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.
