Barely Remembered 80s Kids Shows

As I’ve already established that lazy nostalgia is both easy and appealing, let’s take another trip back to the 80s when things were bigger (recording devices, hair, etc.) and kids shows were surprisingly subversive. Maybe it was a result of comedy starting to branch out into newer areas as a result of the alternative comedy boom of the early 80s (as proved by the success of shows such as The Young Ones and The Comic Strip Presents..) but there were some shows broadcast in a kids slot that were effectively geared towards entertaining the adults too (in a similar vein to more recent shows like Horrible Histories). Let’s take a look at a few of these forgotten gems, shall we?

Gilbert’s Fridge
A green snotty nosed alien from the planet Drill, Gilbert first appeared on the Saturday morning kids TV show Get Fresh. Created by the Spitting Image team and voiced with complete carte blanche by impressionist and improviser Phil Cornwell, Gilbert was utterly unlike anything else on kids TV at the time and proved popular enough to be spun off into his own show. Gilbert’s Fridge had a theme tune by The Pogues and surreal running sketches including WW2 spoof How Far To Hitchin?. In a move that presaged Dennis Pennis and Ali G by some years, Gilbert would also conduct surreal interviews with celebrities, peppered with nonsensical non-sequiturs. Cornwell was pretty much left to do whatever he liked as long as didn't swear or say anything overtly rude; this was rare enough within a lot of TV comedy at the time, let alone a kids show. You can find episodes on YouTube so give it a look if you like your comedy weird.

Round The Bend
Effectively pitched as a live action comic book for kids, it was basically a TV version of the rude kids comic Oink! (itself largely a kid-friendly version of Viz)*. Hosted by puppets Doc Croc and his rat pals (once again created by the Spitting Image puppeteering team), it featured animated segments (provided in part by Aardman Animations) that parodied a lot of famous kids TV of the time with segments such as Thunderpants, Botman and Wee-man and the Masters of the Looniverse as well as stop-motion B-movie spoofs like Attack of the Atomic Banana and The Son of, The Return of, The Revenge of.... The False Teeth From Beyond The Stars (featuring Roger Prentice, the Apprentice Dentist). It was good silly fun and can also be found on the YouTubes if you fancy a watch.

Come back again next time when I might be highlighting some other obscure things that only me and about four other people liked back in the 80s (or not)...

* Oink! was another comic that I obsessively collected at the time. Characters included Burp the Smelly Alien, Ugly Face, Harry The Head, Billy’s Brain, Pete And His Pimple and Rubbish Man featuring work by artists like Tony Husband and Lew Stringer and containing some early written submissions by Charlie Brooker of Black Mirror fame. The first issue came with a free flexi-disc single called “Poo Poo Tinkle Tinkle Parp Parp Oink Tiddly Widdly Widdly Widdly Plop”. Well, it made me chuckle at any rate.