What's Up Doc? Was one of those bizarre shows that on reflection you wonder how it actually got made. And yet for a brief years or so it became the first ITV Saturday Morning Children's TV show to beat the BBC in the viewing figures.
A mixture of Warner Bros cartoon shows linked with a live broadcast magazine show format. But the studio component was distinctly different. 3 presenters (Andy Crane, Yvette Fielding and Pat Sharp) with a healthy amount of derision for and knowing glances towards the medium, sketches, puppets making playing fast and loose with in-jokes and double entendres, and a series of vaudeville level sub-grotesque and often just plain disturbing characters drifting in and out of the show. It suited younger kids for the slapstick and older ones for just how dark it was.
It's probably best know in for the two wolves (Bro and Bro) who were voiced and performed by John Ecclestone and Don Austen, and got their own CITV spin-off 'Wolf It'. The two would later reprise the same level of antics for the BBC as the two leprechauns on rival Saturday morning show Live & Kicking. But other puppet performers included members if the cast of Spitting Image, former Henson Company alumni, even the voice of Star Wars' Admiral Ackbar! Sketches were supplied by the likes of Frank Sidebottom (the Kate Chris Sievey) and a number of other actors creating some often very dark characters to fill the segments between shows. Anorak wearing Simon Perry, a trainspotter and cheese obsessive, with his creepy mate Colin. Perry's father, Professor Perry, whom it was inferred was actually a Nazi. Sam Sam, a hairdresser with a pumpkin for a head, who always turned up on screen accompanied by the tubular bells theme from The Exorcist. Men made of boxes. Disembodied mannequin heads. Piles of wool. Really odd stuff.
And then there was the nightmare inducing 'Mr Spanky'. Some kind of cross between a dandy and leather face from The Texas Chainsaw massacre, who wore waistcoats made of beef, and carried a small tortoise with him who judged as to whether the studio audience had been misbehaving. Those who had were then often drenched in 'Gheee', the vomit of said tortoise. Sprayed into the audience.
No. Really. This happened!
The show was really very successful for a season and a half. But it began it's life in Maidstone with TVS. And when TVS lost its ITV franchise it transferred into the hands of STV. STV were concerned that a number of complaints from parents over some of its darker vaudeville moments might scare Warner Bros into pulling out of the venture. The result was that after the Christmas break in the show's second season the show parted company with almost the entirety of the actors who supplied those characters. All that really remained was the puppets and the presenters. The show felt considerably hollow thereafter. It was forcibly moved up to STV's Glasgow studio for the 3rd and final run. But it was a shadow of its former self. Bro and Bro remained, but were given new voice actors. Yvette Fielding just disappeared one week, never to return. None of these changes were ever acknowledged let alone explained to the viewer.
STV just didn't get it. And from that day onwards it wasn't long for this world. A great shame. At its peak it was brilliant. A country mile ahead of the Beeb's fledgling Live and Kicking. But it was a formula too far tampered with. Diluted over many months. And it went out with a whimper rather than the bang it deserved.
