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By October 6, 2007 found at Amid glades of impossibly colourful trees, a young girl hung out with a very strange group of friends, including an unkempt dog without legs who gorged on sugar lumps that sent him whizzing around in a stop-motion frenzy. He was joined by a rather irritating snail, a spaced-out hippy rabbit and a mysterious, moustached ringmaster figure on a spring who went by the name of Zebedee. A huge cast of cameo characters included everything from violins with Northern accents to boastful exotic fruit. Let's Go buy some DVD's at Amazon:
What set The Magic Roundabout apart, however, were the unusual stories and the often hilarious dialogue. Much of the secret of The Magic Roundabout’s success, and the reason it has secured its legendary status in the pantheon of children’s television classics, was that it appealed to adults as much as children. The show was loaded with references to drugs and the counterculture. Or was it? Thirty years on, the debate continues. What was certain was that the jokes flew straight over the heads of those of us who grew up with the show, until it became the subject of fresh discussion at university. In this respect, The Magic Roundabout was the forerunner of clever, modern animated shows, from The Simpsons down, that are written for two different audiences. Now The Magic Roundabout has come full circle, with a new version of the TV series seeking to resurrect the much-loved characters and dress them up for the children of the original viewers. Remakes of classics are as common in the children’s television industry as they are elsewhere in the media. Producers love a familiar brand name, as the success of new versions of Muffin the Mule, Andy Pandy, and Bill and Ben clearly demonstrates. Parents love to guide their children towards programmes that they enjoyed the first time around. The trick with a show as popular as The Magic Roundabout is to update it without destroying the spirit of the original. The Magic Roundabout was a French creation. Serge Danot was a decorator from Nantes, whose CV included a stint painting the Eiffel Tower. He turned to animation after an accident damaged his foot and came up with a show about a dog called Pollux with an English accent, something his fellow countrymen thought hilarious. La Manège Enchanté, featuring slightly moth-eaten puppets and stop-motion animation, was aimed at very young children. More than 500 episodes were made between 1965 and 1967 and broadcast into the Seventies. There are a few fragments of the original programmes on the internet and you can buy second-hand videos, but not DVDs. Watching them now, the colours seem less bright than in the memory, but that is probably because the film has faded. Danot apparently disliked green and so reds, whites and blues, the colours of the French Tricolour, predominate. The psychedelic mind of the man who took the raw material and reworked it for a British audience is still very clear. Eric Thompson was a presenter of Play School, the husband of actress Phyllida Law and the father of Emma Thompson. In an edition of his Roundabout stories that was published after his death, Law, Emma and her sister Sophie wrote about how Thompson worked. “The stories had originally been written in French, but he didn’t much like the French, so he changed it all.” This included the names: the dotty cow became Ermintrude, who, according to the women in Thompson’s life, “was inspired by his wife”. He watched the episodes on a little machine provided by the BBC that he could start and stop with his feet while he wrote the script for his own narration on a notepad on his knees. He disregarded the French stories and made up his own to accompany the pictures. The name Dougal was reputedly a joke on de Gaulle, the French president, and the character was modelled on Tony Hancock, the lugubrious comedian. Dylan, the rabbit, had more than a touch of Bob Dylan about him. Brian, the optimistic but rather annoying snail, was closest to Eric Thompson himself, according to his wife and daughters. The scripts were full of puns and wordplay, lines that a children’s writer would never get away with in these politically correct times. In one surreal episode, featuring a fruit cocktail party where the guests were lemons and bananas, one character lamented, “I’ll probably get cornered by some boring old fruit.” In another episode Dougal chuntered, “You don’t want to go abroad – all those foreigners mingling about as if they owned the place.” There were references to nationalisation, the three-day working week and other political issues of the time. But it was the nods to the counterculture that were most intriguing. Were Dougal’s sugar lumps really just that? And what about Ermintrude munching on flowers until her head revolved 360 degrees and other characters commented, “I’m afraid she’s been affected by all those poppies she’s been eating.” Meanwhile, Dylan could hardly stay awake, peppered his sentences with “Hey, man” and other hippyisms and generally appeared to be completely out of his burrow on something potent. The Danot family always said they would never do another series of The Magic Roundabout. But eventually they agreed to a feature film, which came out two years ago and was awful, missing the whole point of the quirky television series by taking the characters out of their garden world and sending them off on a Lord of the Rings-style adventure. After intense lobbying, the French producers, who include Claude Gorsky, a suave Algerian War veteran who was an assistant director on the classic 1966 film A Man and a Woman, persuaded Danot’s widow to let them make a new TV series. They are using the same animators as the film, but sought British expertise in making a programme for a pre-school audience that could be sold around the world. Theresa Plummer-Andrews, who was head of acquisitions and co-productions at Children’s BBC and worked on Bob the Builder and Postman Pat, among other shows, and Graham Ralph, a successful former director of adverts whose credits include Harry and his Bucketful Of Dinosaurs, have full editorial control over the 52 new episodes. Ralph, who led a team of British writers and actors, studied old tapes of the original series before setting out to “re-create the spirit of the show so that the characters are living in that warm and gorgeous world of happy relationships”. He says that Eric Thompson’s programmes had a wonderful “rambling and whimsical” nature that was fine for five minutes but for a ten-minute slot they needed to produce proper storylines. The Sixties version was “psychedelic, of its time”, says Ralph. In the new series, “the characters haven’t changed, just come to a different time”. He describes resurrecting Dougal and Co. as “like working with legends. I was terrified: it was something I was brought up on.” Dougal is rather better groomed in the new version, but Ralph wanted him still to be very much the grumbling Tony Hancock figure with “a touch of Blackadder and Victor Meldrew. Always grumpy and thinking he is better than everyone around him.” Florence is the earth mother at the core of the garden universe and Ermintrude is a wonderfully batty, trilling country aunt with a singing voice that could shatter glass. Brian is a fabulously anally retentive, trainspotter-ish snail, highly pedantic, but more than the “mindless mollusc” Dougal says he is. Ralph had Ken Dodd in the back of his mind as he was breathing new life into the magical Zebedee. He is more mischievous and manipulative than the original and, with his crimson face and lavish moustache, a faintly sinister presence. Some things have had to go. The “Time for bed!” catchphrase that ended every episode had to be modified because the new programme will be shown at different times of the day. Now Dylan says, “I wish it was time for bed, man.” Ermintrude’s head no longer revolves when she eats flowers and Dougal’s sugar lumps have gone, but Ralph says this was “because of the food issues”. Depicting a character eating sugar was deemed unsuitable, especially when selling to the American market where there are even more restrictions on what is appropriate in children’s television than in Britain. The producers won’t be drawn into discussion of drug references in the original. “Urban myths were added over the years just like Captain Pugwash,” says Ralph of the children’s animated series that was the subject of stories about sexual references, which turned out to be hogwash. “All successful shows get all sorts of interpretation.” Dylan, popularly regarded as a pothead, has been “left in the Sixties. I think we still recognise that character.” But Ralph insists he is just “a lovely, lazy, laid-back rabbit”. Fair enough. Imagine the outcry if he said anything else. Nevertheless, new interpretations of the characters are bound to spring up. Dylan still falls asleep the whole time, suffers short-term memory loss and converses in hippy-speak. An episode in which Zebedee tells him of a “great high rabbit” who bestows gifts on good bunnies will get conspiracy theorists buzzing, as will the stimulating effect that carrots have on him, making his eyes revolve and his legs move at 100 times normal speed. The show has a very different look. At the studios in Marseilles, teams of animators in shuttered rooms stoop over computer screens fiddling with the latest computer-generated imagery (CGI) techniques. Pierre-Marie Fenech, the production manager, says the aim was to create a garden that is “a safe place where children can be happy, not a place of stress or a mirror of reality. What Serge wanted was a place where children could go in their dreams, a place they would like to be”. Using a rich palette, including plenty of Danot’s despised green, they devised a virtual reality “set” in which to put their characters. Each inhabitant of the village is “built” with a virtual skeleton and then they are made to “act”. The animators sit in front of mirrors, acting out scenes themselves, and then tapping away at their keyboards to replicate the movements in the computer puppets. An experienced animator can produce six seconds of film a day. They will have spent some 40,000 hours on animation by the time the series is completed. In Britain, the original show worked for both children and adults, partly because it occupied the five-minute slot before the news when parents were watching with their offspring. The new show will be shown four times a day on Nick Jr, a channel dedicated to children. Accordingly, there are not so many adult jokes and the shows I am shown in Marseilles are less amusing for adult viewers. They are still witty, however. An episode in which Dylan tries to become a raver because he thinks it might make him more popular, and the other characters follow suit in order to show him how absurd he is being, has some laugh-out-loud moments. The messages, such as the importance of friendship and not trying to be something you are not, are sound and the appeal to children is likely to be huge. I tried out both the old and new Magic Roundabouts on my kids, aged four and (almost) two. Within a minute of watching the dear, old, narrated original, my son declared, unprompted, “I don’t really like this because none of the people speak and it’s quite babyish.” But they can’t get enough of the highly produced new show. Indeed, the first thing my youngest said to me this morning was: “Want to watch Roundabout, Daddy. Want to watch Roundabout.” Parents of young children better get used to similar refrains because they’ll be going round and round in their heads until they’ll wish it was time for bed. The world premiere of the new series of The Magic Roundabout is on October 22 at 8am on Nick Jr (Sky, Virgin Media and Freeview). For more details, visit www.nickjr.co.uk | ____________________
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