If you’re a person of a certain age – and by that I mean somewhere around the precipice of middle age – then there’s no doubt you’ll remember Rainbow: the bright, colourful, quasi-educational TV show for young ‘uns that ran – in some form or another – from the late 1970s to the early 1990s.

The star of the show is Geoffrey, an adult man who lives with a menagerie of bizarre and terrifying creatures in a house decorated to look like a children’s nursery. His bunk-mates are Bungle, a seven-foot ursine version of Norman Bates, who spends the day naked but always insists upon pyjamas for bed; George, a sexually-precocious, passive-aggressive pink hippo, whose smug, sleepy drawl suggests that whomever he’s speaking to is both the butt of a private joke, and the intended recipient of twelve sleeping tablets and a sore arse later that evening; and Zippy, the kind of puzzling ‘whatever’ that even Gonzo would shun for being too freakish.

And Gonzo has a nose like a big blue cock!

Seriously, though, how exactly did Geoffrey come to live with these creatures? Did he abduct them? Did he create them with a needle and thread, a bucket of DNA and a set of jump leads? Doesn’t he have a wife, or an ex-wife or something? A family? Someone in his life to raise an eyebrow at his incredibly creepy lifestyle that appears to be a strange blend of Dr Moreau, Hugh Hefner and Jimmy Savile?

Doesn’t the gas man at least come round now and again to read the meter?

“Hello, sir, I’m just here to check your meter to make sure that… AARRGGHH! WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT THING? THE THING WITH THE ZIP FACE?!! OH HELP ME! OH GOD HELP ME! PLEASE DON’T HURT ME, I WON’T TELL, I PROMISE I WON’T! THE POWER OF CHRIST COMPELS YOU! THE POWER OF CHRIST COMPELS YOU!”

I’d be very interested to see how Geoffrey fills out his census.

“I live with a depressed bear, a pansexual hippo and a creature who crawled out of Tobe Hooper’s darkest nightmares, honest I do, I’m not fucking mental or anything. PS: sorry I wrote this in blood, I ran out of pens.”

Occasionally Geoffrey’s friends Rod, Jane and Freddy come round to sing songs about abstract things like the concept of sharing, something they’re all too familiar with, given that Jane fucked both Rod and Freddy in real life and let’s be honest probably fucked Geoffrey and Bungle, too. Jane practically invented the whole ‘furries’ thing.

Now let’s talk Zippy. What the fuck is he? Was he born with that zip across his mouth, or was he cruelly disfigured in the course of some vile experiment? I’m imagining an origin story along the lines of ‘The Human Centizippy’, in which the poor creature is forced to spend long, hideous weeks with his mouth secured by zip to Big Bird’s quaking bumhole. Perhaps as Mopatop sobs into Zippy’s back-end through a wet strap of velcro.

However it was that Zippy’s zip came to be, why would any sane and compassionate man ever use it to silence him? “Hey, Geoffrey, why not just break a chair over Zippy’s head or shoot him in the shoulder if he starts mouthing off, you total psycho?” And if somebody did do that to Zippy – if some sick, pseudo-Nazi surgeon added a zip to his face without his consent – why would you compound his misery by continuing to call him Zippy? Surely you’d change his name at the earliest opportunity, call him James or Timothy or Geoffrey Junior or something?

If I adopted a mute kid who’d been rendered paraplegic following a hit and run incident, I wouldn’t greet him each morning with a cheery: “Hey Chairy, what do you want for breakfast?” before wheeling him down a hill for not answering quickly enough.

Never mind just changing his name: we have one of the greatest healthcare systems in the world. And it’s free! Why has Geoffrey never referred Zippy to the hospital for surgery? That, I’m sure, is what any one of us would do if Zippy were ever to land in our care. We’d help him. We’d fix his face and accompany him on his journey to reclaim his dignity. We probably wouldn’t look at him and say: “Cool zip you’ve got stitched through your face there, Zippy. That’ll be great for the times when I want you to shut the fuck up.”

The only scenario that makes sense is that the world of Rainbow exists only inside the mind of Geoffrey, who in reality is an unemployed alcoholic and heavy drug-user. He sits all day long in a dowdy, ply-panelled bedsit, with lank, greasy hair and no teeth, waiting for his social workers Rod, Jane and Freddy to come visit him. He rubs his arms raw and rocks back and forth crying in the corner, arguing with himself and alternating between his own voice and his dead mother’s harsh, disapproving tone: “Naughty Geoffrey, going to zip you up. Don’t zip me up momma, don’t zip ol’ Geoffrey up. Oh, I’m gonna zip you up, Geoffrey, no son of mine be lisping like some soft pink hippo. Gonna speak proper, gonna be a man or momma gonna skin you like a bear and zip you up, zip you right up in the mouth. OH NO, MOMMA, DON’T ZIP OL’ GEOFFREY UP, I LOVES YOU MORE’N THE RAINBOW, MOMMA! MORE’N THE RAINBOW! OH SON MOMMA GONNA ZIP YOU UP, ZIP YOU UP REAL TIGHT AND LEAVE YOU HANGING FROM THE CEILING, TILL YOU TURN GOOD AND BLUE AND LET THE RATS NIBBLE ON YOUR DEAD TOES.”

We know a song about that, don’t we, children?