A Lewd Children's Show
Thank you goes out to Penguicon's Roly Poly Tablehammer Shuffleball Pope, Clark Rodeffer, for bringing to my attention this link of a clip from the '70s-'80s children's show Rainbow. It brings to mind Warren Ellis' great comic book Transmetropolitan in which the "Sex Puppets" childrens show is broadcast to the decadent citizens of the future. According to the Rainbow Arch webpage:
This clip was actually broadcast and watched by millions. Almost too ridiculous to believe. These are taken from original Rainbow scripts and there's no way these could have been done by accident. Innuendo all the way.
Comments
cosette-valjean on Dec. 23, 2004 11:04 AM — Oh....my....god!!!
I can't believe children ever watched this. It is sooo obvious. Was there no sensorship in those days?????
ded-guy on Dec. 23, 2004 7:34 PM
Actually, it was produced as a joke and never broadcast (to children).
Here's a quick quote from a webpage (http://www.btinternet.com/~acbarrett/faq.htm) that google turned up.
We're often asked about the so called rude Rainbow, clips of which have been shown on the Channel Four programmes, TV Unzipped and TV Offal. The clip can now be found on the web, without too much effort. Although often introduced as the unaired pilot, this episode was actually specially made by the team at Thames Television. Geoffrey Hayes told us, "The VT department of each ITV company, every Christmas had a competition to enter all the outtakes from their particular companies programme out put, and see which ones were the funniest. But ours wasn't an outtake, we specially did it. It was specially scripted and we did it and I never saw it! We did it and Thames won it, but what they actually won, I don't know. But I never saw the video. I can't remember much about it except for Zippy with a banana." The script was written by the voice of Zippy and George; Roy Skelton.
A search for "TV Offal rainbow" turns up more discussion.
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