18 Watch With Mother : Chigley

First  watched  : 6  October  1969

As  I  said  at  the  start  I'm  pretty  sure  I  can  remember  Chigley  starting  as  a  new  series.

Chigley  was  the  final  and  by  far  the  least  regarded  instalment  of   the  Gordon  Murray  trinity. There's  not  much  of  it  on  youtube  and  it  rarely  crops  up  in  nostalgia  discussions. I'm  not  quite  sure  why  that's  so. One  possible  reason  is  that   it's  the  most  politically  dated. The  character  of  Lord  Belborough  summoning  the  workers  to  his  park  for  a  concert  and  zooming  around  on  his  private  railway  is  redolent  of  the  Pym  and  Prior  school  of  patriarchal  Toryism  soon  to  be  hit  into  the  long  grass  by  Margaret  Hilda.

Another  possible  reason  is  that  some  of  the  storylines  relied  on  guest  appearances  by  the  likes  of  Camberwick  Green's    Windy  Miller  or  the  Trumpton  fire  brigade  which  gave  Chigley  a  bottom  of  the  barrel  reputation. Murray  ( who's  still  alive  at  the  time  of  writing )  did  some  other  stuff  in  the  seventies  but  none  of  the  titles  ring  any  bells  and  he  moved  into  producing  miniature  books.

Looking  at  the  scanty  clips  now  what  strikes  me  is  how  much  the  animation  had  progressed  in  the  two  years  since  Trumpton . The  fire  brigade  in  the  latter  series  never  attended  a  fire  because  it  was  too  difficult  to  realise  but  here's  the  Chigley  train  puffing  out  smoke. The  puppets  have  a  much  greater  range  of  movement; there's  nothing  like  the  six  o  clock  exodus  of  the  biscuit  workers  in  either  of  the  prior  series.

I  liked  Chigley  best  because  of  the  prominence  of  the  train. Through  the  encouragement  of  my  dad,  railways  were  my  first "special  interest"  and  it's  not  entirely  evaporated  even  now.