'You Can't Leave Basil Like That!'

Mid-story with Mr. Derek, circa 1970. Note the strategically placed bag of sherbet!

Memories of a Foxy Favourite

'Hello, hello, hello... and to the show... webble-webble-elcome!'

If I’d been asked, around the year 1970, to nominate my favourite television programmes, close to the top of the list you’d have found The Basil Brush Show. It turned 55 this week. Midsummer seems like a strange time to roll out a brand new childrens’ TV series, but it was on 14 June, 1968, that Basil’s first solo BBC series went out. Basil was already a familiar character from his many appearances alongside David Nixon, so when we sat down to watch on that Friday afternoon, we had a pretty good idea of the fun that was in store.

The show settled instantly into a format that would have been recognisable to viewers over a decade later: Basil was ‘mentored’ by his human co-host, ‘Mister’ Rodney Bewes, and the show comprised a mixture of simple sketches, interspersed with variety artistes and one pop performance per episode – on week one, Manfred Mann lip-synched to their current chart hit My Name is Jack. The show was rounded off with what was easily the best item in the line-up, the weekly story, read by Mr. Rodney, but constantly interrupted by Basil. The stories would later focus on swashbuckling tales, featuring various heroes all named Basil, but for this first series, it was the punningly-christened cowboy ‘Des P. Rado of Cripple Creek.’ (On the first episode, Basil misheard Cripple Creek as ‘Chiswell Green’.) It was rounded off with a rousing song, in which the audience of school children were invited to join in. In later series, the songs would build up to the line ‘he was a brave, brave man’, at which the kids would yell back, Crackerjack fashion: ‘who’s that?’

Sadly, not a single example of the Rodney Bewes era is known to have survived. Rodney himself lasted only for a single series, and the following year moved to ITV, where he starred in his own sitcom Dear Mother, Love Albert. Into the gap stepped my personal favourite of Basil’s co-hosts, the avuncular Derek Fowlds, whose sparring relationship with Basil during the stories was always a highlight. A few of these ‘Mr. Derek’ episodes have survived, and I’ve been lucky enough to see two examples in recent years. Of the pair, the edition from 25 September 1970 is clearly superior, featuring an extended sketch that sees Basil attempting to camp out in the woods (an obvious studio set) but being scared by creepy-crawlies, a thunderstorm and other terrors (special mention should go to that week’s variety artiste Dieter Osweno, whose act included juggling a portable television with his feet while the set was switched on). Though broadcast in colour, the episode survives only as a black and white telerecording: but at least it survives.

The weekly story was key to the success of the Basil Brush Show, because of the interplay between Basil and the various ‘Misters’, all of whom would feign anger and exasperation at his interjections, sometimes resorting to clamping his mouth shut to keep him quiet, and often having to stifle their own laughter. A typical sequence might see Basil with his nose in a bag of jelly babies; in later series, his ‘pet’ dog, ‘Ticker’, a battery-operated hound, would regularly interrupt proceedings. Sometimes, Basil would ask to read the story himself, culminating in the non-sequitur ‘Paganini’ when he got to the foot of, you guessed it, ‘page nine’. If the pace was slowing, Basil would egg on his ‘Mister’ with the exhortation ‘come on, come on!’ And when the plot got exciting, each line in the story was followed by a breathless ‘yes’ from Basil. Every week’s instalment culminated on a cliff-hanger: Mr. Derek would slam the storybook shut, declaring ‘and that’s all we’ve got time for!’ ‘All we’ve got time for?’ protested his foxy chum: ‘but you can’t leave Basil like that!’

The Mr. Derek era lasted until 1973, when Roy North took the helm. I was getting a little old for Basil Brush by this time, but kept watching despite never really warming to ‘Mister Roy’. By the time Mister Roy yielded place to Mister Howard (Williams), I was no longer watching. In my recollection, 1970 was the show’s high water mark: Mr Derek had settled in nicely after his first series, and the scripts were genuinely funny. Basil had also now entered the lucrative arena of character merchandising. A plush glove puppet manufactured by Wendy Boston toys was so popular as to be virtually unobtainable. When we asked at our favourite toy shop, we were offered the alternative of a stuffed Basil. ‘You could puppefy him’ suggested the nice lady in the shop, using an expression I’ve never heard anywhere else. The idea was we could open Basil up, remove his stuffing, and turn him into a glove puppet. Fortunately for Basil, we decided against such radical surgery, and even in his stuffed state, he became a favourite toy. The glove puppet, when it finally appeared, looked a lot less like Basil, with a red corduroy body in place of his fancy clobber.

I even entered a painting competition in an endeavour to win a Basil Brush glove puppet. The contest, organised by the Daily Sketch newspaper, offered puppets as prizes to those entries judged to be the best, and a star prize of a visit to a Royal Garden Party where Basil would be in attendance. My efforts earned me the consolation prize of a Basil Brush sticker fun and colouring book, which I have kept to this day – the only competition prize I have ever won. The Sketch printed one of the winning entries, submitted by one Paul Venables (that’s how miffed I was at missing that prized puppet – I can remember his name more than half a century later!) Later still, I was dismayed to realise that Paul Venables had audaciously copied his picture of Basil in top hat and tails from a drawing in one of the Basil Brush Annuals!

The original, 'copied' by competition winner Paul Venables, from the Basil Brush Annual, publ. 1970

In 1972, Corgi Toys brought out a Basil Brush car as part of their ‘Corgi Comics’ range. The car had been seen in the TV series and also featured in Basil’s stage show, and the model came complete with the unique gimmick of two Basil Brush ‘laugh tapes’. These were in fact serrated lengths of red plastic, which, when dragged through a slot in the supplied cardboard ‘sound box’ made a grating noise intended to mimic Basil’s trademark laugh. What it actually sounded like was someone dragging a length of serrated plastic strip through a slot in a cardboard box…

Beginning in 1970, publishing house World Distributors offered a Basil Brush Annual for several years, but their contents were disappointing. World had licensed the use of the Basil character, but not his human co-stars, whose interplay with him was the whole point of the series. Instead, Basil was reimagined as a kind of country squire, with a Butler, Chummers, who participated in his exploits, a format that also appeared as a strip cartoon in TV Comic around the same time. 

I even got to see Basil ‘live’, on stage in Blackpool in 1973, where he shared star billing with impressionist Mike Yarwood. Basil is obviously very small, and we were sitting up in the ‘gods’, so he was a little hard to make out, but there was no denying that was the real Basil Brush down there on the stage, with Ivan Owen working him invisibly from below and providing his voice. The only item on the bill I can recall with any clarity was a sequence in which Basil 'drove' his car, in front of a back projection screen.

Basil’s first run on television was terminated in 1980 following a dispute between the BBC and creator Ivan Owen, who was angling to revamp the character to appeal to a more adult audience. After a few years in which Basil was reduced to presenting a schools programme for Granada Television, he returned as the host of Crackerjack. In the 1990s, Ivan Owen finally got his wish when Basil appeared on the adult comedy series Fantasy Football League, but it wasn’t a success: the show’s format hinged on improvisation and Basil, without a script, was reduced at times to gaping open-mouthed, with nothing to say. Perhaps Ivan Owen, who was still providing Basil’s distinctive voice, didn’t know anything about football.

Owen and co-creator Peter Firmin sold the rights to the character in 1997, and five years later, a reimagined and revoiced Basil became the star of a new sitcom-style series broadcast on the CBBC channel. But we needn’t linger here. The ‘real’ Basil Brush is the one I remember from childhood. The original puppet still survives and judging from a recent photograph, has been remarkably well preserved. Misters Rodney, Derek and Howard have all left us, along with the ‘real’ Basil, Ivan Owen. Part of Owen’s genius was never to appear alongside his creation, and never to give interviews, helping to reinforce the illusion of Basil being a personality in his own right. I think it’s safe to say that, in the arena of glove puppets and ventriloquism, there was no one to rival Basil, who really deserves the last word here:

'A-ha-ha-haa-haa-haa! Boom-boom!'

Basil Brush merchandise: Wendy Boston plush toy, 1970: Corgi Comics car, 1972,
and the first three Basil Brush Annuals (publ. 1970, 1971, 1972)