When I was young, I had an L.P. called “A Visit to Trumpton” which was presumably the soundtrack to two television episodes of that once famous children’s television show slapped one episode to each side of the record, and released to the general delight of kiddies like me who could only rely on our memories or the odd picture book tie-in (and the repeats, of course) to recreate the magic of our favourite television shows in what must now seem to be those very strange times before YouTube, shiny discs, downloads and even videotape made watching programmes at the time you chose to be anything other than a ridiculous dream.
“Here is the clock, the Trumpton clock; telling the time, steadily, sensibly - never too quickly, never too slowly - telling the time for Trumpton…”
It says a lot for the power of those characters that even now snippets from that record will occasionally pop into my mind for no very good reason, sometimes in the middle of perfectly ordinary conversations which can, quite suddenly, take a very surreal twist.
Clocks are like people,
Clocks are like you and me.
Each has their own
Per-son-al-it-ee…
Suddenly my mind is flooding with memories like Mrs Honeyman, a stoutish lady in a straw hat and leg concealing violet dress, shouting at her three Pekes “Mitzie! Daphne! Lulu!” or “Chippy” Minton, the carpenter, who loved his work so much that he wanted to sing about it:
I like my job as a carpenter,
There’s nothing I’d rather be!
I’ve had my tools for many long years,
They’re all good friends to me.
Although, to be fair, everyone in Trumpton seemed to enjoy their work, almost as if the children of Britain were being somehow “prepared” for their future lives in gainful employment by being made to accept such things as being “normal behaviour” at a very young age.
Hmmm! Odd that…
Even the employees of that most institutionalised of institutions, the Post Office, would still manage to sing a cheery song as they went about their drudge-filled existences. Sadly, those are songs of which I can only remember a few fragments like “Hello... Hello… Replace your receiver please” and “We have found you were connected to a phone we found defective, we are sorry to have troubled you, but now your line is clear! Hello? Hello? Your line has now been cleared…” (or, at least something like that, anyway…).
“Brrring! Brrring! I work for Post Office Telephones…”
All evidence of a far simpler and less cynical and surly era of customer services…
I can also recall that bastion of the town’s fire brigade (from the days before they merely became a “service”), Captain Flack receiving a telephone call: “Aggie? Up the pole?” before summoning the fire brigade into episode-ending action:
“Pugh, Pugh, Barney McGrew, Cuthbert, Dibble, Grubb!”
There are those who eschew the urban sprawl of the fast-living town of Trumpton and prefer the relative peace of the rural idyll that was “Camberwick Green” with its more mellow and relaxed inhabitants like Windy Miller, all of whom would emerge from within a spinning musical box and mutely draw us into their latest adventure.
This is a box, a musical box,
Wound up and ready to play.
But this box can hide a secret inside,
Can you guess who is in it today?
These viewers never really took to this new fast-paced “Trumpton” series and preferred instead to watch the old “Camberwick Green” episodes and harp on about the gentler, simpler old days and style of the “classic” show. What they made of the “spin-off too far” which was “Chigley” is anyone’s guess…
However, if a trip to the big city was required, then a swift visit to the more brutal, industrial and altogether more “urban” area of “Chigley” was precisely the place to be for those forward-thinking kids as they were looking towards their future in the supersonic 70s. For Chigley, with its wild and crazy daily dances after work when the factory closed for the day was, after all, possibly more their thing…
“Trumpton” itself was a series of thirteen short films for children made in 1967 by the same the team which had previously delivered thirteen “Camberwick Green” films for BBC television in 1966, and would go on to produce “Chigley” a couple of years later which featured, amongst all of the blue collar functionaries in the factory, Lord Belborough and his steam train trying to keep a firm grip on the past just after the final steam trains had been withdrawn from the British Railway network.
Who says that the Trumptonshire Trilogy wasn’t about social commentary…?
All three series were brainchild of Gordon Murray, who created and wrote them, and there are those who suggest that they have remained popular because they were not particularly fantasy-based like a lot of children’s TV, but were generally about “ordinary people” doing “ordinary things” albeit in an idealised vision of a Britain that was already fast fading into history (if such places ever really existed at all) even as the programmes were being made.
Nevertheless, as representations of a society long lost to us, they remain a fascinating insight into another “lost world” and, being as it was, the soundtrack to my own childhood, it wasn’t all that bad a place to visit, and it only takes a few bars of those familiar tunes to transport me right back there. As soundtracks to your life go, well there could have been far worse ones; I remember a friend and I coming across an L.P. of “Mary, Mungo and Midge” on a market stall once which he just “had” to buy.
Inclusive, liberalised, utopian high-rise nonsense…!
“Go to Trumpton, son!” is what I should have advised him, “That’s where the real people are…”
“Pugh, Pugh, Barney McGrew, Cuthbert, Dibble, Grubb!”
ReplyDeleteHaha not heard that for well over 30 years! Thanks for the memory.