Rainbow, but not rainbow

‪We all remember the kids show Rainbow right? 🌈 ‬
‪Zippy, George and Bungle the bear... ‬but what’s this?

From 1996 Mole in the Hole, featuring Geoffrey but George has become a cat, Zippy a dog and Bungle a mole.



I appreciate Thames, maker of Rainbow, had lost its franchise by then but this show seemingly has nothing to do with Thames, except for Geoffrey and the puppet voices and maybe the puppeteers!

Just curious how this came about, and presumably just different enough as to not breach any copyright?

That was a GMTV original commission, basically Rainbow on a budget of about 20p. GMTV commissioned any old crap at that point as they were basically near the end of morphing back into TV-am in all but name.

Didn't do much for Geoffrey Hayes, who had spent the best part of 20 years on Rainbow and had unfortunately become typecast. Worked stacking shelves in a supermarket somewhere, then drove a taxi and then "retired", ultimately succumbing to pneumonia about 18 months ago.

Interesting find!

This was a GMTV show which had a slot (in this example) on Saturday mornings at 0610 after the news
https://www.radiodiscussions.com/showthread.php?635110-Retro-Yorkshire-North-East-England-Sat-Oct-18-1997&s=88506d72fb2f91fbf9c88be13b8e92e3

It’s the sort of thing that would have filled GMTV2’s airtime ad nauseum too (GMTV also held the 060l-0925 hours on itv2 for a long time).

Quite clearly a Rainbow rip off but I doubt Thames would have been bothered to do anything about it, given they were no longer a franchise holder, and Rainbow will have had limited sales appeal to anyone else by then etc.

It’s possible that some of the Rainbow crew and production team would have worked on it.

AMG Television who are credited as producing the programme for GMTV appear to have disappeared.

This show has cropped up on discussion here once before:
https://tvforum.uk/tvhome/childrens-tv-43822/page-8

It was insane that Rainbow didn't keep going with its famous cast. It must have been a cheap programme to make and had several successful tie-ins such as Rainbow comic (which kept going for a while), books and videos.

It was just a TV label of Artist Management Group which represented loads of children's entertainers (and more) around that time. AMG used to co-produce various productions that involved their acts such as The Chuckle Brothers series To Me To You, and many, many pantomimes up and down the country. Presumably Geoffrey & co were also on its books.

They did briefly revive it, but that didn't last long.

Though it wouldn't have lasted for long in that format, it was beginning to look old hat in 1992. I doubt the presenters would have lasted much longer either. However it would have been a more gradual change than the introduction of Rainbow Days was

Yes, it had been on air for twenty years when it ended, and a few years earlier Play School, an even more cherished pre-school show which also had a huge legacy, had ended after 24 years, so it probably wouldn't have lasted much longer. Of course, a lot of Thames shows continued after they lost their franchise, but Carlton presumably wanted to launch their own shows as well and there were only a few pre-school slots to go around.

I'd have been surprised if Rainbow had carried on in its original format after 1992, in fact I dare say by the end of 1992 it was pretty much repeats and the last "new" programme I believe went out earlier the same year.

You could have probably picked any episode from the "classic" era, ie Geoffrey and Rod, Jane and Freddy and aired them randomly from any series or year and you would be hard pushed to notice, as it all looked the same from one end of the 1980s to the others. In fact after R, J and F left in 1989 the show could never be the same again.

Rod Jane and Freddy weren't on it for the last few years?

I forgot this existed, my main memory of Rainbow post 1992 was the woeful Rainbow Days which Geoffrey was not part of. I believe this was made by Tetra Films that was formed after Thames lost their franchise, which I believe was set up by the former controller of children’s programmes at Thames.

However the regular Thames show that carried on as normal that I can think of was Mike And Angelo. Rainbow disappeared and Sooty went to Granada via Sooty Films. But certainly Tetra Films did produce a number of shows in the 1990’s.

Yes, Tetra Films was pretty much the old Thames kids department spun off into an indie, and hence they continued making Mike and Angelo and produced various other shows, normally the productions of Lee Pressman and Grant Cathro whose work I used to really dislike as a kid. As you say, Sooty went off to Granada.