Alongside Aardman Animations, those brilliant stop-motion clay animators of Wallace and Gromit fame, another great favourite of the British public was Cosgrove Hall Films. Brian Cosgrove and Mark Hall first met as students at Manchester’s College of Art and Design, and then worked together in television graphics at Granada Television. They left Granada in 1969 to form their first production company, Stop Frame Productions, making TV commercials, public information films and also the opening credits and graphics for TV classic Rainbow in 1972.

The Rainbow work led to Thames Television creating a subsidiary animation studio in Chorlton-cum-Hardy, in Manchester, with Cosgrove and Hall as its lead animators. Cosgrove Hall Films was born. Its first series, Chorlton and the Wheelies, was popular and ran from 1976 to 1979, but it was 1981’s Danger Mouse that spawned their greatest success, running throughout the rest of the eighties and being syndicated around the world. With familiar voiceovers from David Jason as Danger Mouse and Terry Scott as lovable sidekick Penfold, it remains a firm favourite with everyone who lived through that decade.

However, it is Cosgrove Hall’s magical 1981 TV special, The Pied Piper of Hamelin, that I’m looking at today. I remember stumbling across it and being mesmerised by its brilliant animation techniques. It takes the story of the Pied Piper as laid down in the words of the poem by Robert Browning (whose lines are used verbatim) and brilliantly illustrates the strange tale of Hamelin’s plague of rats, the enigmatic piper who offers to rid the town of them, and the dire consequences when the town fails to pay him the agreed amount later.

Here is a clip of the Pied Piper working his magic on the rats, with the narrator’s wonderfully rhythmic rendering of Browning’s poetry driving the story along. Incidentally, whilst you could be forgiven for thinking the Pied Piper story to have come from the imagination of the Grimm brothers (who did indeed tell the tale later), the first reference to the story was in a stained glass window in Hamelin itself, and contemporary accounts make reference to some actual event that led to the town’s children disappearing in the late 1200s. The stuff of legend!