A New Programme With New People

To anyone watching ITV at around ten past twelve on Tuesday 29th December 1981, it must have seemed like business at usual round at Pipkins. ATV’s long-established lunchtime saga of shabby sentient puppets doing good deeds and odd jobs from their toyshop ‘office’ had been dutifully delivering surreal bickering about the correct way up to hold an envelope since January 1973, when it was initially known as Inigo Pipkin, and while by 1981 it may arguably have been past its most fondly-remembered iteration – the opening titles with Hartley Hare operating a camera and being forced off-screen by portraits of the other puppets, the synthtastic theme song and much-loved human helpers Johnny and Tom had long gone, as had lesser-sighted puppets like Octavia, Doctor Stethoscope and Mooney The Badger, and in their place came vaguely twee sub-Chopsticks ivory-tinkling, Hartley being chased by a psychotic beach ball that eventually floored him and the noticeably more straight-laced office human Peter – but it could still be relied upon to provide entertainingly comic meta-arguments about everyday trials and tribulations invariably fuelled by Hartley’s tellingly relatable obstinacy and vanity either side of whatever it was ‘TIME…’ for that week.

That’s exactly what viewers will have got with Odd Man Out, an episode concerning Peter being asked to make a toy shop in his, erm, toy shop, for which he enlists everyone’s help apart from Hartley, who throws an almighty strop that, astonishingly, none of them appear to have seen coming. Nobody pays his slighted feelings much regard until they come to test out the replica till and counter with Topov as a stand-in shopkeeper, upon which Tortoise withdraws in objection to financially unsound plans to use the actual sweets in their larder for makeshift commerce, and Pig is dismissed out of concerns that he will scoff the stock before anyone has even had a chance to ‘sell’ it, necessitating the sudden consumption of sweet-laden humble pie as Hartley is engaged to pose as putative customers Prince Knowalot in search of a Golden Gobstopper for the Princess Chatterbox, a cackling witch insistent on purchasing one jelly baby and one jelly baby only, and knotted hanky-round-jaw-sporting Mr. Toothache-Face who can’t buy any sweets. Everything is more or less business and indeed business as usual until they come to their usual cheerful sign-off to the viewers, upon which that Topov adds that “it really is goodbye this time”, with Hartley cheerfully confirming that next time there will be a new programme with new people. After over three hundred editions of newspapers accidentally glued to puppet arms, parlour games derailed by surreal comic fixations with a fish slice and Hartley ‘using’ a rural telephone box while elderly members of an adjacent bus stop queue looked on askance, Pipkins – and by association Inigo Pipkin – signed off with blithe disregard for the fourth wall for the very last time. It was a small, insignificant and unremarkable moment and also, in its own odd way, deeply profound.

Although Hartley would doubtless have suspected the involvement of ‘that Pigggggg… that pesky, pokey-nosed Pig’, Pipkins actually came to its dignified conclusion for the most prosaic of reasons and one that Tortoise would doubtless have wholeheartedly approved of – on account of their failure verging on defiant refusal to meet their required quota of regionally-focused programming, the IBA withdrew ATV’s franchise in 1980, and that famous bonging bombastic ident was seen and heard for the last time just after midnight as 1981 rolled into 1982. It was just a programme ending as programmes do, and it was far from alone – famously, Sapphire And Steel never did get to escape from that window that was ‘nowhere’ – and while a handful of programmes would survive the transition, notably Crossroads which in fairness would probably have needed an increase in production values before it could actually be in any way halted – Central chose to go their own way with lunchtime entertainment for pre-school viewers. Unfortunately that ‘own’ way involved a sqounking synth-voiced puppet caterpillar thing with a nose that should have been handed in during a police amnesty, a conveyer belt with attached cardboard whale of indeterminate purpose and Wayne Jackman effecting to equate standing in a cardboard box to ‘being’ a lift attendant, but – and this is what is really important here – Let’s Pretend worked well enough for its intended audience and the opinions of those who had secrely not outgrown Topov and Tortoise could not have mattered less. What’s more, it was the work of several of the redeployed Pipkins production team, which makes that peculiar and bittersweet little closing curtsey to the camera all the more poignant. Pipkins was a show that a lot of people had devoted a lot of care and and attention to, and it was missed by a lot of people on the other side of the screen, but at the end of the day, no matter how beloved it may have been, it was never more important than the television company where, somewhat slightly more than arguably if you’ve ever sat through Granada’s Daisy Daisy, it could only ever have been made.

It wasn’t all bad news, of course, and thanks to Central we would get Spitting Image, Auf Weidershen, Pet, Girls On Top, Murphy’s Mob, Press Gang, Inspector Morse and Blockbusters amongst many many others, and wouldn’t get Hardwicke House, but as ATV changed hands and whatever affection Doctors’ Daughters may or may not have ever been held in began to fade, a somewhat more ignominous fate awaited Johnny’s Van. With a huge stack of resusable videotapes coming as a free gift bundled with the much more valuable paperwork, the original broadcast masters of many of ATV’s more studio based shows were wiped, reused or burned on a special bonfire on a seemingly arbitrary basis, with everything from Simon and Liz whizzing through ecologically inconvenient alternate futures to Willie Rushton walking in and out of his own cartoons with a big grin on his face consigned to magnetic oblivion; reputedly, Sapphire And Steel only survived in full because the engineer who was handed the note saying ‘pls record The Money Programme BBC2 at six on these if no room on DAD 3′ happened to be a fan of the series and made sure that it ‘accidentally’ fell into the wrong in-tray. This was, it has to be stressed, much more to do with the fact that ATV was viewed even within months as a valueless archaic relic of a bygone age now that we were in an exciting new world that had no need for, cuh, weeks-old editions of Tiswas than with any consideration with regard to the actual content of the programmes themselves. Some videotaped shows like Come Back Lucy miraculously managed to make it through intact; Pipkins was not one of them, and what little now survives of those over three hundred editions – including Odd Man Out – mostly only does so courtesy of off-air recordings made by some of the cast. Let’s just say that there would almost certainly have been some inter-puppet squabbling about the associated available tape space there.

One of Pipkins‘ contemporaries, however, may have evaded the archival upheaval but would have a much more convoluted future ahead of it. Although it was essentially a co-production from the outset, The Muppet Show was actually originally made by ATV as an ITV show, and amongst the many reasons it caught on so quickly and so decisively was the infinitely playground imitation-inspiring show-closing honk on the saxophone from The Electric Mayhem Band’s resident reed-troubler Zoot. At some point following Topov’s consignment to a slightly different shelf to the shelf he was usually sitting on, The Jim Henson Company secured the international distribution rights to The Muppet Show outright, and prepared new versions replacing his rasping low-toned closing note with a weird unfunny high pitched one as a raggedy computer generated Henson International Television logo came bubbling out of his instrument. The meticulously restored versions you can find on streaming services now have the full-on proper one-note free-jazz Zoot excursion reinstated, but for a long time they didn’t and that was primarily for one reason and one reason alone – the originals had a whopping great ATV logo slapped across his face. Technically it was still an ATV Colour Production whether anyone liked it or not, and it wasn’t anything that an HiT caption after his show-closing improvisation couldn’t have remedied for the benefit of the handful of viewers who would have either noticed or cared, but it needed to be purged of its dangerous ‘old’-ness in case anyone got confused and stopped watching – and what’s more it was slapped on regardless of whether the original episode had a variation on the closing gag or even a post-sax zinger. In fairness there were probably more than a few viewers who neither noticed nor cared about that either, but the blunt fact remains that for a very long time, you could only see The Muppet Show entirely shorn of a widely loved and instantly recognisable part of its format and structure that was arguably more famous and synonymous with Kermit and company than some of the actual puppets, and all because it had the temerity to be made by a defunct broadcaster. This is, in fairness, as far out into the realms of conjecture as one of Pig’s food-related flights of fancy, but who knows, if there had been not even so much a little more of an attempt to keep ATV’s name in the public consciousness as less outright determination to consign it to history with the get-with-the-times-grandad vigour of ironically nicknamed punk squatter ‘Kermit’ in Thames’ Sorry, I’m A Stranger Here Myself, we might still have Escape Into Night in colour now.

Of course, that’s speculation based on what happened after ATV ceased trading. Even if Lew Grade had afforded the slightest degree of notice to actual contractual stipulations he had legally agreed to abide by for once and put in a desperate last-minute call for help to Pipkins, it’s doubtful that even Hartley Hare falling over while waving a big fishing net could have done much to prevent the enforced handover to Central. Just imagine what you could achieve by standing up for a still extant broadcaster, though.