- by Owen Morton
Okay. Everyone remembers Rainbow, probably largely because recently it seems to have had a revival. People are going round wearing Zippy T-shirts and there are cuddly toys available of both Zippy and George. (In my opinion, TV shows have cycles of popularity. Everything we watched when we were little seems to be returning. They haven’t quite got to the stage when they start re-airing all our old programmes, but I’m sure that if they did, people would watch. I certainly would. But then, maybe that’s because I’m a History student who doesn’t have anything better to do with his time.)
But anyway, even though everyone remembers Rainbow, I’d like to suggest that no one actually remembers what it was about. We can all picture Zippy and George – the strange orange beast with a zip for a mouth and the pink hippo respectively – and we remember Bungle, the man in the bear suit (who got arrested for road rage a couple of years ago – and I’m not making that up: the guy who played Bungle was picked up by the police for road rage! How funny is that?), and if we strain our minds hard enough, we can probably also remember what Geoffrey – the idiot who lived in a house with these three interesting characters – looked like. But if you ask anyone the plot of a Rainbow episode, I suspect you’d be met with blank silence (or perhaps you’d be met with a comment to the effect of, “You sad bastard, get a life”). I don’t actually know whether that’s true, because I haven’t tried asking anyone, on account of not wanting to be told to get a life more often than already happens, but I think it’s a fairly safe bet that that’s what would happen.
So how is it that something that has clearly exerted such a large cultural influence on us has become almost entirely forgotten? Why is it that we can remember the characters of this programme, but nothing that they did? Surely a programme that features a large bear, a pink hippo, a stupid man and a creature of indeterminate origin with a zip on its mouth all living together in a house would stick more faithfully in our memories? It sounds bizarre enough to be remembered.
The only conclusion I can come to is that Geoffrey, Bungle, Zippy and George engaged in completely boring activities, so dull that we all chose to forget them and instead concentrate on the exciting nature of the characters themselves. Instead of them doing stuff which would hold a child’s attention – you know, like foiling bank robbers and building space rockets and suchlike – they must have done terribly unexciting things like … like … I really don’t know like what, actually. I have vague recollections of the four of them doing nothing but standing round in the one room that their house seemed to consist of and talking to each other. Based on pure conjecture, most conversations would probably end with Zippy’s mouth being zipped shut. I can’t guarantee this, but I do remember that Zippy, when his mouth was open, talked an awful lot in a rather irritating voice. This would seem to imply that when the others got pissed off with him, they would only naturally zip his mouth shut. Plus this was a children’s show, and a character with a zip-shut mouth on such a show would be a frightful waste of resources if his mouth wasn’t zipped shut at least three times a minute. (Frankly, I wish some characters on adult TV shows had zip-shut mouths as well. The stupid man with stupid glasses from Bargain Hunt instantly springs to mind, as does the annoying man who presents Top of the Pops. And most of the people on Top of the Pops, come to think of it. And while we’re at it, I wish my next-door neighbours had zip-shut mouths, because they make a bloody racket. Actually, I don’t wish they had zip-shut mouths, because they’d never zip the mouths shut. I wish they didn’t have mouths at all. And I wish they would shut their bloody dog up as well. I wish the dog had no head.)
It’s probably time to finish this article now.