Hector's House - Grumpy Old Hector and Catty Kiki and Zaza...

                             

6 September 1968: 'Before September is over these faces will be as well known to the under fives as James Bond, the Beatles and Sophia Loren are to the rest of the family...'

When I was a tot and an infant schooler, watching Hector's House during its original era, I assumed that Hector the dog and Zaza the cat were married. Somehow, they seemed to have that sort of relationship. But they weren't.

Zaza simply lived in Hector's house. 

I was quite shocked when I discovered the truth in the 1990s.

Mrs Kiki frog, from next door, was a Mrs but we never saw her husband.

Goodness knows what their backstory was.

Kiki was a very clever frog - she worked for the weather bureau in London.

I was watching in black and white (BBC1 didn't 'go' colour until 1969, and we couldn't afford a colour set for years), and Kiki's chic gingham outfit, with its retro pill box hat, looked very like the uniform worn by staff at a cafe near me. So, in my tiny little world of tot-dom, it seemed surprising that she didn't work there. It was only in more recent times that I discovered Kiki's outfit was pink. The staff at the local cafe wore blue.

Hector's House was, like the Magic Roundabout visuals, an import from France, but there was no Eric Thompson here to totally rewrite the characters and dialogue. I assume the English dialogue and characterisations for Hector's House were much closer to the French, but if you have further information I'd love to know!

Hector and his friends were not products of stop/start animation like the Roundabout, but glove puppets - which seemed very obvious at times as the arms of the puppeteers were often seen where there should have been legs. Still, there was much loving detail in both the puppets and the sets, and Kiki and Zaza, sashaying around the garden one night, singing about how superior they were to Hector, actually appeared to be holding real candles.

Health and Safety would have a blue fit these days, but never mind - we could now achieve the same affect with CGI.

Hector's house was thatched and set in a lovely garden.

As with the the residents of the Magic Garden, the folks around Hector's House didn't always get on. Kiki and Zaza seemed a little narcissistic, and out and out misandrists (or dogophobics) at times, and Hector could be a bumptious oaf and a hidebound grump of a hound.

Zaza and Hector enjoyed a good quarrel - they were, after all, cat and dog. Kiki could be distressed by this early on, but soon settled down into ganging up with Zaza against Hector as they extolled their own superior qualities - or 'blew their own trumpets' as we used to call it.

But it wasn't all aggro, and the series was quite a gentle and genteel affair, with Hector's chivalrous manners usually to the fore. When he wasn't being a 'grumpy old Hector', or a 'silly old Hector' or whatever!

Dear Mrs Kiki Frog used a ladder to peer over the wall into Hector's garden.

The first season of the show was broadcast on the BBC in September 1968. Other seasons soon followed, and the original run ended in January 1970. Then the series was repeated, on-and-off, in its pre-News time slot until 1975, when it was relegated to early morning broadcasts during the schools' long summer holidays, before returning to pre-News repeats later in the year and then being put to bed by Auntie Beeb. 

The coming of the video age in the 1980s saw the first Hector's House VHS release (in 1989) and I seem to remember the acid house/dance scene paying tribute to the show with a souped-up choon at some point.

In the 1990s, and beyond, daft people saw all sorts of meanings in the show which I'm convinced weren't really there. When retro-tripping 90s youngsters heard a character (I think it was Kiki) mention the word 'trip' the absurd shrieks of delight from modern day dead heads could be heard from here to Lands End.

The characters returned briefly to TV screens in a series of advertisements for a bank account at the turn of the 21st Century. The scenario was very much the same, but time had obviously moved on - and Kiki appeared to be the worse for drink in one of the ads.

Shocking!

Playland, 1969: a lovely cup of tea in the garden for Hector, Zaza and Kiki,

In the early 21st Century, Zaza wasn't Pope Gregory the Ninth or Simon Le Bon and it's doubtful that Kiki was Louis XIV, but she certainly WAS sozzled. How times change (sigh).

Watching a few of the original episodes recently, I experienced a great blast of nostalgia. The viewings were accompanied by memories of Gran's steak and kidney pud, my Mr Mix from Nesquik hand puppet, and my being terrified by Patrick Troughton's face in the time tunnel in the opening credits of Doctor Who,

And I felt very fond of the characters and their idyllic existence (apart from all the squabbles) in that lovely house and garden.

I'm a silly, sentimental old Hector fan...

But, of course, the Magic Roundabout was in a class of its own and nothing could compete.