Chigley [DVD] [1969]

With 9 hours of Camberwick Green, Trumpton and Chigley (all the episodes from each series) this is very good value. Obviously a 2 year old is not going to watch a marathon viewing of it but it provides lots of story variety rather than a video with four episodes on and is of slightly better quality to view than the video. Quite a memorable watch for mum too!

For beginners: Camberwick Green, Trumpton and Chigley were all made in the late 1960s and chronicled the doings of residents in three nearby settlements. They were made using puppets in stop-motion. Each series expanded on the characters and landscape of the previous one; coming to it again as an adult I'm surprised just how much interlock there is, with a lot of characters from one series cropping up in another. (Pretentiousness alert: you could compare them to the way Trollope interlocks his groups of characters in Barsetshire.) The time in which they are set is roughly that at which they were made, or perhaps an old-fashioned version of it, but in the same way that a child will play with a mixture of toys and not care that model cars are built to different scales or that a cowboy is defending a model castle, there are anachronisms: the boys at Pippin Fort military academy ride in an army lorry but wear 18th century grenadiers' outfits, complete with pigtail.

How well do they stand up today? Well, my five year old watched them with huge enjoyment, which has to be the best test of all. They are certainly of their time; you won't find black or disabled characters and attitudes to authority are pretty deferential. You're unlikely, however, to find anything that positively grates and the target group, infants of pre-school and reception age, will enjoy it.

What you get with this set of DVDs is the complete set of three series. Full marks for completeness; that is, however, all that you get. There are absolutely no extras (I for one wouldn't have minded just a little information on the people behind the names credited; the names Bura and Hardwick, in charge of photography, crop up in a lot of children's programmes from this era, and I'd like some background and maybe career highlights). More importantly, as previous reviewers have noted you get the films as they are now apparently dumped straight onto DVD with no attempt to clean them up or remove the wobble caused by old distorted film. It's something that one can live with, but it's not great. Also, the menu functionality is negligible: you can select the episode at which you start but from then on the disk will play continously (and start again once it reaches the end) so you only get to choose where in the cycle you start, not whether you want to play a specific episode only. Still less do you get to programme episodes to play in a certain order: an annoyance when one comes to the Chigley disk, since the first two episodes here are in reverse order.

Four stars - for the content. It doesn't have the haunting strangeness of Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin's work of the same period, but it's a solid, fun piece of work that can still delight children nearly forty years after it was made. For the actual production - film quality and the amount of "customer service" you get in terms of menu, extras etc. - three stars. Spartan, but it gets you there, is the best one can say about that. Fortunately it is worth getting there.

Our 2 year old daughter is now thoroughly enjoying the programmes her parents so enjoyed years ago. The simplicity of the animation and clarity of script makes it ageless and therefore still very watchable. Delighted that we can still share these classics today.