Kroft Original

My biggest fear as a kid was being ordinary. Every story involved a kid who people thought was ordinary, but he had some secret power or key to a hidden world. He could transform, become microscopic, converse with inanimate objects, jump somehow into a painting and interact with its inhabitants and have epic adventures, yet when he came back he'd only been gone half an hour. Gran, or Great Uncle Silas or someone (they never lived with their parents these kids - always some eccentric relative) would say, "Oh there you are! Been to the park have we?" without looking up, engrossed in a dusty encyclopedia, in a study with a table-globe and a parrot.

That's what I wanted. I needn't have worried, as kids we were anything but ordinary. Heriditary genetics had blessed us with crazy afro hair, in a Northern town with an ethnic population of zero. And there were five of us. My sister was the oldest, and being a girl, long curly hair was an advantage, but not so for four little lads in the 70s. We may as well have had targets on our backs. Plus we lived in what was arguably the roughest street in town - Raglan Street.
The kid next door was named 'Boo Boo'; that's how his parents addressed him! His mam would shout him in from the street, "Boo Boo! Get here! Your tea's ready!" His inexplicably conventionally-named younger brother Eddie was the archetypal weasely henchman, there to egg him on and revel in his beastly acts. Years later I picked up a local newspaper and there was Boo Boo looking out at me. He'd escaped from prison custody on a hospital visit and the public were being warned not to approach him.

Probably also to blame for my yearnings for special-ness were the Kroft Brothers - not some other local psychos, but creators of mindbending 60s kids' TV. HR Pufnstuf was their most famous show but they made some others; all involving the ordinary kid in the magical world.

Maybe it's not too late for me. I'm staring at this can of beer right now on the train and the ring-pull is a goatee-bearded wise cyclops beckoning me in. Suddenly I miniaturise and I'm whooshed down the hole to 'BeersVille'. I meet freaky animated characters like Mayor Froth, the Bubbles Bunch and the Hip Hop Hops (who do a rap every episode, Oompa Loompa style), who all live on Yeaster Island in the middle of the Golden Sea.
"He came from The Hole in the Sky! Maybe he can explain why our world keeps getting smaller with The Great Tippy Tippy Ness!" The Hip Hop Hops fire up on cue -
"Once there was darkness/ then there was light/ and the bubbling fizzyness raged all night/ 'til The Great Tippy Tippy Ness swept it away/ as The Hole in the Sky gets further away".
I don't know what to tell the little guys. A few swigs and it could all be over, we won't even make it to a second season, let alone a trilogy. There will be no Lord of the Ring Pulls.

Well it could be worse Mayor Froth. In a distant universe far far away, there's an abandoned half-drunk can at a student party with a cig-butt in it, whose inhabitants live on it, and fret about the steady loss of fizz. The rich live on the bouyant filter end, the less affluent on the white bit, and only a fool would venture towards the deadly strands...