thing, Airfix models.

For the purposes of this entry in the catalogue, we’re limiting it to model planes. Because it was only the model planes that came in such a ridiculously varied range of scales and sorts. Because you couldn’t hang a miniature replica vintage Darracq from a piece of fishing line thumbtacked to the ceiling. And because the planes had a truly aspirational hierarchy (which we seem to recall was based largely around the number of moving parts. Pretty much all the model cars had proper moving wheels, but it was only the bigger and badder model aircraft that included moving propellers, rotating gun-turrets and tyres, or fully-opening bomb-bays and cockpits); therefore, they win.

The decals, of course, were one of many hobby-threatening booby-traps designed to scupper your enjoyment, getting forever crinkled or folded before they could be applied properly. Here’s another; polystyrene cement, which could be guaranteed to coagulate into crusty white flakes all over your fingers and tabletop without ever acting as a useful plastic adhesive. Or perhaps it was attempting to navigate the baffling range of Humbrol paints that fouled up your facsimile Fokker. Whatever, we know that, back in the day when there was such a thing, the BBC Visual Effects department boffins would keep a crate of leftover Airfix parts around to add detail to their spaceships with. All we can say is they must have had the patience of saints.

Further reading:
Classic Kits by Arthur Ward