Model & Collectors Mart Article 
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Although my main focus is Gerry Anderson's Supercar these days, I started collecting almost by accident and with a very different model.
In 1990 when my son Alex was around 3 years old he used to watch a video of the film Chitty Chitty Bang Bang almost constantly, or so it seemed. I thought it would be nice to get him the Corgi Chitty model as I had one as a child and remembered it fondly. Not knowing where to look I bought a copy of Model and Collectors mart whilst browsing in my local newsagents and this lead me to going to my first toy fair, which I think was at Wigan Pier.
I purchased a far from mint Chitty at the fair, and over a number of weeks I tracked down the various spares I needed to repair it. The following Christmas I gave it it Alex as a present. Gladly he was as thrilled as I had hoped and still has it today.
During that Christmas I sat looking at Chitty thinking "I wouldn't mind one of those either" so I headed back to the toy fair. This time I think it was Buxton, which in those days was a big two-day event. I duly purchased a Chitty for myself and then set off on the slippery slop of thinking "Wouldn't it be nice to get some of the toy cars from my childhood" I should think most readers of this piece can identify with that thought. From Buxton came a Dinky FAB1 and from there I can't remember in what order they came but a Batmobile, the Saints Volvo P1800, James Bond's Aston Martin and Captain Scarlet's SPV soon joined the collection and I went wholly down the TV related die cast path.
Fairly early in my collecting I bought a Budgie Supercar. I had loved Supercar as a child and although I had not remembered this particular die cast model, I did remember having a large plastic Supercar and set off in search of one of those. Where should I find one but in the classified ads in Model and Collectors Mart! it wasn't complete but it was nice to have. The strange thing was when I started my search I had remembered it as being at least 2 to 3 feet long and when it arrived it was only 12 inches long. it finally dawned on me that my memory of the toy was in proportion to my height at the time and although I had grown in 30 years Supercar hadn't. Over the next couple of years I started to specialize and bought more and more Supercar items from visits to big toy fairs like Donnington, the NEC and Memorabilia.
I have also made valuable connections with other enthusiasts and from one of those managed to buy the one-off Louis Marx prototype Supercar toy, which is the star piece in my collection.
I would now say, and will stand corrected if anyone knows differently, that I have the biggest Supercar collection in this country and maybe the World. I launched a web site www.mikemercury.net at the back end of 2004 so that I could share my collection and hopefully it will become a valuable reference site for those interested in Supercar or Gerry Anderson in general, I have certainly had a lot of interest from all over the globe since I launched it and now Gerry's back with a bang with the new Captain Scarlet here's hoping for Supercar in CGI.