Just a quick blog post as I'm pleased to hear the news that Britbox is soon going to be putting a range of old CITV shows from the 1990's on the streaming subscription service.
It lists the likes of The Worst Witch, Jungle Run, Wizadora, Children's Ward and Tots TV will be availablefrom May 7th. The full story can be found here.
The first episode of Jungle Run is to be added. Which was
originally presented by Dominic Wood.
I don't have Britbox but it makes me very tempted to sign up. I wonder if this will be an incentive to upload some more old CITV shows. Only time will tell, but this is a great step in the right direction not only for nostalgic old fools like me, but it's also an opportunity to introduce these shows to a new audience too.
Another show listed to be added is Tots TV. A popular
preschool show which originally aired between 1993-1998
on CITV.
Rebecca's best known work is being the hands and voice behind Rosie in the popular 90's kids TV show Rosie and Jim which she did for 10 years. A role she actually fell in to with no prior puppeteering experience! We chat at length about what it was like on that show and also about some of her other puppeteering work on the likes of Bug Alert!, Live and Kicking, Barnaby Bear and The Hoobs.
A big thanks to Rebecca for taking the time out to chat with me and for saying my accent reminds her of Frank Skinner! 😂
Enjoy!
As this is the last in the series, I'm going to be taking a break from the blogging, podcasting and youtubing for a bit. I shall be back soon though.
OK, maybe a slight exaggeration but a look at his website shows that he has worked on some of the most popular TV shows, films and adverts over the last thirty five years or so.
Simon started out on the likes of the film Labyrinth and TV comedy Spitting Image. Before landing roles in the educational programme You and Me and entering the world of Saturday morning TV, being both the hands and voice behind Nobby the Sheep on Ghost Train and also Gimme 5 for six years. This wasn't Simon's only foray in to Saturday mornings as he also operated Jarvis the Monkey on Mashed for two years.
A show which I love and think is hugely underrated is Roger and The Rottentrolls which Simon worked heavily on. Being the puppet co-ordinator for the show. His roles included operating characters Yockenthwaite and Commander Harris (voiced by John Thompson and Phil Cornwall respectively).
Simon operating Yockenthwaite
on Roger and The Rottenrolls
Through the 2000's Simon worked on the likes of Ripley and Scuff, The Fimbles, Bear Behaving Badly and the revival of Emu.
More recently Simon has changed careers and become an Anglican priest and runs St.Anne's church in Soho, London. He still occasionally can be seen using some of his puppetry talent in his current work as well!
Only a week and a half late but here we are in to a new year and a new decade. Which means the crushing realisation that 2000 was 20 years ago, which is frankly depressing when you can remember those days of sunny delight, turkey twizzlers and spiking your fringe up with cheap hair gel.
This is just a quick blog post to reflect on the previous year and the upcoming one, in regards to this barmy project of mine.
Being very "Dead Silly" - Comic Con March 2019
I'm really pleased about how the recent second batch of podcasts has gone. It was great fun recording them. The majority of them were recorded between June-August apart from the Simeon Courtie chat which I recorded in the January. Originally intended to go out with the first lot, but I ended up starting a new job shortly after which took up my time as I got to grips with it.
There's still something very surreal about chatting with people you watched on TV as a child and admired, even if it is just over the phone. I've never claimed to be a brilliant interviewer. I just write down a list of questions and hope to get some good stories out of them. The one thing I like doing is asking questions about shows which have fallen off peoples memory radars. I don't think Dave Benson Phillips was expecting to be asked about one series wonder Petswap for instance. You can detect an amount of surprise in his voice in the interview!
It is still alien to me to get people agreeing to chat with me and being happy to give me their contact details to phone them. I'm entirely grateful for it though. Every interview I've done has been special.
The amount of plays appears to be increasing each time there's a new one. We're not talking viral figures here and I never expect that to happen for such a niche subject. However, I'm amazed at how certain interviews such as Dave Benson Phillips and Sophie Aldred passed the 300 plays mark within a week or two of being uploaded.
One of the nice highlights of last year was also meeting Francis Wright. Who has brought many puppet characters to life on children's TV down the years. Including 'The Head' on Art Attack and being one of the great mind behinds the criminally underrated Bug Alert!. We've kept in touch and email often and he's a genuinely nice chap. The surprise in his voice when I mentioned I actually have seen Bug Alert! (It used to air VERY early in the morning) and I am a fan was a great moment.
There's still two more interviews to go out for the second batch, both should be out by the end of February. One of which is with someone that I have to thanks Francis for, a fellow puppeteer who worked on a show very dear to me as a large amount of it was filmed around where I live.
Meeting James MacKenzie of Raven fame was great too. He was at a small convention near me and was a very nice guy indeed. I hope to one day record an interview with him, if and when that will happen I'm not sure as he's understandably a very busy man.
Other highlights include of course attending Birmingham's Comic Con in March dressed as Cuthbert Lilly from Zzzap! With my friend Rachael going as Daisy Dares. Some lovely reactions and some great feedback received afterwards by people who worked on the production of the show.
Well this year I do hope to do a third batch of interviews. So far I have no plans set in place, but maybe towards the spring I'll have a look at my list of names I have in mind and start attempting to contact people and record them over the summer. Fingers crossed!
I do hope to do some more videos on my Youtube account for people to watch. A megamix compilation I made has so far since July 2019 at the time of writing this blog post received over 200,000 views. I'm thinking about maybe doing some retrospective review videos on certain shows, featuring narration by myself. As well as maybe doing some videos looking at some items I own which relates to 90's kids TV. Something similar to an Ashens style review maybe? I'm trying to find my style at the moment. Plus it's very time consuming and I don't have a fancy editing suite. I have recently done a video on forgotten CITV shows of the 1990's though which you can watch here...
You may notice at the moment that the comments feature has been disabled on the majority of my videos. This was done automatically due to Youtube's new rules on child friendly content which I'll have to look in to and get amended at some point as the feedback I receive from fans of the same TV shows is what makes doing this project so enjoyable!
So that's a look back at last year and a look forward to the new one. Hopefully some great stuff will come along and more great memories will be revived. As always you can look at what I do on Youtube and you can follow me on Twitter too!
I'm hugely proud to present this new podcast interview and seeing as it's almost Christmas it's a bit of a special one as it's a chat with a true legend of children's television, it has to be none other than the godfather of gunge himself, Dave Benson Phillips!
Dave is someone who had been top of my list to talk to the entire time I've done this project so I was very pleased when he agreed to have a chat with me and what a lovely chat it was and very funny too!
I have to say I admire Dave as someone who is a bit of an all rounder and a genuinely nice guy. He loves entertaining children, he gives up a lot of his free time to charity and to meet his fans young and old. He does the telly work but still happily entertains at kids parties and DJ's various retro events. I think that's lovely and very admirable.
Dave presenting Get Your Own Back in the 1990's
In this chat we discuss Playdays, Get Your Own Back, Wake Up in the Wildroom, Playhouse Disney, Petswap and all many of other things. We do also chat about the unfortunate internet hoaxes about Dave that spread in the late 2000's which caused a bit of a dip in his career which the then lead to Dave using the internet to his advantage and picking himself back up and is now very busy with all kinds of work. Including his Get Your Own Back live shows and the mockumentary series Getting Back With Dave Benson Phillips.
To the surprise of anyone who remembers it and even to those who worked on it. Classic CITV show How 2 is now available to stream on Amazon Prime.
To refresh your memory How 2 was the revival of How which was popular in the 60's and 70's. It combined interesting facts to do with history, science, technology, art and geography. Packaged in to a fun show for children with demonstrations and experiments. It ran for 16 successful years on CITV between 1990 and 2006. I've previously interviewed both Gareth Jones and Fred Dineage about the show on my podcast.
Well for some reason, Series 2 and 3 have been picked to be available to stream. It's very random and out of the blue but I'm not complaining. Nice to see the show in high quality, the only slight niggle is the awesome theme tune (With the deep voice going "How 2!" throughout) has been replaced with something that sounds like it was knocked up in 5 minutes on a cheap keyboard by pressing the "demo" button. Are there rights issues with the theme tune? Who knows.
Maybe this means more hard to find 90's CITV shows will be available to stream in the not too distant future. We can only dream...
In the 90 minute discussion we talk about Francis's long and varied career in the world of puppetry. From shows such as You and Me, followed by the likes of Grotbags,Wizadora and the fantastic series Bug Alert! which Francis co-wrote.
We also discuss Francis's time as 'The Head' on the original version of Art Attack for 12 years.
Francis with The Head. Alongside producer Nic Ayling.
This is my first chat with a puppeteer (but by no means the last) and it's very interesting to hear how so many wonderful characters were brought to life and what it was like being involved in so many fondly remembered TV series but at the same time remaining pretty much incognito.
Francis runs a blog himself at https://franciswright.wordpress.com/ which is largely about family history but does have some pages relating to his TV work. I have to say Francis is one of the nicest people I've spoken to and is always more than happy to answer questions.
A few weeks after recording the interview we did cross paths at an event about 90's kids TV at the BFI in London.
