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!