The surprisingly turbulent history of Sooty

Read more on telegraph.co.uk

When Richard Cadell was a little boy he had a set of Sooty and Sweep glove puppets. “My mum made me a puppet booth out of a clothes horse and I would waggle the puppets for whoever cared to watch,” he says. Fifty years later, he’s still waggling them, only now he does it professionally, on stage and television.

The yellow bear and his friends are celebrating seven decades in showbusiness this year and, in many ways, they are bigger than ever. The Sooty show, presented by Cadell, is still shown every day on ITVBe. The gang – Sooty, Sweep and the panda Soo – perform live up and down the country. And this summer sees the opening of Sooty Land, a multi-ride attraction at Crealy Theme Park in Exeter. As well as outdoor rides and various indoor activities, the venue will feature a museum full of sets and props from the TV series, including Sooty’s bedroom, bathroom and campervan.

The appeal of the mischievous bear to today’s children is exactly the same as it was to Cadell as a six-year-old, the presenter reckons. “They know it’s a glove puppet, but they don’t care,” he says. “They totally buy into it, because they can go out into the foyer or a toy shop and buy a puppet that looks identical to mine and do the same stuff. They also know that when Sooty squirts you with a water pistol you’re really squirting yourself and that somehow makes it funnier.”

Cadell, 54, is only Sooty’s third handler in the character’s 70-year television career (a landmark that makes it the longest running children show in the world). He took over from Matthew Corbett, the son of Sooty’s creator, Harry Corbett, in 1999.

The original Sooty was one of a small batch of teddy bears made from a fabric remnant just after the Second World War and sold in Paul Clive’s joke shop on Blackpool’s North Pier. He was bought for 7s 6d by Harry Corbett to amuse his sons during a rainy holiday in the resort, in July, 1948.

That’s the legend, anyway. According to Cadell, who bought the global rights for the Sooty brand with his brother, David, in 2008, for a sum reportedly close to £1m, Corbett had plans to put Sooty to work right from the off. “I met the shop assistant who professed to have sold Sooty to Harry – a man called Bill Lamb, who passed away recently – and he said Harry bought two of them. So I think he was already planning to use them in his magic act.”

Corbett (nephew of chip shop magnate Harry Ramsden – a connection referenced in the name of Sooty’s cousin Scampi) was an electrical engineer by day and performed at children’s parties at weekends. He made his television debut on the BBC programme Talent Night, where his puppet – at that point called Teddy – appeared with new, black ears to stand out on black-and-white screens. The ears, created by Corbett’s wife Marjorie using coal dust from their fireplace, also gave Teddy his new name when Marjorie remarked: “Oh, he looks a bit sooty.” 

After winning Talent Night in 1952, Sooty became a regular on the children’s show Saturday Special before getting his own programme, replacing Muffin the Mule, in 1955. Before long, Corbett was driving him around in a Bentley thanks to lucrative merchandise deals. “There’s a copy of the Radio Times from 1958 in which every single advert had a product endorsed by Sooty,” says Brenda Longman, who has voiced Sooty’s pal Soo, a panda, for the past 40 years. “Even pipe smoking!” Cadell laughs.

Sooty has also done his bit for charity. Since the Fifties, he’s raised more than £11 million for the Royal National Institute of Blind People, through Sooty-shaped collection boxes on shop counters around the country. 

In 1957 Sooty was joined by Sweep, a sausage-mad dog whose high-pitched squeak was performed by Harry’s brother Leslie, using a trombone reed. Soo completed the gang in 1964, originally voiced by Marjorie.

Typical routines revolved around Sooty performing magic tricks (with his catchphrase “Izzy-wizzy, let’s get busy!”) or scenarios that a child would recognise: bathtime, bedtime, cake-making. Whatever happened, it quickly descended into slapstick chaos with Corbett (the ostensible adult in charge of three unruly children) ending up soaked with water or covered in cake-mix. “I still do some of Harry’s routines virtually verbatim,” says Cadell. “I get great satisfaction from seeing children react to them exactly as they did 70 years ago.”

When Corbett suffered a debilitating heart attack on Christmas Eve, 1975, he passed presenting duties to his son, Matthew, who had begun his TV career on Rainbow.

Matthew took a more physical role in Sooty’s slapstick antics and changed the TV show to a sitcom format. In different series, the gang were based in either a suburban house or a bric-a-brac shop. He also recruited Brenda Longman as Soo, because he didn’t want to tell his mother what to do.

“I actually can’t remember what it was like to not be the voice of Soo,” says Longman. “It’s an honour to be part of something that one absolutely adored watching in black-and-white as a child. On some of the shoots I used to have to take a fortnight off afterwards because I’d laughed so much that I suffered from physical exhaustion.”

Brian Sandford is another old hand – no pun intended. Having thought he’d add a couple of years of puppetry to his C.V. in the 1980s, he still operates Sweep today.

Sandford, Longman and Cadell have such a comfortable comedic bond that even an interview comes to resemble a Sooty episode.

“Life under the counter can be rather frenetic,” Sandford says. “I get covered in baked beans, flour, water…”

“Wasn’t it true,” Cadell cuts in, “that if you made a mistake Matthew would give you a little boot?”

“You’d get a cuff!” Longman chips in. “Understandably, when time is money and you’re all concentrating.”

“It is true,” Sandford continues, “as you well know, Richard, because you give me a kick sometimes!”

“There’s the exclusive!” Cadell chortles. “We’ve never admitted that before!” 

“I was abused!” Longman laughs.

Soo caused controversy in a 1994 episode by pretending to be pregnant, with cravings and morning sickness. “It was an odd episode,” Longman admits, “But Matthew’s great fount of material was his children and he tended to echo what was going on in their lives. His daughter saw the mums with their bumps at the school gates and put a cushion up her dress, pretending to be pregnant. That’s where he got the idea.”

Cadell made his first appearance on The Sooty Show as a 15-year-old guest performer when he was named Young Magician of the Year by the Magic Circle. He forged lifelong friendships with the team and when Matthew, who is now 74, hung up his gloves in 1999, he suggested Cadell as his replacement.

As a magician, Cadell brings large-scale illusions to Sooty’s stage show, including a flying car in which an audience member can take flight with Sooty. “I think the audience come expecting to see a preschool kids show and come away with a little bit more than they expected,” he says. 

Although not as aggressive as Rod Hull’s Emu, Sooty has wreaked some real life havoc. He squirted Prince Phillip with a water pistol and hospitalised Paul Daniels with a flying pizza that caught the magician in the eye. “I was mortified, because Paul was my hero,” says Cadell. “But Debbie McGee is one of my closest friends and we do laugh about it, because it generated so much publicity that Paul’s theatre show sold out continually for the next few months.” 

Sooty also once whacked Cadell over the head with a frying pan, drawing blood. Although, as he says, “I’ve only got myself to blame. I can’t blame Sooty, can I?”

Over the years, there have been several attempts to meddle with the Sooty formula, but he’s always been saved by those who loved him. In 1968, the BBC wanted to replace the ageing Harry Corbett with a young, female presenter. An outraged Corbett took the show to ITV, where it was revitalised with a bigger budget. Then, in the 1990s, Matthew Corbett sold the rights to Bridge Films, a company owned by HiT Entertainment, the owners of Bob the Builder and Thomas the Tank Engine, and, under their stewardship, the TV show lost viewers and was eventually axed. 

“It became almost a school lesson with not a single joke in the damn thing, and ITV said, ‘Kids aren’t watching it like they used to.’ It was a terribly sad day for Sooty,” says Cadell. “So when [Bridge Films] announced that they were selling the rights, I said to my brother, ‘Let’s buy this. All we’ve got to do is flip it back to how it was before they changed it.’”

To raise the nearly £1 million purchase price, the Cadells mortgaged the seaside funfair that they had spent 25 years building at Brean Leisure Park in Somerset. They then spent more of their own money making a 50-minute pilot episode in which Sooty and his friends enjoy a day out at Brean. ITV loved it and commissioned a 26-part series, the first of several, starting in 2011, in which the characters were based at the leisure park, dubbed Slater’s Holiday Park within the show.

“Harry Corbett was Sooty’s dad,” says Cadell, “But I feel like I’m his protector. Would he be around if I hadn’t stepped in? I don’t think he would.”

Cadell runs the Sooty franchise like the cottage industry that it was in Harry Corbett’s time.

“Matthew told me it was a family business, run around the kitchen table, and it needs that approach,” he says.

“You can’t run it by committee,” Sandford agrees.

Celebrity fans include Bee Gee Barry Gibb, who took a Sooty mascot onstage at a Royal Variety Performance, while George Harrison summed up Sooty’s appeal to grown-ups in his foreword to Geoff Tibballs’ book, The Secret Life of Sooty: “Sooty symbolises the speed at which I wish the world was still turning.”

“That’s absolutely one of the key things,” Cadell agrees. “Particularly in the last couple of years that we’ve all been living through. George wrote that 25 years ago and it’s still on the button.”

In an era of fragmented viewing habits, Cadell sees the new Sooty Land attraction at Crealy as a way of maintaining the character’s visibility in an increasingly distracted world. “I want to find a way for Sooty to survive forever,” he says.

Sooty Land opens on May 28 at Crealy Theme Park and Resort, Exeter crealy.co.uk/sootyland