Shoe People

SHOE PEOPLE
Made by: Fairwater Films
Shown on: ITV
Years shown: 1987
Theme tune: “Sh-sh-sh shoooo people, doo be doo be doo be doo…”

The Justin Hayward theme is about the only thing I do remember about Shoe People, except that it was a bit like the equally unexciting Munch Bunch, but used footwear instead of fresh fruit. Basically, it was about a lot of different kinds of shoes, whose type determined their personality. They lived in the back room of the Shoe Repairs Shop, but at night they come to life and the magical Shoe Town appears (someone has been sniffing too much shoe polish, obviously.)

The star of this cartoon was Trampy, a scruffy boot with a detached sole (don’t look for any deeper meaning in this unintentional pun, please), but there was also PC Boot, Wellington, Charlie the clown shoe, Sergeant Major, Sneaker the burglar, Guilder Van der Clog, Flip Flop, Mr Potter , Sid Slipper, Margot the pink ballet slipper and her baby, Bootee.

TVAM was also responsible for the execrable ‘saviour’ of breakfast television, Roland Rat (another creation we can blame Anne Wood for), when they really should have just given us more time with the Green Goddess. Strangely, Shoe People was very popular in the Soviet Union, and the programme's creator James Driscoll even got to meet Mikhail Gorbachev. They must have been yearning for the Berlin Wall to come down so they could get their hands on even more bourgeois capitalist cartoons.

SQUARE EYES RATING: 2/10

(Thanks to www.jedisparadise.co.uk for the borrowed pic)