The Fishwhacker Swindle?

I wanted to post this as long ago as 1976 but the technology back then wasn’t up to the task. Nonetheless, in the wake of last year’s film of The Magic Roundabout (released, stupidly, as Doogal [sic] in the US), I feel I cannot keep silent any longer. What follows might just save you or at least your children from the hell of totalitarian enslavement.

The Magic Roundabout (henceforth TMR) was a stop-motion animated children’s series on BBC television that ran from 1965 to 1977, with a brief resurrection in the 1990s. I was a devoted fan in the early seventies, and it’s a miracle I wasn’t taken in by its foul ethos. For I can, indeed must, now reveal that it was part of an insidious KGB operation to brainwash British children; and its continuing popularity, as evidenced by its frequent re-runs and the 2005 cinema offering, indicates that the spirit of Bolshevism is still alive in these supposed post-Cold War days, and is if anything even more dangerous for its subtlety.

The programme was originally French, but was adapted – rewritten and narrated in English – by one Eric Thompson, now deceased (or is he?). A cursory glance at Thompson’s life is enough to sow the seeds of unease in any right-thinking brain. He trained as an actor (in other words, a shifty dissembler), and was father to Emma Thompson, star of stage and screen and a noted supporter of the left-wing Labour Party.

TMR's characters represent a veritable Who’s Who of Communist archetypes and icons. Dougal the dog, long-haired and grumbling, is the slovenly Lennonist working-class hero dissatisfied with his lot and clearly longing for a goateed leader to urge him on to insurrection. Brian the snail, in ever-present Russian steel-worker cloth cap, is the stolid, truculent working man so beloved of latter-day leftists like John Prescott. Ermintrude the cow blatantly symbolises the Stakhanovite ideal of the Soviet man/woman who surpasses what was hitherto thought to be humanly (in her case bovinely) possible in the pursuit of the building of a Socialist society. (In her case, the tremendous feat is the consumption of enormous quantities of grass.) The weird spring-like creature Zebedee is red in colour – no subtlety there, methinks! – and, tellingly, in the first ever episode shown on French TV he is seen bursting free from a box in a nakedly revolutionary act. Dylan the guitar-strumming rabbit, invariably portrayed with a suspicious-looking cigarette between his fingers, is an obvious homage to Matt Dillon, the hero of the American Wild West TV series Gunsmoke, and admittedly does not fit into my thesis so well.

The human characters include the little girl Florence, a.k.a. The Gentle Soviet Mother Figure; the roundabout operator Mr Rusty, whose resemblance to Karl Marx is astounding; and Mr McHenry, who drives a tractor just like one of those kulaks Stalin professed to represent yet slaughtered in their millions. Mr McHenry closely resembles Friedrich Engels, for good measure.

The TMR plots are without fail ultimately about co-operation between the various characters, leading to a happy resolution for all concerned. There is never a hint of war or bloodshed. Such Utopian storytelling is, I submit, the most horrendous, corrupting drivel that could ever be inflicted upon an impressionable mind. The world is just not like that.

My friends, the Communist threat, far from having been defeated, is only just beginning, and can be found in your child’s video collection and on your television screen courtesy of the taxpayer-funded BBC (or should that be BBCCCP?!). Join me in resisting the vile Leninist menace! Sign my petition by clicking here:

http://www.ohchristtheylethimoutforthedayagain.co.uk.