Basil Brush
oldie 21st century fox of the year
I was brought up on puppets. Indeed, I was exposed to more puppets than I was to actual human beings. Andy Pandy, Sooty and Sweep, Bill and Ben, the
Flower Pot Men... Pinky and Perky, pigs with shrill, speeded-up voices, were the stuff of nightmares – luckily, Muffin the Mule and Monty the Monkey were before my time. The stuff of fantasy – how impressed we were by the plastic spaceships and puffs of smoke – were the jerky marionettes of Thunderbirds. To this day, the colourful menagerie of Jim Henson’s The Muppet Show is striking.
I was going to say that at least none of these legendary felt or wooden personalities has been arrested in recent years and persecuted by Operation Yewtree, but even Rod Hull’s Emu, I believe, has been accused by Sally Phillips of spying on her while she got changed.
My favourite creature was Basil Brush,
who, dapper in his cravat and Basil Rathbone tweed capes, was a puppet version of Terry-thomas – the English gent as cad. He was created in 1962 by Peter Firmin, ninety this year, who with Oliver Postgate founded Smallfilms,
which gave us Clangers, Pogles’ Wood, Ivor the Engine and Noggin the Nog. Simply to list such classics brings back my childhood. Firmin made the scenery, drew and painted the backgrounds, designed and sewed the puppet characters, and illustrated the tie-in publications. Basil’s tail was real.
Basil, with his fruity voice and ‘Boom! Boom!’ catchphrase, first came to my attention when he co-starred in conjuring shows with David Nixon. In 1968, The Basil Brush Show was launched. It ran for fifteen series and each episode was watched by 12 million viewers.
The likes of Demis Roussos and Petula Clark sang duets with the irrepressible fox. His human sidekicks included Rodney Bewes, Roy North and Billy Boyle. The one I remember best was ‘Mr Derek’ – Derek Fowlds – who used to read Basil a bedtime story, which Basil would infuriatingly interrupt with corny jokes and a much-imitated guffaw: ‘Whaa-ha-ha-ha-haaa!’
Basil has been such a hard grafter that there have been two puppets, thanks to wear and tear, and 200 costumes – from spaceman to Robin Hood to judo expert. The arm up Basil’s bottom was Ivan Owen, who died in 2000, aged 73. Ivan, whose first outing as a puppeteer was as Yoo-hoo the Cuckoo, spurned personal publicity, crouched uncomfortably under the desk, or inside a papier-mâché tree, or whatever, taking his cue from a TV monitor. Apparently, Ivan ‘wasn’t averse to a drink or two’, and once, in a Basil voice, asked Princess Anne, ‘Have you fallen off any good horses recently?’ She replied, ‘You don’t fall off the good ones.’
When the BBC relationship ended in 1980 – Ivan wanted Basil to graduate from children’s telly to evening telly – Basil’s agent, Billy Marsh, got him work in panto, with Cilla Black. Basil’s TV career was revived earlier this century.
He got into trouble in 2008 when, splendidly politically incorrect, he poked fun at thieving gypsies and a complaint was made by the vice-chairman of the Southern England Romany and Irish Traveller Network. Nevertheless, the British Film Institute is pledged to restore the tapes of Basil’s old programmes.