Terry’s Crackers?

Hello viewers, Max here.

Terry just sent me a copy of the latest part of his memoirs which I’m allowed to put right here on The Media Museum. He starts by recalling the joyous days of making fruity cop dramas, working with Germans and stuffing birds (or something like that…)

Here’s Terry -

Remember Blue Squad? Chances are you don’t. It was a short-lived straight-to-video show I worked on in the mid-eighties following the adventures of some rather tasty policewomen who investigated crimes of a saucy nature. Never had the phrase ‘here come the fuzz’ been more apt as each episode we’d feature yet another gratuitous shower scene.

This was far from The Wire or even The Bill. A typical episode would see the girls investigate such crimes as underwear theft or waggle-eyed fiends lacing the water supply with a high-power aphrodisiac. In fact anything that would segue into soft focus nudity or softcore coitus all set to a score by self-styled master of the erotic, Hans Liebmeister. Hans, known to his parents as Alan Foreman, couldn’t manage a word of anything other than English, but insisted in speaking in a cod-German accent. “I zink dat dees ist, how you say, der most sexual way of music mit der Kasio Keyboard.” Absolute nonsense but he was cheap and if you can find his album, Der Moistness, you’re in for a treat. It’s guaranteed, as the sticker says on the sleeve, to dampen any gusset.

Blue Squad didn’t last for long. It was fairly popular with a certain demographic but we encountered something of a cash flow problem. The production company’s assets were seized as the boss went off to spend time at Her Majesty’s Pleasure for his part in a cigarette smuggling racket that did the exchequer out of thousands of pounds worth of snout tax. Customs got their hands on almost everything including springloaded bras, oversized loofahs and a crotchless camel costume.

However, there was the odd thing that managed to escape their clutches. One of these was a puppet of a parrot that was at the dry cleaners at the time having some unspeakable stuff removed from its feathers. The parrot had been used for a particularly fun episode about an animal hypnotist with a passion for prank phone calls. Hans provided the voice of the parrot and it was the nearest the show got to a wider acclaim as years later Chris Tarrant showed a clip on his hilarious television show. Lord knows where he got a tape.

Anyway, I had a fake parrot that lived in my shed for two years until I got a call from Central TV. The poor quality of darts on the latest run of Bullseye meant that they had a bit of extra cash for programme making. And so I was asked to devise a sitcom to rival Allo Allo in quality, but at half the budget. Immediately my mind drifted to the parrot, probably because I’d taken the call from my shed and was a little woozy from gluing together a model Spitfire.

My plan from the beginning was to use the parrot as the central character. Voice actors are a lot cheaper than real ones and usually less demanding. It also gave me a chance to devise another black sheep or odd-one-out comedy. You may be familiar with the concept, wherein a strait laced suburban family is joined by a character such as the wise-cracking alien Alf in ALF, the cut-out communist Wolfie in Citizen Smith or the sex-pest Fonz in Happy Days. Out of these three traits I was most interested in the wise-cracking, having had enough of politics when I was thrown out of the Garrick for wearing a donkey jacket and being too disturbed by my brief tenure as an altar boy to even consider the Henry Winkler method.

I imagined a middle-class family sitting round the dinner table with a low cost Lynda Bellingham-equivalent serving up the Sunday roast. Everyone is making noises of approval until the parrot chimes in with ‘what no crackers?!’ much to the baying amusement of the studio audience. In fact, to spell it out for readers of the TV Times we named the show, ‘Crackers’ and for a moment in the early nineties I worried that Robbie Coltrane had nicked the idea. But, as I was to discover, his show had fewer laughs, and would actually have benefited from a bit of puppet tomfoolery.

The family was made up of parents, Margaret and Graham, and children, Jenny and Tim. Margaret was a house-proud mother and keen member of the local theatre group. Graham worked in an office, wore a bowler hat and often had to have the boss round to dinner, just like any other businessman. The kids were nondescript theatre school brats destined for a life of drugs and tabloid shame but for the brief time I knew them they were, well, they were tolerable.

Sitcom family in place it was time to slot in the parrot. I came at it from a variety of angles. One of the first names I chose was Loki, with the parrot as the reincarnation of the mischievous Norse god. I was amused by the idea of this once proud deity reduced to life as a pet. I wanted to explore Loki’s pathos, get deep below the feathers, figure out how he ticked, or squawked as it were, as he went about meddling in Margaret’s elaborate dinner party preparations. The idea was vetoed and dismissed as too highbrow for an ITV audience and, if I wanted to produce Bergman-esque explorations of the human condition with a parrot puppet, I could sod off to channel 4. I remained where I was and put aside my intellectual aspirations until the series of dramatic monologues I wrote and directed for Su Pollard’s run at the Key Theatre in Peterborough in 1994.

I had been touting around for a half-decent voice actor for the show when we ran into a spot of bother with the budget. Someone finally won the speedboat on Bullseye and the money was taken from our coffers to pay for it. I was forced to flick through the Rolodex and phone up Hans Liebmeister to reprise his role as the parrot. It did solve the problem of character, there was no way the bird could be say French or Australian, as Hans could only manage his decidedly dodgy German impression. He may have been cheap but this sniff of stardom set off the diva in him. He originally insisted that the parrot be named Hans and somehow be given the ability to play an electronic keyboard. After some negotiation we finally settled on Dieter as a name, and reduced the parrot’s musical ability to the occasional toot on a kazoo. You have to rein these people in or before you know it they’re demanding fresh flowers, puppies and tea and coffee making facilities for the dressing room.

We managed to finish four scripts and shoot the pilot. I’d even written a part for Babs in the third episode, with a view to making her a regular guest star and finally being able to afford a home sauna. Officially we were told that shooting had to stop on the show due to a spate of big wins not just on Bullseye but across Central’s formidable range of primetime quizzes. Unofficially, I knew that Hans was to blame. He’d been obsessed with Rod Hull’s appearances on various chat shows and somehow got the idea that people didn’t mind being groped by middle-aged men so long as there was a puppet attached to the groping hand. Whereas Rod, bless him, managed to get away with it for years, poor Hans got stuck on a list and I never heard from him again.

The parrot moved back into my shed, and Babs and I had to wait another three years before we could even begin work on our home sauna.