Tag Archives: 80s

The Madness of Greenclaws

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In the late 1980s children in the UK were introduced to the eponymous Greenclaws, a king-sized, waddling worm-beast, with – it probably won’t surprise you to discover – green skin and claws. Physically, he was a monstrous medley of Jabba the Hutt, the Azorbaloff from Doctor Who, and Penn Jillette; psychologically, he was a creepy co-mingling of Norman Bates and Alan Titchmarsh.

He lumbered around his house with the wide, unblinking eyes of a man who’d been pumped full of psychotropic chemicals and then forcibly mutated into a gigantic maggot as part of some failed government experiment. He wore dainty little SS-style spectacles, and dragged behind him both a ponytail and an actual tail, between which two points of protrusion sat enough body-fat to make a week’s worth of jumbo fry-ups for King Kong, and still have enough left over to sculpt a life-sized chess-set made entirely of saggy-titted, puffy-faced Piers Morgans.

Of course, Greenclaws wasn’t called Greenclaws simply because he was green and had claws; his name was also a monstery spin on ‘greenfingers’, the phrase we humans use to describe people with a love of plants and horticulture. That’s why greenclaws had a greenhouse and loved plants, see? Do you see? Do you understand? DOES IT MAKE SENSE TO YOU NOW? It’s layered, see. Oh, the layers. The exquisite layers. I can feel a dissertation coming on. Once I’ve finished my current thesis, of course. The world shouldn’t be made to wait any longer for my bold masterpiece: Jess and Feminism: Postman Pat and the Patriarchy’s Last Parcel.

Greenclaws lived in a cluttered house that looked as though a messy pensioner had lain dead in it for sixteen years. Appended to the house was a greenhouse, inside of which lived Greenclaws’ best pal, a robot owl called, I don’t know, owl-face or something. Owly? Mrs Owl? Owlma? Yes, Owlma, that was it. Pretty poor effort, if you ask me. I would’ve opted for something a bit funkier, like Owl-abama, Owling Wolf, or Owlmageddon. Or gone completely left-field and blended hip-hop and scat chat to bring the world ‘Owl Movement’, a rapping robot owl with a talent for free-style shitting. A wasted opportunity.

Most episodes began with Greenclaws getting excited about taking part in some human ritual or milestone – going on holiday, taking a trip to the supermarket, learning how to synthesise meth – and then not actually doing it, because doing it would entail going outside, which Greenclaws couldn’t do, presumably because he suffered from some description of serious anxiety disorder and agoraphobia. Or perhaps he couldn’t go outside because he was prohibited from leaving his property under the terms of a recent court order. That seems the most likely explanation, given that Greenclaws had the soft drawl of John Wayne Gacy and the same terrifying, bulging eyes as Ted-Bundy.

So instead of venturing out into the world, Greenclaws would recreate inside of his greenhouse whatever it was he’d been day-dreaming or fussing about at the start of the episode, usually with the help of some obscene plant he’d spent the episode growing inside of a magical tree, which he’d only be permitted to harvest if his robot owl was satisfied that he’d correctly answered three arbitrary general knowledge questions…. erm… It seems a bit crazy when I write it all down like that, doesn’t it? No wonder I’m so fucked up. Kids’ TV was an acid-trip back then, wasn’t it? A nightmare factory. Where was Paw Patrol when I needed it? A bunch of dogs driving police cars and recycling trucks seems positively normal when set against the bug-eyed, botany-based insanity of Greenclaws.

Greenclaws had a human pal called Iris, who was always dropping in to keep an eye on Greenclaws and… Wow, wow, wow. Back up. Wait a minute… Iris. Iris… Iris? An eye. Keeping an eye on him. Iris. The woman who teaches Greenclaws all about the real world; a teacher, so that makes Greenclaws her… pupil. Iris, eye, pupil…. Wow. I mean…

THAT MEANS GREENCLAWS WAS KEYSER SOZE ALL ALONG, RIGHT?!

See what I mean about layers? When I get around to writing this thesis it’s going to make my last paper, Mopatop’s Shop and the Rise of Capitalism in the Communist East, look like something Bodger scrawled in mashed potato with his dying hand.

Anyway, Iris certainly made you wish that you didn’t have any eyes. She was a walking showcase for every horrific fashion faux pas and wardrobe atrocity that was ever spat forth from the dying womb of the 1980s. Her look was more of a clothes-based virus than a style: imagine, if you will, an amorphous, multi-dimensional denim beast enveloping the Sixth Doctor Who’s legs, and then booting him into one of Gayle and Gillian Blakeney’s music videos.

Iris was guilty of the crime of being over-. ‘Over-what?’ you may ask. Over- everything, I say to you. She was over-board, over-enthusiastic, over-enunciating, and, if Greenclaws’ ample bosom was anything to go by, over-feeding. The big beast never left the house, so it figures that someone must’ve been helping him maintain his corpulent physique. Perhaps it’s not fair to lay the blame for Greenclaws’ poor diet squarely at Iris’s feet. That owl was a bit of a wrong ‘un, too, what with it constantly growing things lke beef-burger trees, cake plants, and the like. I guess everyone in that poor monster’s life wanted him dead.

It’s become something of a running joke for those of us who grew up watching children’s television in the 70s and 80s to say that the shows we so enjoyed and accepted as pure and innocent were actually, unbeknownst to us, swimming in sleazy subtext and scandalous filth. Thus, when we look back on them through adult eyes we see their true horror laid bare. This belief, however, is mostly apocryphal: Captain Pugwash didn’t have a crew composed entirely of double-entendres; that episode of Rainbow where Zippy peels a banana and makes a foreskin joke was only made to amuse the programme’s makers and was never actually broadcast. It’s our own developed brains that are the real perverts here. The kids’ shows were fine.

All that being said, Greenclaws is the clear exception to that rule, the dirty fat green bastard. What the hell was going on in that glasshouse of sin? For example, when Iris came round to visit she always asked Greenclaws to ‘plant one of his fabulous seeds in the secret groin place’. ARE YOU KIDDING ME, IRIS? Ah, you might counter, what she actually said was ‘secret growing place’, but I would counter your counter by saying, a) SILENCE! I HAVE SPOKEN! and b) even if she did say ‘secret growing place’… that’s just as bad! I’ve been a little unfair to Owlma in this article. I should’ve acknowledged the fact that the poor beast was witness to years of horrendous sexual abuse. I’m going to start a #meTooTooToToToo movement on her behalf.

Let’s talk Owlma, the owl who replies to every question with the answer ‘Doo Doo Doo-do Doo’. To be fair, every statement she makes is also ‘Doo Doo Doo-do Doo’. That’s literally all she’s able to say, like some backing singer from a 1980s pop group stuck in an infinite time loop.

‘Doo Doo Doo-do Doo’, however, can carry an infinite range of meanings, and be used to convey questions and statements of every length imaginable. When Owlma says ‘Doo Doo Doo-do Doo’ she could be saying ‘yes’, ‘no’, ‘this’, ‘that’, or ‘maybe’. But she could also be saying: ‘My agent got me THIS gig? I made it explicitly clear that I wanted to be in Rainbow. This weird, greenhouse-based bollocks is probably going to get cancelled after two seasons, leaving yours truly here up a tree without a hoot. And then what? Casualty? Coronation Street? I’m a fucking robot owl! I should’ve listened to dad and followed him into the accountancy firm. I’m finished. FINISHED!’

In the end, it’s probably best not to interpret Greenclaws literally, but to see it as the story of Iris, the care-worker for a fat drug addict, one day discovering his naked, unconscious body on the floor of the greenhouse following a bad trip, next to a tree with beef-burgers selotaped to it, and an owl nailed to one of the branches, hoo-ing in agony.

Rainbow: A Work of True Evil

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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?