Bungle was the big fluffy, man-size Teddy bear from Rainbow. He knew his own mind and wasn’t afraid to share his opinions but was often frustrated, particularly with Zippy.
Of the Rainbow three, Bungle was probably the one that least qualifies as a puppet seeing as he was essentially just a man in a bear suit.
If the three puppets from Rainbow were supposed to represent siblings then Bungle was the slightly older one. A bit of a know it all, but he wasn’t always right.
Bungle, who only put clothes on usually when it was time for bed.
Bungle was the more independent of the three he would often walk around doing his own thing or be shown playing his own games. He’d often assume the position of responsibility if Geoffrey was out of the room.
But Bungle was still meant to represent a child, probably a six year old. He would often strop when the others didn’t listen or agree with him and would still get a telling off from Geoffrey dispite being bigger and taller than him.
In the earliest series of Rainbow bungle was portrayed by a different actor and with a different costume. His appearance was a lot more frightening while his personality seemed a lot calmer.
The original, scary Bungle.
I was an only child so it’s only now as an adult I can see that each character had a distinct role and personality for the pre-school viewers to identify and relate with. Having said that I think of all the characters on Rainbow, Bungle was the one I could associate with the least. Frankly he’d be the one I’d be trying to wind up the most if it came to it.
The curious thing about Bungle was that he was often seen full frame with just his fur to preserve his dignity and yet when it was bedtime he put on a full set of pyjamas. He also shared a bed with Zippy and George, but that sort of thing was OK on kids TV in the 80s.
This was a classic children’s television show that formed a huge part of my own childhood. Aimed at preschoolers of which I was one when I used to watch, it was quite possibly the first TV show that I latched onto.
In a way Rainbow set the standard for all future children’s shows in the UK. While it may not have been the first to do what it did, it was the first major success at doing it.
Inspired by the success of Sesame Street in America, Rainbow mixed its format with human presenters, puppets, short animations and musical interludes. However, the budget and scale was considerably smaller than the American show.
Although the first series had a slightly different format and cast, it quickly settled into its stride and not only became a children’s TV success but a cult hit too.
The Rainbow gang, complete with Bungle bear in pyjamas instead of just naked as usual.
With Geoffrey Hayes acting as the father figure to the three puppets that were intended to represent the children at home – Bungle, Zippy and George.
As I was thinking back over my memories of Rainbow I attemped to find a slightly different slant because anyone who would be interested in reading this probably remembers the show anyway. The one thing that struck me was the all male cast.
While some would raise an eyebrow at that statement and certainly TV was a male dominated world back then, the one area where that was less-so the case was children’s television which in the UK had its foundations in Watch with Mother. In other words it was women and children first.
Geoffrey, the classic architype Children’s TV presenter of the 70s and 80s.
Not that I would ever have noticed that as a child. In truth the things I watched for most were to see Zippy’s mouth get zipped up or to see the someone farting in bed joke they did more often than they probably should.
Yet Rainbow was so integral to my childhood I feel like it was on daily when in fact it only ever aired at most a couple of times a week. Usually at midday, just after This Morning.
Rainbow was an integral part of a generation of children’s lives and I was one of them. In some ways it was just like every other children’s show but that I think is mainly because it set the direction that kids shows would go in for decades to come.
It’s September and from this month, in a bid to get things going here I am focusing on one subject each month. So I’m kicking off by going right back to my preschool years with one of the first TV shows I remember watching – Rainbow.
Although I’m fairly sure any preschooler today would be totally unenthusiastic if they were sat in front of Bungle, Zippy and George in a way the show set the standard for almost everything that airs on CBeebies.
So coming up over the next few weeks are my memories of the show, the trio mentioned above and another trio that spawned from the show.
When I started this blog I thought it would be a good idea to do a post close to my birthday every year to reflect on things. I never have until now…
How I got to here
Three years ago I started writing this blog. Then about six months later I stopped again before sporadically resuming things. I started just as we entered lockdown when time was plentiful and I had big plans, fill this blog with lots of pop-culture and mainly TV based memories. I had no idea who the audience was meant to be. Naturally when the world dipped in and out of being normal for a time I came back and forth to writing this blog but never with any consistency.
Despite it all being sporadic this is probably one of the longest running projects I have ever stuck with and I think I have managed to work out why. I mentioned that I wasn’t sure who the audience was meant to be, well now I know. It’s me. These are my memories after all and so really this is a place for me to reminisce over my life and mainly head straight back to childhood that we all usually like to do.
So unashamedly I have decided to come back once again and give this another stab. I’m hoping to be a little more consistent, now I know what my goal with this blog is and who its for I think I have a little more focus. If you are not me however, and you are reading this because somehow you are from the same generation as me and you were googling a memory from your own life that brought you here – you are very well to stroll down memory lane with me.
An obligatory recent photo of me channeling my inner Mike and Angelo.
What is coming next
My goal now is to see if I can keep updating this with memories for a whole year, consistently through until my birthday next year. To help, I’ve already got some posts lined up and ready to go. I find that one memory often leads to another similar one, so my plan is group posts together with a different theme every month.
If I succeed there will be lots of nostalgic memories here, starting with a preschool favourite in September. If I fail I have scheduled a post for one years time to recoginise what a disappointment I am to myself.
While they are still a thing, Ice Cream vans seemed to be everywhere when I was a child. That may have been because in my area there was a well established local Ice Cream firm called Verossi/Verricchhia (it seemed to use both names as I remember).
My nostalgia might simply be because their orange and yellow vans used to stop right outside my house and their chimes playing ‘Oh Sole Mio’ are intrinsically linked to my childhood summers.
But I was speaking to my other half about this just recently. She doesn’t see the fuss about Ice Cream vans but she is a decade younger and by the time she was growing up everyone had freezers to fill with Ice cream at anytime.
I’m sure most people had freezers when I was a child too, we didn’t though. Our house was technologically behind the times with our very old (and small) fridge with Ice Box compartment.
There was something special about getting an Ice Cream on your doorstep. A 99 with a flake was a treat. Or for my Gran it would be an oyster shell with strawberry sauce and nuts.
I think my neighbour often got the screwball which I’m sure most kids got as the cheap and relatively cleaner option but I was never allowed that because it had bubble gum at the bottom. I wad never allowed any sort of gum.
For me though it was the Top Secret lolly – chocolate coated banana ice cream with a hidden lemonade ice layer. In truth I suspect I only really liked the lemonade layer and yet I would never have picked a lemonade lolly.
The Top Secret lolly was probably exclusive to that local ice cream company. I’ve never been able to find much reference about it and nobody else seems to remember that piece of my childhood. Like the orange and yellow vans, it’s long gone now.
Ice cream vans still do exist and one even stops outside my house now regularly during the summer but somehow it just isn’t the same anymore.
Next time you’re at the supermarket and you hear the beep… think of the fun you could be having on Supermarket Sweep! – the famous closing words uttered by Dale Winton at the end of each daytime trolley dash. After a decade of working in supermarkets I think I can now say Supermarket Sweep may well have been fun but the real world of retail much less so.
Still some bright spark came up with the idea of a TV gameshow based in a supermarket, or should that be grocery store? because that bright spark was a guy called Al Howard who invented the format for American television. That first series was actually made in real supermarkets across the country – way back in the 1960s when such things must have been technically challenging. Later versions used a purpose built set, as did the show when it finally reached our screens in the 1990s.1
Dale’s Supermarket
In actual fact that was probably about the only time such a show could work in this country. A lot of changes to the regulation of broadcasting in the UK had happened and TV had been given more commercial freedom, taken a turn down-market and in the opinions of some, downright crass. Supermarket Sweep was an amalgamation of all of the above which a smattering of extra cheese for good measure.
The format was straight forward with three teams consisting of two players each. The first part of the programme was a straight forward quiz, with the contestants standing in front of the supermarket shelves behind buzzers cunningly disguised like shopping baskets. The game play was simple quiz questions, usually with a pricing game thrown in to keep up with the theming.
I’ve recently been able to rematch the first ever episode thanks to a combination of Challenge TV airing repeats and somebody uploading it to YouTube illicitly. The very opening moments featured a grand opening of the supermarket by none other than Ken Morely from Coronation Street who’s character Reg was the Supermarket manger at Firmans Freezers – if I remember correctly. He literally only appeared as a star name to open the show at the beginning as Dale Winton himself was far from being a celebrity at the time.
Actually, recently, me and Mrs. Ben have gotten into a routine of watching old episodes just before we go to sleep because, well we’re a bit weird basically. One thing I’ve realised by time jumping through the various series though is that questions got recycled quite a bit and those that weren’t were often just basic questions about soap characters which even now you’d only need a little knowledge to get right, “who is married to Vera Duckworth in Coronation Street?”2
Correct answers added time rather than points for the all important part of the show, the trolley dash – the Supermaket Sweep. The exception was the first question where the winning contestant got to run the ‘mini-sweep’ where they would run around the six or seven aisles looking for a specific item and usually not finding it. Still as a viewer this was a great warm up for the second half of the show, which really was the only bit we really wanted to see – the actual trolley dash.
Straight after the adverts the sweep got underway where one half of each team got to push a trolley round filling it with whatever they felt like, high value items like frozen turkeys always seemed to go in, as well as ironing boards – which seems a bit impractical. Extra points could be earned for collecting specific items from a shopping list, weighing sweets or finding a can with your teams colour stuck on it – not forgetting those all important bouncy bonuses. My local fruit and veg shop (remember those?) used to have an inflatable banana and always wondered…
Inflatable Bouncy Bonus
There were a couple of rules for the sweep, like a limit on how many items could go in a trolley and during the episodes from the first series I’ve been able to catch up on a very specific point about not taking out any cameramen. Perhaps they had some bad experiences during the pilot recording.
Only the one member from each team got to push the trolley round the supermarket, despite them all doing at least one pit stop to swap out the trollies, I always used to think this was unfair for the team mate who had nothing to do other than shout and cheer random aisle numbers at the top of their voice.
I recently saw one episode where the trolley pusher went a bit nuts and was ripping stuff off the shelves left right and centre, he nearly tipped his trolley. His team mate didn’t look best pleased when the scores came in at the end – possibly because everything he chucked around the place was deducted from the score and put into a big cardboard box at the end. They had been in the lead at the start of the sweep but came firmly last.
The guy on the right was really not happy.
I only saw that happen the once. But then I was a child in the 1990s so I only really saw Supermarket Sweep when I was off school sick where it was the only option worth watching, even then I only watched for the trolley dash at the end.
I’ve got this far and I haven’t even discussed the host, Dale Winton3. Much like the show Dale’s career could only really have existed in the 90s. He was camp, but he was down to earth. He spoke of how he knew he had to host the show, how it would be perfect for him and he was right. His career rocketed once it began, hosting more TV cheese like Pets Win Prizes and becoming one of the hosts of the National Lottery along the way.
Watching back over the series its clear to see where Dale’s star was in the ascent. First the pastel blazers went to be replaced by trendier shirts, then the show became ‘Dale’s Supermarket Sweep’ but fair play to him. He hosted a ridiculously camp and over the top gameshow set in a supermarket and did it with a totally straight face.
Also while time-hopping through past episodes it’s worth noting that the synatsised saxophone music used during the various sweep rounds often borrowed from pop songs but usually only a few seconds worth – possibly enough to avoid paying any royalties.
The show ran for exactly eight years, running from September 6th 1993 to September 6th 2001 and then finished – the last of those cheesy daytime gameshows of old, the cheesiest too probably. By the end Dale was tucked into the early afternoon slot, his morning opening hours being occupied by Trisha.
With product placement becoming a thing, advertising restrictions being relaxed (the original show was careful not to give undue prominence to any brands, not easy to do when you literally have a fully stocked supermarket as a set) you’d imagine it would be perfect for a revival, and they tried. With Rylan Clark hosting and Tesco stocking the shelves,4 but it doesn’t seem to have done that well. I can’t confess to having watched a whole episode but from what I’ve seen, it tried way too hard to be cheesy and camp rather than playing it straight in the way Dale and Co managed in the 90s.
Even Dale himself failed to revive the show seven years after the original run ended. It was all a bit more polished, you could even see cars in the car park behind Dale,5 the music was less camp. There were far more references to Mr. Winton too (Dale’s Daily, Dale’s Deals… etc.) and frankly Dale himself looked tired and less interesred than he had in the original.
But that original lives on, endlessly cycled on Challenge TV and in randomly uploaded episodes on the internet that me and Mrs. Ben like to watch just before bed because it requires minimal investment or brain power.
It was definitely a product of its time – and even then it was probably on special offer.
1. That set was built in the studios of Central TV in Nottingham for those that wanted to know.
2. Jack Duckworth
3. I should really mention Bobby Bragg, long-standing TV warm up man who commentated on the sweep and was an integral part to the personality of the show.
4. Various supermarkets supplied the goods for the original show including Asda and Sommerfield but this was only acknowledged during the closing credits and who reads them anyway.
5. At the time I thought this was impressive and pulled off well but having watched back its really obvious that it is just a photo blow-up. Less convincing than the painted backdrops you’d see whenever a front door was opened on an old sitcom. Just goes to show that the memory plays tricks.
6. Shalamar Night to Remember being one which seemed to repeat the ‘make this a night to remember bit on a loop’ and The Jacolksons, Blame it on the Boogie which seemed to borrow only the key bit once then not replace it at all.
When is a memory not a memory? So back in the early 90s Walls introduced their Walls Bangers which were Sausages in breadcrumbs. Because not only were Walls a well known ice cream brand they also did Sausages, still do.
Now I’m certain I will have had these but I have no recollection of them, I remember the advert but not the product itself.
It’s all so beige!
What this memory actually concerns is a different product. Round, coated in breadcrumbs but fish-based. The reason I recall it was because it was absolutely disgusting. They used Pollock, which is your go-to fish for non cod/haddock products.
They were vile and the memory has always stayed with me and I have always stayed away from fish products bar the occasional battered haddock at the fish and chip shop.
I’ve had plenty of foods I didn’t like but I think the reason I was so revilled by the round fish finger was that I had been expecting them to taste just like the round breaded Sausages did.
Also can we just take a moment to appreciate that Walls advert which was so beige just to match how the product looked on the plate. I dunno why that looked so appetising as a kid.
Ben remembers... 