Lewdness, drink and jealousy all part of Rainbow job, says Zippy

IT WAS Britain’s answer to Sesame Street, enchanting young children for more than two decades with its “magic and innocence”, as its presenter Geoffrey Hayes declared.

But sentimental fans of Rainbow might need the smelling salts after reading a tell-all memoir by Ronnie Le Drew, the puppeteer who operated Zippy.

Le Drew has revealed the “lewd antics” that went on during filming of the show, including an incident when an archbishop was given a guided tour of the Thames Television studio and arrived just as “Zippy was mounted upon George, going at it hammer and tongs”.

Jane Tucker, one of the show’s trio of singers, was apparently nicknamed “Miss Whiplash” after throwing open her coat during rehearsals “to reveal a shiny, tight, leather S&M outfit”. She would ask Zippy if he fancied “playing with her maracas”. Cast and crew would also rearrange the positions of the zoo and farm animals on the table into “bizarre sexual positions”, while a culture of heavy drinking meant the cast would often “stagger in” drunk to rehearsals.

In Zippy and Me, his memoir, to be published by Unbound this month, Le Drew claims that Hayes was jealous of his puppet co-stars. “Geoffrey was afraid of being upstaged by Zippy and George,” he writes, saying he was “irked” when they and Bungle received more fan mail than he did.

Hayes would complain hadn’t been given a big role in a particular episode.”

The show ran for 27 series and 1,071 episodes after its launch in 1972.

Le Drew said working the famously caustic Zippy mouth was physically demanding; that “he enough Violet Philpott, the puppeteer who preceded him, was left with a slipped disc that kept her bedridden for nearly a year due to the effects of crouching for hours on end.

Roy Skelton, who voiced Zippy, would drive colleagues mad with his “endless name-dropping”, especially about his work with Alfred Hitchcock, Le Drew said.

One year, Rainbow ran an art competition in which they invited young viewers to draw a portrait of the Queen, which was presented to her at a party in Hyde Park.

The boy had painted her with a black face. “Her Majesty merely smiled politely,” Le Drew recalled.

The Duke of Edinburgh, on the other hand, burst out laughing and told the Queen: “Oh dear, I think you’re going to have to change your make-up.”