Classic TV

I do this Lost Gem, mainly as a favour to my wife and as an instructional video for younger people. It seems that there are “young people” (ie people in their 20s) in Britain who do not know who King Rollo is/was, which is just unacceptable.

King Rollo was a children’s character created by David McKee in 1979, starring in a series of books, animations narrated by Ray Brooks, and a comic strip in the magazine Buttons. In all, 13 episodes of the animation were produced in 1980 that were originally shown in two halves as part of the BBC’s pre-school See-Saw strand.

The central character of the stories was Rollo, a child-like King who was always in need of advice and assistance from his friends. Among these were The Magician (a father figure), Cook (the king’s cook, a mother figure, who was arguably the real ruler of the kingdom), his neighbour, Queen Gwen, King Frank, and perhaps most importantly, Rollo’s cat, Hamlet, who was generally portrayed as wiser than Rollo himself.

The animations used the same distinctive colourful cut-out paper look as McKee’s other works, such as Mr Benn (about whom much will be said at a later date), and one memorable aspect was that the characters’ legs would rotate outwards when walking until they were at right-angles at the sides of their body.

Here’s the first episode. There – now everyone knows who King Rollo is. Job done.

Seeing as Charlie Brooker decided to remind me of Ludwig with a spoof on last week’s How TV Ruined Your Life, let’s deal with this very strange, but well-remembered cartoon series from 1977.

The cartoon in essence was simple. Ludwig was a strange egg-shaped, metallic/stone contraption with a mind of its own who lived in the forest with a bunch of animals. The plot was then more or less the same for each of the 25, five-minute episodes in the show’s run. Something would happen to the animals and Ludwig would come to the rescue (normally having created the problem in the first place, just to see what the animals do in some kind of scary experiment). To do this, his body’s facets would open up and out would pop arms, legs, gadgets or even a helicopter rotor blade when he needed to get somewhere fast.

Neither Ludwig nor the animals talked – they squeaked. However, they were constantly watched by a human birdwatcher (voiced by Jon Glover) who had a deerstalker and large binoculars and he narrated the cartoon. Very odd. Then at the end of every episode, Ludwig played the final movement of Beethoven’s first symphony through the credits.

If this all sounds a bit weird to you, it’s because it was created by father and son team, Mirek and Peter Lang. Mirek had worked on Czech TV during the 60s and as all watchers of BBC2 during the 70s and 80s will testify, Eastern Europe was pretty much the home of mental, nihilistic, inexplicable cartoons at that time.

Ludwig is pretty much remembered for the music and scaring the crap out of children. You can watch all the episodes on YouTube to see why it did this, but here’s the first episode below.

Diana Wynne Jones is a name that’ll be familiar to some, but won’t ring a bell for others. However, she is one of the most celebrated authors of children’s fantasy books around. Small wonder that the BBC would turn to adapting one of her most famous award-winning novels, Archer’s Goon, back in the early 90s.

The premise is relatively simple: normal English schoolchild Howard Sykes (Jamie De Courcey) comes home from school one day to discover a huge man (the eponymous Goon, played by Morgan Jones) in his house, claiming that he’s owed 2,000 words which he has to give to someone called Archer. It turns out that 13 years earlier, Howard’s dad, Quentin, agreed to write 2,000 words each quarter for a town official called Mountjoy, in return for not having to pay any taxes. However, he’s forgotten to do it this quarter.

Eventually, Howard and the Goon go to meet Mountjoy who reveals that the town is secretly run by seven wizardly brothers and sisters: Archer, Shine, Dillian, Hathaway, Torquil, Erskine and Venturus. Each one ‘farms’ a separate industry, with Archer farming money, electricity and gas, Shine looking after crime, Dillian minding law and order, and so on.

Armed with this new knowledge, Howard and the rest of his family go looking for the wizards, trying to work out exactly what Archer needs with all those words. The siblings try to stop them, resulting in their various industries taking action against the family (musical instruments rebel, for example). Of course, when they discover Hathaway lives 400 years in the past and Venturus lives in the future, it all becomes a lot trickier…

The six-part BBC adaptation was actually pretty faithful to the books, thanks in part to Wynne Jones’s close collaboration with the producer and the scriptwriter Jenny McDade. It had a reasonably star-studded cast, with Roger Lloyd Pack (Trigger on Only Fools and Horses) playing Quentin, Susan Jameson (the queen in The Queen), Andrew Normington as Torquil, Annette Badland as Shine and Clive Merrison as Hathaway. It was also surprisingly complicated, with the eventual revelations about the identities of the siblings (the clues are all there if you can spot them) making it a cerebral affair as well as a fun one.

Joyfully, you can watch the whole thing over on Veoh, read in great detail about each episode, or watch bits of it on YouTube. But here’s how the first episode begins: