Trumpton

The action takes place in the fictional English town of Trumpton, a short distance from the equally fictional village of Camberwick Green, the focus of the first series in the Trumptonshire Trilogy. Each episode begins with a shot of Trumpton Town Hall clock:

"Here is the clock, the Trumpton clock. Telling the time, steadily, sensibly; never too quickly, never too slowly. Telling the time for Trumpton".[1]

The townsfolk then appear going about their daily business: examples include the unnamed Mayor, Mr Troop the town clerk, Chippy Minton the carpenter and his apprentice son Nibs, Mrs Cobbit the florist, Miss Lovelace the milliner and her trio of Pekingese dogs (Mitzi, Daphne and Lulu), Mr Clamp the greengrocer, Mr Munnings the printer, and Mr Platt the clockmaker.

Although most of the characters and settings are new, the style of the programme follows the pattern established by Camberwick Green (from which a few characters make an appearance in Trumpton also), in which domestic problems are cheerfully resolved by the end of the show, leaving the last minute or so for the fire brigade to become the town band and play the episode out.

The fire brigade is perhaps Trumpton's most-recognised feature. Captain Flack's roll-call was recited in all but one episode:

"Pugh, Pugh, Barney McGrew, Cuthbert, Dibble, Grubb."

Puppeteer Gordon Murray explained that "Pugh and Pugh are twins you must understand – not Hugh, Pugh".[2] In the episode "Cuthbert's Morning Off",[3] Cuthbert's name is omitted (due to his absence). They are continually being called out to attend some emergency or other (in many cases to resolve fairly trivial matters), but to Captain Flack's annoyance never an actual fire. The main reason for this was the difficulty of animating fire, water, and smoke,[4] although a naked flame was successfully animated in episode 8, for the abortive lighting of a bonfire. Nonetheless, after "Right men, action stations!", the fire brigade often absent-mindedly deployed the fire hose and were quickly halted by Captain Flack ("No, no! Not the hose!").

Writer Gordon Murray said that the communities of the series are "representative of real locations which are one-and-a-half miles from each other in an equidistant triangle", but declined to name them for fear of the area being "inundated with tourists".[5]

Episode titles were given in Radio Times but were not shown on screen.

In 2011, BBC Studios and Post Production digitally restored all 39 episodes of the Trumptonshire trilogy (Camberwick Green, Trumpton and Chigley) after William Mollett, son-in-law of the creator Gordon Murray, found some original footage in an attic. He then approached the BBC to see if it could track down the missing 40‐year‐old original footage, which was eventually traced to the BBC broadcast archive (now in Perivale, west London) but it soon became very clear that its age meant that restoration would be a difficult and delicate task. Murray and Mollett enlisted the expertise of BBC Studios and Post Production, which cleaned, scanned and digitally restored the film footage frame by frame.[6][7]

• In 1986, the English indie band Half Man Half Biscuit released an EP, The Trumpton Riots, whose title track describes an insurrection on the streets of Trumpton.[8]
• Half Man Half Biscuit also referenced Trumpton on the song "Time Flies By When You're the Driver of a Train", a parody of the "Train Song" from sister programme Chigley, on the album Back in the DHSS. The lyrics of the parody cite such things as drug use and football hooliganism.
• In 1987, a sketch named "Trumpton Raid" appeared in Alas Smith and Jones's series four. Smith is a news reader on the telephone to Jones (as "Mike Airey" Live from Trumpton) reporting on an early morning raid by American F-111 aircraft on Trumpton.
• In the UK in the early 1990s there were several dance music tracks based on children's TV programmes or short educational films. The Prodigy released the track "Charly" in 1991 which was then promptly followed in 1992 by "Sesame's Treet" by the Smart E's and "A Trip To Trumpton" by Urban Hype,[9] which was based on the original Trumpton music by Freddie Phillips with heavy use of Trumpton samples.
• Aired 20 April 2007, in the second episode of season four 'Conference', Peep Show's Alan Johnson addresses the Project Zeus team and rhetorically posits as to whether 'the inventors of google sat around watching Trumpton'.
• At the 2007 Edinburgh Fringe, Phill Jupitus and Brian Cant presented Trumptonshire Tales. The format consisted of Jupitus interviewing Cant and introducing clips from the series.
• In 2009 Chippy Minton appeared in "The Official BBC Children in Need Medley" music video; he appears at the end of the video and is told by Big Chris from Roary the Racing Car that they have just finished. Miss Lovelace and Windy Miller also appear in the video.
• In its explanation of the fiscal multiplier, the BBC radio programme More or Less used the Trumpton economy as a model. Notably, firefighter Dibble was laid off due to the financial crisis. (8 April 2011)
• In September 2014, a spoof Twitter account @Trumpton_UKIP was created to parody the accounts of UKIP branches. Initially, the account received little notice: however, several weeks later, during a period when the party had been warning members to be aware of possible fake accounts designed to discredit them,[10] UKIP MEP David Coburn encouraged his own Twitter followers to report the spoof account as a fake, leading to widespread media coverage.[11][12]
• The music video for Radiohead's 2016 single "Burn the Witch" is an animation in the style of Bob Bura and John Hardwick which "crosses Trumpton and The Wicker Man".[13]
• In December 2016 after Donald Trump won the U.S. presidential election, Huffington Post created a parody video imagining what Trumpton would be like with Trump as the mayor. Original scenes were re-used with a dubbed imitation of Cant narrating satirical lines instead. The famous opening lines are changed to "Here is the clock, the Trumpton clock; telling the time, time to make Trumpton great again – yes, it's time to drain the swamp!" The video satirises various controversies of Trump's election campaign such as proposals to bar entry to Muslims and to build a border wall with Mexico (figuratively represented by Chigley), allegations of sexual assaults on women, and admiration for President Vladimir Putin.[14]

In 1984, 17 years after the broadcasts on BBC in 1967. Longman Video released eight of the episodes on video as part of its Children's Treasury collection. There were two releases, each containing four episodes

later in 1989 the BBC released a video with the last three episodes (including ep13 The Greenhouse as the first episode, ep11 The Plumber as the second episode and ep12 Pigeons as last episode).

Then, in 1996–1997 Telstar Video Entertainment as part of its 'Star Kids' range released two videos.

In 2002 a three DVD set entitled The Complete Collection was issued by Telstar Video Entertainment Limited (TDVD9033). It featured one disc each of Trumpton, Camberwick Green and Chigley, each disc having all 13 episodes of the respective series.

• Music: Freddie Phillips
• Narrator: Brian Cant
• Script: Alison Prince
• Sets: Andrew & Margaret Brownfoot
• Animation: Bob Bura, John Hardwick
• Assisted by: Colin Large, Lisa Palace, Pasquale Ferrari
• Devised & Produced by Gordon Murray Puppets Ltd 1967.

Notes

Citations

• Camberwick Green, Trumpton and Chigley
• Urban Hype: A Trip To Trumpton
• Trumpton at IMDb