No Strings

I've decided that I don't like puppets.  OK, I still quite like the ones on Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet (the proper sixties originals, not the more recent CGI versions), but other puppets - no.  This dislike has surfaced recently and I blame it on the growing number of TV commercials which seem to use puppets.  That bloody mobile phone network one with the irritating purple puppet thing which goes around telling everyone how 'it's going to be alright' was bad enough, (what the fuck is all that about anyway - why should some furry purple thing make me want to sign up to a particular network?).  But then they started that sodding hotel booking one with the puppet versions of the actors in it singing about the virtues of the service.  Maybe that's what I don't like - the singing.  Perhaps it is singing puppets that I don't like.  Thankfully neither the members of International Rescue nor Spectrum felt the need to burst into song whilst they were rescuing people or thwarting the latest Mysteron plan to subjugate earth, respectively.  The Muppets, on the other hand, were always bloody singing - and I was always pretty much lukewarm about them.

The more I think about it, the more I suspect that my sudden dislike for singing puppets could be post traumatic stress disorder, triggered by those TV commercials.  The trauma in question being my childhood exposure to Pinky and Perky.  For those of you fortunate enough never to have encountered this pair, they were puppet pigs that used to have their own children's TV show in which they performed cover versions of various pop songs of the day in horrible shrill voices.  They also had a whole supporting cast of animal puppets similarly performing contemporary pop numbers.  It was horrendous. I'm afraid that I just didn't see the point of it - unlike the puppets on Thunderbirds, they didn't do anything except bloody sing.  Badly. I'm sure that I've been scarred for life as a result of my exposure to them.  They were unaccountably highly popular, with spin off comic strips, annuals and the like.  Of course, my childhood exposure to them might well explain why I like bacon so much - perhaps I'm subconsciously eating the irritating little bastards every time I enjoy a toasted bacon sandwich...