The Secret Show
Just in case you think I'm a grumpy old curmudgeon who thinks that everything was
better in t'olden days, here's a bit of contemporary telly that I'd heartily recommend.
The Secret Show is made by a British company called Collingwood O'Hare and has been
showing on BBC children's TV for the past couple of years. It's a stylish and stylised
pastel-coloured animation which looks a bit like a 1960's vision of The Future and
tells of the adventures of Victor Volt and Anita Knight, spies working for a top-secret
organisation called UZZ as they battle to save the world from destruction at the
hands of assorted aliens and super villains. They are aided in their missions by
tiny Bavarian brainbox Professor Professor and their boss, who sounds a bit like
James Mason and whose name is changed daily for reasons of security (a high point
of each episode is his disappointment as he discovers his latest embarrassing name
of the day). The villains are equally splendid: Professor Professor's evil counterpart
Doctor Doctor is a bride-of-Frankenstein look-alike with constantly wobbling teeth
and a secret army of henchmen called 'Expendables'. Then there are the Impostors
(who live sixty four miles beneath the surface of the earth and emerge from time
to time bellowing their fiendish war-cry "Dim-Badoo!") the raptorgators (who live
even deeper underground) and the wonderful Floaty Heads, who are probably the best
TV aliens since the Cybermen, cruising the universe on endless quests to kidnap Santa
or build collections of Top Secret Headquarters.
This is what all children's TV should be like. It's tightly written and beautifully
drawn; the gags are strong and the plots are inventive. It's colourful and fast-moving
enough to keep even quite young children entertained, but there's no sense of talking
down to the audience, and none of the cheesy moralising that mars so many children's
programmes. It reminds me a little of the work of Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin,
which may seem a strange comparison, as there is little similarity between The Secret
Show's knowing, action-packed gag-fests and the gentle, whimsical, innocent worlds
of Bagpuss and Noggin the Nog. But like Postgate and Firmin's company Smallfilms,
Collingwood O'Hare come across as a bunch of highly talented, slightly eccentric
people who are making programmes that they want to see and which just happen to be
for children.
I may be wrong, of course. I know nothing about Collingwood O'Hare and I suppose
it's possible that their shows are cranked out by hard-working slaves in some third-world
animation factory. But if that is the case, then they disguise it well, and I hope
they start working those slaves harder still, because we need more episodes of The
Secret Show, and we need them soon!
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