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and fibreglass, a sculpting room, and, upstairs, a digital focus that - back then – was so futuristic but is now commonplace.
“Whenever the real Kermit puppet came to visit from New York, we all loved having our photos taken with him and Miss Piggy.”
Then there was the call from Slumdog Millionaire director Danny Boyle that led to “the most incredible opportunity”.
As head of costume, hair and make-up for the London Olympic and Paralympic Opening and Closing Ceremonies, Tahra oversaw the completion of 23,000 costumes, dressing everyone from waving children to David Beckham and the Queen.
“I worked on the Olympic shows for 18 months,” Tahra remembers, beaming.
“It was endless rehearsals, long days – we had four shows to deliver, working with a cast of 17,000 volunteers – and there was constant negativity in the press about the London Olympics, but we knew from the go that the Opening Ceremony would change all that and be really special.
“We couldn’t wait for everyone’s reaction.”
Tahra set herself the task of using only British manufacturers for the costumes – “with all our funding coming from the taxpayer, I felt we had a responsibility to put the money back into the local community.”
That wasn’t the only challenge – “the ceremonies were a mixture of a live event, with everyone in the stadium watching with birds-eye-like views, and a film – with everyone at home seeing all the jewel-like details in the costumes.”
Then there was a certain matter of the Queen, who famously joined Daniel Craig’s James Bond to ‘fly’ into the Olympic stadium.
“I had an amazing time working with Buckingham Palace,” Tahra recalls.
“I visited the Palace a number of times for meetings – I couldn’t believe little old me was going in this big entrance to see the Queen, with hundreds of tourists outside with their cameras saying, ‘who’s she?!’”
At security, Tahra was asked to fill in her personal details “and I was faced with the best drop-down box I’d ever seen – it took me ages to find the ‘mrs’ I was looking for because there were so many other options – ‘admiral, lord, lady, countessess…’”
Then she did at last get through the barriers to meet the Queen.
“She was just lovely – and one of the things I noticed most was her really beautiful skin!”, Tahra giggles. “She was so interested in all of our plans – we had to make multiple copies of her outfit made, and of her exact jewellery – because of course it wasn’t actually going to be her parachuting out of a helicopter..”
On the opening ceremony night itself, “I was running around like crazy all day, but for the arrival of the Queen, when the helicopter came in, I ran to the entrance of the stadium and just watched that moment and everyone’s reaction. I’ll never forget it.”
Buckingham Palace might seem a long world away from CBeebies favourite Bing but the show’s puppets have also been honed to perfection.
Flop alone took Tahra and her team four months to create.
“We had someone knit a prototype Flop, then a specialist lady dyed wool the perfect colour, then another knitted more prototypes, then we developed Flop’s puppetry… On stage, you see one finished object but many different people with different skills have been involved in creating it.”
Making Bing and friends, then, has been a gently slow, old-fashioned process; the same is true, Tahra adds, of the experience of the Bing Live! stage show for everyone in the audience.
“I love that puppets, like the characters themselves, are expressive, forcing us to suspend our imagination, and all be like children.
“We’re all going faster and faster in modern life, and it’s important to have those moments to quieten down – I hope that’s what Bing Live! lets families do.”
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