Hee-re comes the Wagon!

The wanderly, wanderly Wagon! Here comes the Wagon!

No prizes for guessing what we've been watching recently. Yep, that classic of Irish childhood, Wanderly Wagon. The Small Child adores it. Needless to say, Himself, who was reared on it, does too. I suspect that Uncle Skinny, who gave it to the Small Child, had his big bro in mind when he bought it. I must say, it's even grown on me.

Vintage 1970s, it has sets similar to the wobbly ones beloved of Doctor Who. There is cutting edge 70s computer technology, and a bunch of puppets, of whom Sneaky Snake (or Snicky Snek, as the Small Child used to call him) is the household favourite.

And it has Frank Kelly, aka Father Jack. Apparently he ad-libbed the majority of his lines in the show. This led to such memorable lines as "Doctor Who? Nein, Doctor Who ist BBC! Dr Astro ist RTE!"

But possibly the item I love most in this show is Dr Astro's time travel machine, which runs on runny custard. Blue runny custard, topped up with popcorn. A triumph of the clearance sales in whichever was the closest department store to Donnybrook, I recently counted the following components:

A tea strainer
A number of wooden spoons
A wire frame milk bottle holder with milk bottle and dial showing how many bottle were required the following day
Quite a number of vegetable peelers
An equal amount of spoons
A collection of orange glass canisters and bowls, all self illuminated via standard electric globes
A vegetable basket
A cutlery holder
A funnel
A lot of pegs
A dustpan brush
A wine rack

Truly, they don't make TV like that any more.