Fabulous Films

It’s a lovely day in Chigley. Here is a clock, here is a box…

In some, though admittedly not many, ways we are currently living through a bit of a Golden Age.

Specifically, if you’re of a certain vintage and a fan of older television, this is quite the time to be alive. Sure, we’ve lost Network, which is a genuine disaster for those of us still waiting for a DVD of Brighton Belles, but we still have Britbox and the BBC Archive on iPlayer – and Fabulous Films, who I once thought of as more of an American TV company (even though they’re UK based), have really pulled out the stops with some of their recent British releases.

They put out excellent sets of Bagpuss and Ivor the Engine a few years back, and then a superb 10 disc Monkey! Collection in 2020, but last year’s beautifully restored Worzel Gummidge Blu-ray boxset was a genuine revelation, and I was eagerly waiting to see what they’d do next.

And this year they’ve returned with a box set of three shows which every British kid over 40 or so will remember with enormous fondness. Chigley, Trumpton and Camberwick Green were a series of stop motion animations made by the legendary Gordon Murray in the mid-60s for the Watch with Mother strand and then shown on a pretty constant loop until at least the mid-80s. Famous enough then to be spoofed in ‘Trumpton Riots’, a song by indie rascals Half Man Half Biscuit, each little story tells a tale of one of the inhabitants of each of the titular towns. Windy Miller, the firemen Pugh, Pugh, Barney McGrew, Cuthbert, Dibble and Grub, Brackett the Butler – these are names to conjure with and to bring back memories of small tellies and coming home for lunch from school to catch that brief period in the mid-afternoon when programmes came back on, purely for kids to watch.

One of the big complaints about Network was that there was rarely any attempt to clean up the picture or add any extras on their releases, but that’s something you could never accuse Fabulous of – these Blu-ray episodes have been remastered from the original film negatives, so the quality is exceptional and there’s even an interview with 90 year old Gordon Murray.

Verdict: Hard to recommend this enough, if you grew up watching these shows… 9/10

Stuart Douglas

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