It is official: Watching telly as a child can help you make money in later life, meet your heroes and become a more rounded human being. The first two of those statements are indisputable and I’m going to prove to you that the third is equally beyond doubt.
In 1983, along with the 21 million other people tuned into a single episode, I was watching . My Mum said ‘sitting in front of the idiot box is no good for you’. Well ‘IN YOUR FACE MUM!’ I would have said if I’d known 21st century petulant kid slang, because little did she realise that all those hours exposed to the direction and production of , the performances of and and the writing of would hardwire their unique sense of comedy and character into my DNA. If that little boy had known that 28 years later he would be a rather attractive and debonair script editor/writer sitting in the first development meeting with a bunch of equally attractive TV people pondering how to ‘reboot’ the show he would have had the uncanny power of precognition, but he didn’t, which is just as well because that kind of pressure on a 9 year old would have been immoral. He was simply loving the show and probably eating a Wagon Wheel or swallowing bubble gum – no-one told him you weren’t supposed to swallow it did they! That love was what all the people involved in bringing Danger Mouse back focussed on when making decisions about how to make the ‘new’ show. It was always a question of how do we pass that fragile emotionally-charged baton on to the current generation of kids without antagonising all the grown up kids who still hold dear (played in the new version by and - ).
The question of why we love a certain show is something that we dwell on a lot in development between the cups of tea and biscuits…and crisps…and more biscuits…and sometimes cake. It feels that pretty much all stories, shows, films, plays, games, whatevs, contain their essence in the nature of the characters. We didn’t love ‘’ the show, we loved Danger Mouse and Penfold and we had a great affection for and the Narrator. Some of us even had a cheeky flirtation with Count Duckula but that’s a story for another time. We loved DM and Penfold because they were hilarious best friends having fantastically exciting adventures together. We wanted to be like them and hang out with them. When DM was being a bit arrogant and Penfold was taking cowardly to a new level it made them more human, more rounded, more like us. When they had fun so did we and we loved it!
So how do you replicate that love? Do you just make everything exactly the same as it was before? Wouldn’t having new actors playing the characters mess it up? The purists would say yes and that we shouldn’t have dreamed of breathing new life into DM in the first place. They’ll say the show was perfect including all the wonky technical aspects which give it a unique charm – which even Brian Cosgrove admits needed work. And those purists are right; the show is absolutely perfect for 1983 kid and he’s encased in amber and can never be tainted by the modern world. Original DM will always be there for you whenever you choose to download or stream him. But time and use of social media wait for no man and a voracious 9 year old hungry for ‘content’ in 2015 is not the same as 9 year old voracious for ½ penny ‘’ in 1983. A kid now is infinitely more media savvy, they have a plethora of broadcast and online channels, they have a more sophisticated understanding of storytelling because they’ve been exposed to far more of it than 1983 kid could possibly have imagined. 2015 kid has had , , , and , 47 versions of (slight exaggeration and the latest animated version is really good). They’ve had really good stuff. They have brilliant characters. And that’s why the new Danger Mouse needed to be different. Different isn’t a euphemism for commercialised or defiled. What it really means is adapted for a new environment. And the trick to adapting well is to keep the fundamentally important elements of something and be brave enough to try and do something else with the rest. So we focussed on DM and Penfold and worked out how they related to each other and worked our stories and the world from them. Then we invited writers who love the characters as much as the original writers did to come and play. In the performance we needed actors who have a warmth, energy and chemistry to bounce off each other. In the animation we needed artists and directors who really care and want to make the best thing they possibly can.
Once we had the central characters nailed down all the rest is splendid dressing. We definitely wanted the Danger Car, we definitely wanted the post box HQ – although the question of scale took many a meeting – and we definitely wanted the full menagerie of villains led by Baron Greenback. And without the Narrator you would have lost a little bit of the show’s soul. Into this we mixed new elements like female co-stars including the marvellous Professor Squawkencluck (Played by ) and Jeopardy Mouse (Played by ), tuned into subjects that 2015 kid would care about and gave it the energy and wit necessary. All these elements might seem a bit different, but the fundamental love that you only get from thinking, feeling and empathising with your fictional characters as rounded human beings whether they be Mouse, Hamster, Chinchilla or Chicken is exactly the same now as it was in the 1980s and hopefully comes across on the screen.
We all hope that with this we have cursed an entire new generation of bespectacled, balding Geography teachers to the nickname of Penfold. I hope we have infected the brains of a whole generation of kids with the theme tune that for some reason they’ll know word for word in 30 years’ time. I hope we’ve done enough to make Mr Cosgrove, Mr Jason, Mr Trueman and the late Mr Scott smirk a bit and say ‘They did alright’. And more importantly I think I’ve proved conclusively that watching telly as a child was good for me because it did get me a job, it let me spend time with Cosgrove and Trueman, two heroes and pillars of my childhood – when I realised Brian Trueman presented ‘’ and wrote ‘’ I did lose my composure – and it made me into a more rounded human being because that’s an essential trait for any writer. Without it how could you rebirth real characters like Danger Mouse and Penfold? Enjoy the series!