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I had been told a couple of days ago that Bill Oddie had died, but it was still awful to see the news confirmed in print.
I loved the Goodies and Bill was the one that I liked most as a child. He was anarchic, naughty and rebellious and even though I was only mildly naughty and quite conformist, I harboured the desire to be a rebel too. And I loved the comedians (and puppets) who didn't care about the rules.
All the Goodies were my favourite Goodie at some point in my life. And now they're all my favourite Goodie. I am very sad that there are two empty seats on the trandem, but I hope Graeme will be around for a good while yet. He is one of the sweetest and funniest men in the world, but displays his genius very quietly. Which I appreciate now much more than I did as a child. Tim appealed to me when I was a kid, because he was in many ways a kid too.
And then came the news that Ronnie Le Drew, the man behind Zippy had died too. Another anarchic and indefinable entity that appealed to me from my earliest days. Bill and Zippy both showed me what it was to cock a snoop.
I did meet Zippy once and wrote about it in the Metro and as a result was asked to write the forward to
Ronnie's autobiography (which is a nice book, but maybe not worth the £60+ that it's on Amazon for. I'll share my bit here as I think it's a pretty solid tribute (and a nice bit of writing which I clearly worked quite hard on- I didn't want to let Zippy down) It also includes a nod to the Goodies.
I once met Zippy from Rainbow. At least I think I did.
Because if memory serves me right, just seconds before the encounter I’d been cycling at speed through the streets of London on a tandem tricycle being steered by John Bishop,
before careering through some doors into a TV studio where I was showered in confetti like at the end of “Who
Wants To Be a Millionaire?”
So there’s a chance that it was just a dream.
This was all for a non-broadcast pilot of a late night TV
show and the guests they’d managed to get were me, Richard Herring (probably best known for playing a police officer on Ant and Dec Unzipped) and Zippy from
Rainbow. I don’t know what list they’d got us from, but I don’t think it was the A-one. If it was the Z-list then
alphabetically at least Zippy would be right at the end of it. The barrel was scraped and we’d both been found clinging to the bottom.
And I didn’t actually meet Zippy. I just stood next to him,
too dumbfounded by his presence to introduce myself. Because even though I was nearly 50 years old, Zippy still meant as much to me as he did when I had first seen him
shouting out of my television set when I was 6 years old.
I was always attracted to anarchy in comedy: the flan-flinging antics of the Tiswas team, the tomato ketchup squirting, black
pudding thumping Goodies, the dangerous driving of the Banana Splits. And Zippy was right up there. Because he was anarchic and transgressive within the bounds of what, at first appearance at least, was a traditional happy-clappy kids TV
show. George was soppy, Bungle naïve and confused, Geoffrey just another in a long line of ever-cheery presenters that we knew from Play School.
But then there was Zippy. Rude, brash, often angry and
frustrated. So much so that people could only shut him up by pulling his mouth shut with a zip. What kind of creature has a zip in their mouth? No creature does. That zip had been stitched in there by someone. This wasn’t normal.
And if Zippy wasn’t normal then maybe the show wasn’t
either. What was Rod, Jane and Freddie’s real relationship (we could never have guessed quite how complex)? How had Geoffrey, Bungle, George and Zippy even got together in the first place: they had so little in common? How old would
Geoffrey actually get before he decided he should move on? Why did their house have no walls? Was George smarter than he seemed? Was Bungle more calculating and selfish? Why did he wear pyjamas when he never wore clothes? Was Geoffrey actually squeaky clean or was there something darker lurking underneath? Was he just one step away from getting out his twanger and showing it to everyone? And
was there somewhere, deep in the recesses of all of our brains, some memory of the hideous horror show that was the original Bungle, whose head seemed too small for his (or any body), like it had been ripped from a bear, left to rot
and then attached like an ursine Frankenstein to a body that it simply didn’t fit with?
Zippy and his zip mouth being zipped shut was one of the
first things that made me laugh (and also slightly scared as I too was a mouthy child and would someone stitch a zip on to me too) and one of my earliest memories.
So now as a grown up I was more than starstruck to be so
close to one of my childhood heroes. The young man in charge of the social media part of the team on this never to be broadcast show we were guesting on said, “So this is the puppet thing, is it?” - aptly enough as the segment was about
things that would mean nothing to millennials - I was so aghast I almost punched him for his rudeness. It’s fucking Zippy from Rainbow, you prick. Have some respect!
I really wanted a selfie with Zippy, but just like the time
I met Bryan Cranston I was too embarrassed to ask (Zippy must be sick of it after all - let him live his life). I can’t be the only one to compare Zippy to Walter White.
But John Bishop had no such shame and got photos as the
puppeteer hid quite badly behind him. Why didn’t I ask too? Imagine having that picture. You don’t get opportunities like that twice.
And it’s interesting because even though for most of the
time I was with him, Zippy was inanimate and when he moved, it was only with assistance, it is only him that I really remember. The curse of the puppeteer and maybe the triumph too, is that you are invisible. I was in the company of
the great Ronnie Le Drew, but because he is so great he was practically invisible. We only saw Zippy.
It’s certainly the case that many puppeteers and ventriloquists have strange relationships with their puppets. Hopefully not quite THAT strange, though I wouldn’t put it past some of them. Apparently Harry H Corbett used to take Sooty on holiday and once had to turn the car around because he’d left him Home Alone (now that would be a film- I mean it really would - I might give that a crack). Whereas Rod Hull so resented the fact that his success was tied up with his Emu that he started to hate the puppet (he appeared on our show Fist of Fun precisely because we’d asked for him alone and not “the bird” as he called him, practically spitting the words out).
But Ronnie keeps Zippy in an IKEA bag. Which makes me think he might be that rare thing: a sane puppeteer.
Perhaps this book will prove otherwise.
But it’s finally time for the invisible man behind the
puppet to rise up above the Rainbow kitchen counter. He must remove his hand from Zippy’s backside, give it a wash, zip the puppet’s mouth shut and lock it with a padlock and tell us his side of the story. Given that most of it was spent crouching behind scenery I can’t imagine he saw very much, but maybe we get a better perspective of things from
the background if everyone else has forgotten we’re even there.
Thank you, Ronnie for making me so in awe of a piece of felt
that I couldn’t bring myself to even ask for a photo. Thank you for bringing this monster to life.
I know I speak for a lot of middle-aged children.
