Denis Shaw Season: Two More Children's Shows

Next up this series of posts about shows in which actor Denis Shaw appeared, we have another two children's shows.

The Magnificent Six and 1/2: Kon-Tiki Kids

The Magnificent Six and 1/2 was a series of children's shorts made by the Children's Film Foundation. There are two reasons why the CFF's excellent programmes don't appear on here more frequently: one is that they don't seem to have been intended primarily for television and the other is that their copyright is zealously guarded so that pirated copies of their shows can be quite difficult to find on the internet, and I'm po white trash.

I see that the show was based on Our Gang, a series of short comedy films about a group of poor neighbourhood children, made as long ago as 1922 to 1944. Much of the point of Our Gang was to show children behaving naturally, which was very much carried over into the ethos of The Magnificent Six and 1/2, which was about a gang of children and their adventures.

In Kon-Tiki Kids Shaw plays an evil workman working on a canal lock gate, who tells the kids they can't cross the gate while he's working on it. Inspired by the adventure of the Kon-Tiki the kids make a raft to enable them to float across the canal. While they are doing this Shaw and his mate realise that they're going to need a boat to carry out their work on the lock gate, so when the kids arrive with their raft he confiscates it, gets on it in the water and of course it immeidately sinks.

Here Come the Double Deckers: Scooper Strikes Out

The huge success of The Magnificent Six and 1/2 in the cinema led its creators Harry Booth and Roy SImpson to make a similar show for TV, which they did in the shape of Here Come the Double Deckers. It was a transatlantic collaboration and in fact was broadcast in the US before being seen in the UK. It revolves around the adventures of another gang of children whose den was a double-decker London bus in a scrap yard.

Scooper Strikes Out is a rather more fantasy-based adventure than most of them, in which the character Scoopy gets knocked out by the ball while playing baseball and dreams he is in Alice in Wonderland. This magnificently means that the plot of the Alice in Wonderland takes place, with all its characters, in the world of the Double Deckers. Denis Shaw's role in limited to being one of the soldiers, but it is interesting to see him in a more - let's say 'morally neutral' - role than many of the roles in which he specialises in being sinister. It's also an indicator of versatility if the rudest man in London could be in an adaptation of Alice in Wonderland!

These two shows are worth watching in their own right, I think. Incidentally, while Here Come the Double Deckers has been released on region 2 DVD (currently going for about £55) I see that it's also had a French-language release in which it becomes L'Autobus à Impériale!

This blog is mirrored at

culttvblog.tumblr.com/archive (from September 2023) and culttvblog.substack.com (from January 2023 and where you can subscribe by email)

Archives from 2013 to September 2023 may be found at culttvblog.blogspot.com and there is an index to the tags used on the Tumblr version at https://www.tumblr.com/culttvblog/729194158177370112/this-blog