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Who isn’t a big fan of the Muppets? From their beginnings on Sesame Street at the end of the sixties through the classic The Muppet Show and Fraggle Rock to the more recent movies, they’ve been keeping us laughing for ages!
Today I want to concentrate on what I consider to be the Muppets at their best by talking about The Muppet Show.
The Muppet Show ran for five years from 1976 to 1981 and clocked up 120 episodes in that time. During this time the regular characters such as Kermit the Frog, the karate chopping Miss Piggy and the struggling comedian Fozzie Bear became household names, and are still well known today despite not being on TV regularly any more.
The show was conceived by Muppet’s creator Jim Henson, who was beginning to feel typecast for his work on Sesame Street and wanted to do something to appeal to all the family. He came up with the idea of the Muppets putting on a variety show from a theatre, a form of entertainment that was still popular back in the Seventies but which has become much rarer these days on television.
The format worked brilliantly, with comedy sketches and songs featuring a wide array of Muppet characters and also that weeks guest star. The Muppet Show became the one programme that real life stars wanted to be on, much like The Simpsons has been in more recent years.
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You know how sometimes you can remember you really loved something from your childhood, yet for some reason you just can’t actually remember much of the detail about it? A good example of this for me is Tales of the Gold Monkey.
Yeah, I know Hawaii Five-O would really be better suited to Child of the 1970’s, but with the news that a remake of the series is in the works, and the fact that the original show was still just about being made in the eighties (and was almost certainly still on UK TV screens into the 80s) I thought it would be nice to visit this landmark show.
Jossy’s Giants was a BBC kids show about a struggling youth football team, the Glipton Giants, who were managed and trained by ex pro-football Jossy Blair, hence the programme’s name.
If you’re currently wondering what a white haired gentleman has to do with a Queen song then you’re thinking of the wrong We Are The Champions. No, today’s post is all about the BBC sports game show of the same name, which was hosted by Ron Pickering, the aforementioned white haired gent.
Kick Start is another great example of the sort of TV programme that just doesn’t get made any more, and really should as it was great family viewing, whether you were into motorcycles or not.
Knightmare was a children’s TV game show aired on ITV from 1987 to 1994. As the name may suggest, it had a fantasy setting and involved a group of four adventurers going on a quest through Knightmare Castle, which was overseen by Treguard of Dunshelm (played brilliantly by Hugo Myatt). Treguard was basically the host of the show, who provided help and advice to the adventurers, although quite often the kids took little notice of him!
There are a great many science fiction shows from the eighties that I fondly remember today, although it has to be said that quite possibly some of them were possibly not as good as I recall.
