Time Flies by - Revisiting Chigley

 

It was the last of Gordon Murray’s famous ‘Trumptonshire’ trilogy, and the only one in the series to acknowledge the existence of such a place. Previous entries Camberwick Green and Trumpton had existed more or less independently of each other, barring a few recurring characters. Chigley’s opening titles finally nailed the geography of Murray’s fictitious shire, with the location of the titular village specified on the title card as being ‘near Camberwick Green, Trumptonshire.’ 

I was just a few weeks away from starting school when Camberwick Green arrived on BBC1 on 3 January 1966. An episode (Mr. Dagenham, the Salesman) was, indeed, broadcast on my 5th birthday, when I finally reached school age. Trumpton arrived a year later, by which time my viewing was restricted to school holidays. It took a good few years before I could confidently say I’d seen all the episodes of either series, and I’m sure some eluded me until well into the 1980s or 90s.

Chigley was a different matter. By the time it came to the screen, in October 1969, I considered myself a bit beyond such childish entertainment. Watch With Mother was, after all, intended for pre-school children and I was now eight going on nine. Starting as it did mid way into the autumn term, I’m not sure when I’d have caught my first episode of Chigley, but I’d hazard a guess that it was most likely during the half-term holiday when we would occasionally tune in at lunchtime to see which of the old WWM classics were still running (the answer was, surprisingly, almost all of them). 

I’d enjoyed both Camberwick Green and Trumpton, but Chigley didn’t quite do it for me. Unlike its predecessors, it lacked a clear sense of where the stories were set. Camberwick Green and Trumpton both had obvious centres, around which the stories took place, before venturing further afield to locations like Pippin Fort or Colley’s Mill. In the case of Chigley, there was no village centre, just a series of diverse loci: namely, the pottery, Treadle’s Wharf, Winkstead Hall and the bauhaus-inspired factory of Creswell’s Chigley Biscuits (CCB… a nice in-joke from Gordon Murray). Right from the very first episode I saw, I decided I wasn’t going to like Chigley. The characters weren’t as diverse or colourful as those we’d met before, and their accompanying songs were a step back from the sophisticated tunesmithery of Trumpton, whose themes had included some unusually subtle chord voicings from composer Freddie Phillips.

Chigley seemed staid and uninteresting after the endless invention displayed during Trumpton, and some of this dullness must be attributed to the creator, Gordon Murrary, who was back to handling script duties. Trumpton, whose stories evolved with neat, logical simplicity, was scripted by Alison Prince, but she received no credit on Chigley. And it shows. The stories are dull and repetitive. Every episode of Trumpton had provided work for the Fire Brigade, but it was always something different each week – from rescuing the Mayor’s hat to demolishing a dodgy chimney. In Chigley, the equivalent sequence involved Lord Belborough and his vintage railway engine, Bessie. Coming back to the series via the recent blu-ray restoration, it occurs to me that the whole ‘heritage railway’ aspect of the stories was derived from the old Ealing comedy The Tifield Thunderbolt. Lord Belborough even bears a distinct resemblance to actor George Relph who played Titfield’s engine-driving curate.

For the first couple of weeks, the trips out on Bessie were entertaining enough, and provided the series’ only truly memorable musical moment, ‘Time Flies by When I’m the Driver of a Train’. But it soon began to pall. All Bessie ever seemed to do was steam out to Treadle’s Wharf and collect cargos of bricks or stone from Mr. Swallow, the Wharfinger. And once you’ve seen all the shtick with the crane once, it doesn’t bear endless repetition.

But what really put me off Chigley – even at the age of eight – was the peculiar end sequence that took the place of Trumpton’s band concert. The firemen’s brass band in the park had seemed a perfectly acceptable piece of minor civic pomp, even if they did perform the same tune every week (and none of them was playing a Spanish Guitar). At Chigley, we got the ‘six o’clock whistle’. Having left their place of work, the CCB employees were obliged to attend a kind of square dance for which Lord Belborough provided music on his ‘Dutch Organ’ (best not to ask). And this seemingly happened every day. You’d think his Lordship might have had better things to do. As for the dance itself, it had a decidedly Eastern European flavour, judging by the ladies’ costumes. The whole affair smacked of the kind of communal activities you see on old newsreels of the Hitler Youth or factory workers in wartime Japan. It felt somehow un-British. Certainly it seemed unlikely. And worst of all, it was contrived. Of course, it was advantageous to the production team in that the sequence used up a good two minutes of screen time, thereby reducing the amount of animation required for each episode. Add to that the two and a half minutes spent watching Bessie steaming along the tracks, and the amount of new footage required for each episode was down to around nine minutes.

I probably saw no more than a couple of Chigley episodes during its first year on air. The series continued to be broadcast on BBC1 (latterly in the ‘See-Saw’ strand that had replaced Watch With Mother) until 1986, but unlike its predecessors, which I would occasionally endeavour to watch during days off from work, I made no such efforts with Chigley. In the 1990s, it found its way onto Channel 4 where I caught one or two more episodes. But at time of writing, I can confidently say that there are episodes of Chigley that I have still never seen, even after 55 years. The recent blu-ray release of all three series has provided the opportunity to make good this defecit. So does it look any better with the benefit of rose-tinted nostalgia? Not really. Of the episodes I have watched thus far, only The Balloon (previously unseen) provided any real visual interest, with a hot air balloon ride giving viewers a look at some previously unseen Trumptonshire scenery including a castle and a clutter of rooftops. One or two scenes are rather more sumptuously realised than had been the case in Camberwick Green – the road into Chigley is nicely detailed with trees, shrubs and even telegraph poles. And the camerawork includes more close-ups of the characters than had previously been attempted. Had the film makers acquired some different lenses? 

Perhaps by the end of thirteen episodes I might have changed my mind about Chigley, but I’m still inclined to go with my original 1969 opinion. And I suspect it was shared by other viewers. Somehow, Chigley never quite caught the popular imagination in the same way as its forebears. Of course, it spawned its share of merchandise, including an LP record, annuals and a number of story books. But of the three Trumptonshire titles, the real merchandising moneyspinner was Camberwick Green, whose characters were realised as plastic dolls and even tubes of toothpaste! I have never come across a Chigley spin-off toy, and I suspect there simply weren’t any. 

Whether or not one is the driver of a train, time flies by, and after fifty-five years I’ve finally completed my tour of Trumptonshire. Chigley may have been a disappointment, but I still cherish the worlds of Camberwick Green and Trumpton far more so, dare I say, than the worlds of another 1960s TV puppet-meister…