Druggy fun or just innocent teatime entertainment, The Magic Roundabout had 60s schoolkids hooked! Allan Bryce looks back on the charming animated series that preceded Breaking Bad!

In this ever-changing and turbulent world what we really all need is a place like The Magic Roundabout. It was a place of fun and friendship, where everyone could gather to talk, to play, to think quietly or just to sit on a wooden horse and twirl sedately round and round until Zebedee, with his red face and large upturned moustache, boinged into view on his big spring lower body and told us that it was “Time for bed.”

In case you’re not old enough to have seen The Magic Roundabout back in the day, it was one of the all-time greats of children’s television, every episode 5 minutes of oddly surreal briliance. The claymation classic for kids of all ages was the creation of French animator Serge Danot, who as a young artist worked on the restoration of the Eiffel Tower. It was only after he suffered an injury on that job and had to spend time recuperating that he started developing an interest in animation. Danot’s partner in making The Magic Roundabout was a half-French, half-British animator named Ivor Wood (see boxout).

The Magic Roundabout hit French screens as Le Manège enchanté in 1964, and the BBC didn’t buy it straight away because, well, to be honest they didn’t have a Scooby Doo what it was all about. It was only its popularity on French TV that persuaded them to screen it, with English narration provided by Eric Thompson, an English actor, scriptwriter and stage director married to actress Phyllida Law. His daughter Emma Thompson is still quite well known these days.

The Oscar-winning actress later recalled of her father, “When the BBC asked him to write The Magic Roundabout they lent him a machine with a tiny screen which he used to work with his feet.

He watched the pictures without sound and wrote the script with a pencil and pad balanced on his knees. The stories had originally been written in French, but he didn’t much like the French, so he changed it all - even the names, like Ermintrude the cow, who was inspired by his wife!”