Thanks to the wonder of Youtube I've been showing my daughter some of the TV that was around for us sprogs of the 70s and 80s. Having endured the torture of
'Big Cook, Little Cook' or
'The Tweenies' it seemed a fair exchange to introduce her to such 'gems' as
Morph,
Mr Benn and
Button Moon. For my money, one that seems to represent the 'zeigeist' of 70s kids telly is the legendary
'Fingerbobs'.
For those too young to remember, Fingerbobs was a sort of hippy puppet programme presented by a character called 'Yoffy' (aka Rick Jones), who looked like a member of rock band
'Jethro Tull'. Yoffy, in his trademark grey sweater and neckerchief, would don several different gloves, from which he would create a number of card finger puppets. These included 'Gulliver' - a seagull made from an old ping-pong ball, 'Tortoise'
(Whats the hurry?) and of course Fingermouse
(The mouse with guts and verve!). A typical episode involved fingermouse sent off on a sort of quest to fetch beach pebbles that Yoffy could doodle smiley faces on and pretend they were cats, caterpillers etc.
As the puppets were made out of coloured card and gloves, Fingerbobs couldn't have put much of a dent in the kids' TV budget, the bearded Yoffy was the sole presenter and the theme music was provided by a solitary flute (Jethro Tull again?) and drum with maybe the odd xylophone piece thrown in. Like its contemporaries such as Bagpuss and Mr Benn there was only about a dozen programmes made, as a kid you don't realise this and the number of episodes seemed to stretch to infinity and beyond.
A few years ago in a programme about kids TV, Rick Jones stated emphatically that he loathed fingerbobs and would have sooner have been strutting the boards in a Shakespeare play. However, my daughter seemed to enjoy watching it, which just shows that in the age of CGI dominated programmes an old (to my eyes then) hippy with a few gloves and bits of assorted junk can still be entertaining to kids nearly forty years on - now that's class.
