November 20, 2004

Children's TV show gone horrible wrong TV program "Rainbow" from the 70's and 80's...I cant even believe this is real.
posted by freeasharold 20 years ago
  • horribly* sigh.
  • 6000! w00t to FHA!
  • Just in case any sensitive souls are worried this actually aired...
    "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."
    From rainbow.web.com
  • I have that saved to CD - it's priceless.
  • children's tv gone horribly right.
  • Technically, this is a double post, but the original just shows a blank page.
  • And I used to watch that show when I was a kid, too. It went for years. Incidentally, Roy Skelton, the voice/puppeteer of the two weird things, was also the voice of the Daleks in Doctor Who throughout its original run, over a couple of decades, from memory. If you listen to Zippy, sometimes you can catch a hint of the famous Dalek intonation.
  • an echo of flashboy's comment ... watching the rainbow clip i thought that there was no way this was actually broadcast (i remember the show from the 1970s when i was a kid) ... too obvious and too short (the actual programme format was longer) ... it struck me as something that had cropped up on 'TV naughtiest blunder' style shows in the last few years, something the cast and crew did for a laugh ... rainbow did achieve something akin to cult status later in life though when it was discovered as 'comedown tv' for the chemical generation in the uk
  • That was plucking brilliant.