Button Moon

I can safely say that Button Moon was my most favourite piece of children's television ever to have graced our great screens. All I remember from my childhood is sitting close to the TV and watching every single (short but worth it) episode and dreaming of flying off to my own big button in the sky... and it was all low budget too! forget your expensive production line 'toons that kids are entertained with nowadays, nothing beats a baked bean tin and the contents of your kitchen drawer! Even years later, I can still say it is incredibly entertaining, as while drunk at the beginning of my uni years myself and the guys next door lay giggling in my room watching the amusing vacuum cleaner and his "vvmmvvvmvvvvvm" speech, completely in hysterics at the wobbly jelly, our friends teddy, rag doll and lest not forget the army of bottles! Trippy as it was, button moon RULED - as it still does!

Yet another programme from my wasted youth, 'Button Moon' maintains a weird power all these years later. As with all the best kids' shows, 'Button Moon' was dedicated to helping its young audience's imaginations sprout from the normalities of everyday life. All the world was a potential playground. Thus, kitchen utensils become the restless Mr Spoon and his family, baked bean tins become spaceships, cardboard boxes become houses. All good staples of a healthy child's imaginative development.

However, this same approach helped give the show a very weird, very trippy atmosphere, ensuring it cult TV status years later. It looks as if it were literally filmed in a dustbin. Bananas fly through the sky with green bean wings; party dresses suffer from depression; umbrellas play golf. In one particularly inspired sequence, Mr Spoon, trapped on top of a squealing Royal Jelly, is rescued by a small army of gingerbread men wielding a ladder constructed from chocolate finger biscuits.

Ineffably English - check out the thinly disguised Heinz logo on the baked-bean tin spaceship, for instance, or the cockney troll in the 'Little Goats Gruff' episode - it features terrific narration by Robin Parkinson, and a theme tune that will haunt you till your dying day. 'Button Moon' is surely the pinnacle of early 1980s English children's psychedelic sci-fi puppetry weirdness.

The catchy theme tune ('We've been to Button Moon, we've followed Mr Spoon') was the work of Peter Davison and Sandra Dickinson. It set the scene, and wrapped up each 11 minute episode, of the tales of the Spoon Family and their journeys to the mysterious planet which looked, well, suspiciously like a button, where lived irritating characters such as the West Country voiced teddy.

Aimed at pre-schoolers it quickly gained a cult following amongst teenagers and students (as did many other series of the 1980s). It seems there were fewer episodes than I remember - rather like the legendary Mr Benn ...

i used to watch button moon all the time, even though it is a very cheaply run program,

and it was made from every day items like spoons etc it was still a good memory to hold, when i heard button moon the theme song today i got really happy and cheerfull because its something i haven't seen for like 10 years at least, if you do want to do something today or over the weekend please do me a favour, get me a copy of one episode of button moon so i can show my son please.

if you do i will be grateful to you.

(07gmitchell@tla.essex.sch.uk) send it to that address

lyrics for button moon....

(trust me i know the lyrics

What a fantastic show this was... I was such a fan as a toddler! I loved that theme tune and thought "I want to go to Button Moon!" Where lives the most annoying sounding doll! and a teddy bear that sounds like a west country cider drinker... POETRY in MOTION!!!