meisterburger23 Inigo Pipkin later renamed Pipkins after the untimely death of George Woodbridge is a jolly old man who runs a puppet store and goes around collecting used and discarded items to create puppets from. His assistant is Johnny played by Wayne Laryea who coincidentally aired in an American children show The Bugaloos in 1970; I love that showAnyways the puppets included in the show are Hartley a hare that looks like road kill; a tortoise named Tortoise, an ostrich, a penguin, a cat and a ugly pig. I forgot about the monkey Topoff and a pigeon too as well as a badger with an Irish accents, There's also Hartley's uncle who lives on a farm and a Scottish cousin that both look freakyMr Pipkins passed away two weeks into filming the second season and in 1974 Pipkins became the first preschool series to include a storyline about death well, two story lines about death. Mr Pipkins death episode became a strong topic about death. I had not seen the death of Mr Pipkins but I did see an episode where the Pipkins gang bought a goldfish and it died causing a brief discussion on eventually everything dies including people Johnny left the program in 1978 to star in Empire Road to be replaced by Tom Jonathan Kydd and later by Peter PotterThe show aired 313 episodes and sadly the only episodes remaining are 57 off air recordings from the guy who voiced Hartley and Tortoise and another presenter Jonathan Kydd who came in 1978 and left in 1980The show aired from 1973 to 1981 and many episodes are present on four DVDS in the UK. Volume 4 came out in November and although I live in America I've bought the DVDS on Ebay Not a bad show for little kids

didi-5 'Pipkins' was one of the best children's shows of the 1970s, with its manic (and in some cases, Brummie) puppets Hartley the Hare, Topov the Monkey, and the ever-experimenting Pig. There was also Tortoise, and the French ostrich Octavia. There was also a bloke called Wayne who kept the whole thing together. 'Time!!!' was an insert in each show with a lot of clocks, but I can't really remember why now. But the best of all was Hartley's put downs of Pig ('oh shut up, Pig!') and his ineffectual flirting with Octavia. Great fun in an era which also had Morph the plasticine man, and Zippy, Bungle and the curiously camp George in 'Rainbow'.

hernebay I have fond recollections of "Pipkins", even though I was already in my teens when it began, and in my twenties when it vanished from our screens, alas!, for ever. The early episodes featured character actor George Woodbridge as the eponymous Inigo Pipkin, but the real glory days of "Pipkins" occurred under the stewardship of Wayne Laryea, a young black British actor. The undisputed star of the show, however, was Hartley Hare, a character of extraordinary depth and complexity for a children's show. Vain, neurotic and unbelievably camp, the self-deluded Hartley (who rather resembled Frank Williams's Vicar in "Dad's Army") hopelessly held a torch for the coquettish French (!) ostrich, Octavia, who on one occasion pointedly rebuffed his advances with the immortal (and sublimely delivered) put-down: "Oh, 'Artley, you are so SMALL!"