ONE of the most quintessentially English children’s programmes is, one would think, Tales of the Riverbank, featuring the adventures of Hammy the hamster, Roderick the water rat and GP the guinea pig.
Yet these simple stories, first shown in 1960, were conceived by two Canadians, film editors Dave Ellison and Paul Sutherland. It was only after their pilot programme was turned down by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation that they took it to London, where the BBC commissioned an initial 13 black-and-white episodes. Sutherland was to be the narrator but Auntie took exception to his Canuck accent and he was replaced by Johnny Morris, a Welshman. A former legal clerk, building site worker, salesman and farm manager, Morris was ‘discovered’ telling stories in a pub by BBC producer Desmond Hawkins and featured in a number of radio series before graduating to the Riverbank.
The series was subsequently sold to Canada and the US, with voices in turn dubbed by local actors. It was shown in a further 32 countries around the world
Tales of the Riverbank was introduced by a guitar piece, Raccolta, op. 43, no. 6: Andante in C by Mauro Giuliani. The rodent protagonists were filmed live operating toy props, which the producers encouraged them to approach by smearing them with jam. This provided a basis for plotlines in which they supposedly drove cars, sailed boats, flew planes and even went down in a diving bell.
The sheer simplicity of the programme was a delight, as were the various voices provided by Johnny Morris. Hammy was, to my ears, a West Country yokel while Roderick sounded like an irascible ex-public schoolboy and GP the Riverbank’s resident inventor had a strong Yorkshire accent. Here are several lovely examples of the surreal stories, which many years later would become cult late-night viewing for American students using mind-expanding substances.
Following the original 13 episodes a further 39 were filmed, mainly on location at Wootton Creek on the Isle of Wight, where the missus and I once stopped and asked for directions while on holiday and were invited for a cup of tea and a chocolate biscuit by an ex-sailor on a former fishing boat he had converted into a cosy home. It seemed pretty close to heaven.
Morris’s talent for giving human voices to animals led to his longest-lasting TV role as presenter and narrator of the BBC series Animal Magic. With his companion Dotty the ring-tailed lemur, he appeared as a zoo keeper in more than 400 editions between 1962 and 1983, having conversations with a variety of fauna filmed at Bristol Zoo. He was seldom, however, seen near spiders, of which he had a secret phobia.
For reasons best known to itself, the BBC eventually turned against the anthropomorphism of cuddly creatures and Animal Magic got the chop. By the same logic, it rejected a 1970s colour version of the Riverbank, titled Hammy Hamster, and it was shown instead on ITV. A 1990s version, Further Tales of the Riverbank, appeared on Channel 4 and is the only one released on DVD.
A feature-length film, Tales of the Riverbank, came out in 2008 and comprised a blend of live action and puppetry. The characters were voiced by Ardal O’Hanlon as Hammy, Steve Coogan as Roderick, Jim Broadbent as GP and the ubiquitous Stephen Fry as Owl. It went straight to video.
The following year Hammy the Hamster made an unscheduled appearance in a US TV news report about a missing girl. Instead of the mug shot of a suspect thought to be involved in the disappearance, viewers were treated to a picture of a cartoon Hammy holding a clapperboard. It was hastily withdrawn.
The Genesis guitarist Steve Hackett gave us his own version of the Giuliani theme while the original programme also inspired the Jam’s 1981 track Tales From The Riverbank. Tales From The Riverbank
Johnny Morris died in 1999, aged 82. He bequeathed his home to his Animal Magic co-presenter, Terry Nutkins.
Return of Bill the Conqueror
More than five years ago I wrote about my friend and fellow oenophile Bill Dalton, multi-instrumentalist of this parish. During lockdown, he and several chums traded tracks remotely via the miracle of the internet and the result is a bluegrass album under the name of Los Ajustes, titled It’s All Joe’s Fault.
Bill, whose home in Clitheroe includes the state-of-the-art Earwig Studio, explains that he and his friends took inspiration from Joe Craven’s 1996 album Camptown, where he took traditional tunes and re-interpreted them. ‘We took a bunch of tunes and songs and adjusted them into new settings. This album is a labour of love.’
Bluegrass aficionados will be familiar with several of the personnel, who are listed alphabetically as follows:
Phil Bunce: vocals, banjo, pandeiro, theremin, fiddle;
Bill Dalton: vocals, resophonic guitar, ukulele, percussion and fairy dust;
Richard Partridge: vocals, fiddle, viola;
Mike Pryor: vocals, mandolin, guitar, double bass, charango, cavaquinho.
You can listen to the entire album here and find details of how to buy it.
All the tracks are cover versions apart from the last, my favourite, Dos Viejos Amigos, notes for which read: ‘Mike wrote two tunes while living in Spain in the mid-1980s but had never done anything with them. Here they are, joined together and then given to his old friend Bill to write a new melody and funk up the rhythm.’
Old jokes’ home
I went to buy a watch, and the man in the shop said: ‘Analogue?’ I said ‘No, just a watch, thanks.’
A PS from PG
‘If I had to start my life again, Jeeves, I would start it as an orphan without any aunts. Don’t they put aunts in Turkey in sacks and drop them in the Bosphorus?’
‘Odalisques, sir, I understand. Not aunts.’
‘Well, why not aunts? Look at the trouble they cause in the world. I tell you, Jeeves, behind every poor, innocent, harmless blighter who is going down for the third time in the soup, you will find, if you look carefully enough, the aunt who shoved him into it.’
PG Wodehouse: The Code of the Woosters