Dougal is so popular now that it is about time for somebody to denounce him as a dangerous cult.
He is the shaggy dog who appears on the BBC TV children’s puppet cartoon The Magic Roundabout (Monday to Thursday, 5.45pm). Viewing figures for the programme range from 5 million to 8 million.
It is aimed at under-fives, but when the BBC tried to put it on at an earlier time last autumn there was such an outcry from adults who couldn’t get home in time to see it that they had to restore it to its old slot. There are fan clubs at universities and when children were invited to make models of the puppets in the show there were more than 100,000 entries.
Mr Eric Thompson, who writes and reads the scripts, can’t explain the success. “It really is an accident,” he says, modestly.
The Magic Roundabout is a French creation and first appeared here in 1965. Mr Thompson looks at the film, and the shots of Dougal skimming round and round the tree, and adds his own story to go with the pictures. He has no indication – apart from the pictures – of what the French story is about and uses no soundtrack to guide him. It can be a bit daunting at times.
A year ago Dougal had become so famous here that he rated a special biographical summary on Junior Points of View: seventh son of a freelance lamp-post inspector; sent to Shepherd’s Bush to train as a sheepdog; an extra in The Hound of the Baskervilles; bark-on parts in dog food commercials; discovered by Florence (the little girl in the show) and launched as a dog star.
Mr Thompson tries to keep the words in his scripts down to a minimum. They have a gentle rhythm and the stories are delightfully pointless. He thinks he must have hit on the right formula, because children send him stories written in exactly the same style.
He says that if the programme were put out late at night with a totally different script it would still get a huge audience. He tries to amuse the adults with little jokes – provided they mean something to the children, too – but he is conscious of the danger of making the whole thing sophisticated. A rather hip rabbit joined the cast recently, and when Dougal remarked that he wasn’t like a rabbit at all, because he didn’t skip around all the time, the rabbit replied: “We’re rethinking the image.” Mr Thompson fancies he went a bit too far that time: “Children couldn’t really get hold of an idea like that.”
Mr Thompson is an actor who has lately been appearing in Let’s Get a Divorce at the Comedy theatre in London.
For those who want to catch up with the Roundabout cult, there are repeats until June, and then it is hoped to start a new series in the autumn.
This is an edited extract
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