While Camberwick Green and Trumpton are widely-quoted cornerstones of any self-respecting conversation about old children's television, it's difficult enough to find anyone who remembers Chigley with a sufficient degree of certainty to be able to say which characters were in which. When it comes to Rubovia, you might as well not bother even asking them. In fact, it's not unusual to find yourself being accused of just having made it up.
It wasn’t made
up, though, and in fact this wasn’t actually the first that viewers had seen of
the magical medieval kingdom. In the late fifties and
early sixties, Rubovia was a regular fixture at Saturday teatimes on the BBC,
as a series of comic plays presented by the BBC Puppet Theatre. Rubovia creator
Gordon Murray then moved into both independent production and stop-motion
animation, and spent the rest of the decade working on the three shows set in the fictional yet very believable county of ‘Trumptonshire’.
The BBC would continue repeating Camberwick Green, Trumpton and Chigley well into the eighties; Murray was keen to continue making new shows, however, and after a couple of false starts he was commissioned by the BBC in 1975 to produce a remake of Rubovia in his distinctive and now familiar animation style.
King Rufus XIV
and Queen Caroline were the reigning monarchs of this decidedly offbeat kingdom, aided and abetted
by the put-upon Lord Chamberlain, Farmer Bottle, Rubina the
cat, Caroline’s pampered pet dragon Pongo, MacGregor the Chinese
Native American 'businessman', card game-loving neighbouring monarch King
Boris of Borsovia, and court magician - in addition to practically every other job
title he could affix his name to - Albert Weatherspoon, whose utter ineptitude with
all things sorcery-related was invariably the cause of whatever odd happenings
with exploding wine and levitating noblemen were perplexing everyone that week. Brian Cant, who had narrated the earlier
'Trumptonshire' shows, was not available to resume his duties for Rubovia; the character voices were handled instead by
Roy Skelton - who had contributed to the earlier Rubovia plays - with narration provided
by Gordon Murray himself, and music from Murray’s longtime associate
Freddie Phillips.
Although Rubovia was exactly the sort of wacky surrealist stop-motion quasi-sitcom that all of this suggests, the BBC - for reasons best known to themselves - decided to air it in the lunchtime Watch With Mother timeslot aimed at pre-school viewers. Gordon Murray, who had intended it for the afternoon children’s schedules and a slightly older audience, was surprised at this and felt it was too sophisticated and dialogue-heavy for the Watch With Mother audience; the fact that it never really caught on and disappeared after only a couple of repeat runs would seem to suggest he was correct. Murray's subsequent shows, the equally if not even more humorous Skip & Fuffy and The Gublins, would find a far more suitable home as inserts in Noel Edmonds’ Multicoloured Swap Shop.
Surprisingly, despite its latterday obscurity, there was a large amount of Rubovia merchandise available at the time - including books, a record, jigsaws, a board game, a plasticine modelling set, and a strip in Pippin In Playland comic that ran into the early eighties - but even that wasn’t quite enough to prevent it from becoming the ‘forgotten’ fourth show, and little more than a troubling hazy memory for people who can’t quite work out how a dragon would have fitted in to Trumpton.
Although Rubovia was exactly the sort of wacky surrealist stop-motion quasi-sitcom that all of this suggests, the BBC - for reasons best known to themselves - decided to air it in the lunchtime Watch With Mother timeslot aimed at pre-school viewers. Gordon Murray, who had intended it for the afternoon children’s schedules and a slightly older audience, was surprised at this and felt it was too sophisticated and dialogue-heavy for the Watch With Mother audience; the fact that it never really caught on and disappeared after only a couple of repeat runs would seem to suggest he was correct. Murray's subsequent shows, the equally if not even more humorous Skip & Fuffy and The Gublins, would find a far more suitable home as inserts in Noel Edmonds’ Multicoloured Swap Shop.
Surprisingly, despite its latterday obscurity, there was a large amount of Rubovia merchandise available at the time - including books, a record, jigsaws, a board game, a plasticine modelling set, and a strip in Pippin In Playland comic that ran into the early eighties - but even that wasn’t quite enough to prevent it from becoming the ‘forgotten’ fourth show, and little more than a troubling hazy memory for people who can’t quite work out how a dragon would have fitted in to Trumpton.
