Can You Tell Me How To Get To Redemption Street?
or: Somewhere Over the Rainbow Street.
Few will remember the original trailblazers; those who set the stage for all that followed. Time has a habit of turning foundations to dust. But many a great institution had humble beginnings, none more so than children’s television.
I find myself outside walking along a cobbled street in London as the first rays of light fan out into the sky. It’s colder than I’m used to and my foggy breath acts as a pacemaker for my progress towards the market by the river. I’d been here as a boy many times before I moved to Los Angeles with my parents. It was having lived in these two cities that was the reason I now found myself walking towards a food market on a cold September morning about to meet a local legend; the first on this transatlantic story.
Separated by an Ocean, at the other side of the globe from each other, two heavyweights of their genre were founding fathers of their respective children’s shows. In the early days they weren’t aware of each other despite there only being three years between their debuts. The two shows varied significantly in both the budget available and style of delivery, but years later they ended up having more in common than either would have liked. The one thing they did have in common in the beginning was it all started so glamorously.
‘Yeah, it was all lights, camera, action, you know?’ Joe says, laughing at the thought and trailing off into a chesty cough as the cigarette smokes in his paw.
Meet Joe Carpenter, the original Bungle on children’s British television show Rainbow.
‘They call me Grisly Joe ’round these parts, but you can call me Joe.’
He says this with a warm smile, but there’s a hint of sadness in his eyes.
Joe played the loveable Bungle for the first series of Rainbow. He still has the scruffy, brown face he did when he was a regular on television for that first season from October 1972.
‘I was no actor, mind. I worked on the set, helpin’ them build the props and Rainbow sign, and all that. It was the director who came up to me and said I had just the look he were after for another role they was havin’ trouble fillin’.’
I point out to Joe that he was in the right place at the right time. He laughs that chesty laugh again.
‘Story of my life!’
We’re sitting in a small cafe near the market. Joe agreed to take a break from selling spices for a while to talk with me. His colleague agreed to keep an eye on his stall for him.
‘We had no idea what we were doing, you know?’ Joe says this with a nostalgic look on his face. ‘We were pioneers, trying something a little different. Figurin’ it out as we went.’
I ask Joe if Rainbow was the UK’s answer to Sesame Street that had debuted a few short years before Rainbow. He raises an eyebrow and his smile falters for the briefest of moments.
‘Well, no, I wouldn’t go that far. What they did was very, you know, American, no offence meant.’
I tell him there is none taken.
‘Good. No, Rainbow was its own thing. Very British.’
Joe rolls up his jacket sleeve and parts the fur on his arm. He shows me a tattoo of the Rainbow logo.
‘Lookin’ back it was a bit daft, like getting a tattoo of a girl’s name or something.’
He tells me that when season one wrapped he and the other actors on the show all got the same tattoo. They felt like they’d really accomplished something of note. It was a real bonding experience.
‘Yeah, it felt like we were makin’ a difference. The new fella must have felt the same since I heard he got the same tattoo not long after startin’.’
Joe was replaced as the actor who played Bungle for the remaining run of Rainbow after season one.
Joe asks if we can move the conversation outside. He wants to smoke with his coffee. I say sure.
We sit at a cheap, rusting metal table and the heat vapours from our coffee are whisked away on the chilling breeze. I pull my scarf tighter around my neck. I ask Joe if he misses Rainbow. Joe takes a deep drag on his cigarette.
‘It’s not on the telly anymore, you know that?’
I tell him I do. The last episode of Rainbow aired on March the 6th 1992.
‘The way I look at it is that I got out at the right time. When I left the show, after some troubles, I made a life for myself.’
He gestures back towards the market.
‘The poor fucker who replaced me, it must be harder for him after all those years on the telly.’
I push Joe again and ask him if he actually misses being on the television.
‘Ah, that’s all in the past. I don’t really think about it much.’
I ask him why he thinks he was replaced after season one. He smiles.
‘That’s anyone’s guess. My agent at the time... can you believe I had an agent!... she told me the casting people was approached by the new lad’s agent and somehow he got his foot in the door.’
I say that must have been difficult.
‘It wasn’t easy, no. But I’ve a lot to be thankful for.’
I mention that the Wikipedia entry for his character states that “some of the younger viewers were frightened” by his appearance and this was why he was replaced after season one. Joe’s brow furrows, and I’m almost certain I can hear a low growl.
‘That’s not much more than a rumour. Some random nobody put that up on that website.’
Despite Joe’s clear annoyance I ask him, did he think the decision to replace him was due to how he looked? He takes a deep breath, as though to calm himself, and pauses before speaking.
‘That’s a real tough question to answer. If you’re saying to me do I know that I’m what some people would see as hideous, scary even, to look at? Then, yeah, I see them starin’. But you know, the 60s and 70s, they was supposed to be a time of change, you know? Free love and all that. Nana bear always taught me that it isn’t what’s on the outside that matters, but you know, what you do that counts. Honestly, I don’t know why they pushed me out and brought in the new guy, but I suppose it didn’t hurt that he was handsome as all fuck.’
He goes on to say that the pandemic the year before, as awful as it was, afforded him a new experience beyond the obvious.
‘When we started wearing masks, you know, during the pandemic and all that, people didn’t look at me no more. I suppose covering half my face meant I didn’t stick out in the crowd like I do now.’
He says this gesturing towards his face.
I ask him how the experience of the pandemic affected him and his family.
‘It was shit, you know? It was hard to explain it all to the kids. So many people here died needlessly. Anyway, me and the kids managed to avoid some of the worst of it when we hibernated through winter.’
I ask him why he thought people died needlessly.
‘Ah, that’s not what I’m here to talk about.’
He says this with an unmistakable finality and I’m almost certain there was another low growl accompanying it.
I don’t press Joe any further on why he thought people had died needlessly. Later when I was doing some background research into who his wife was, besides the mother of his young children, I discovered that she worked for the government of the day. That went some way to explaining his reluctance to discuss the costs to the country of the pandemic.
It may come as a surprise to some of you that Joe fathered children so late in life, I’m not proud to admit I hadn’t considered it a possibility. We didn’t dwell on this fact, though he did express some regret about the state of his relationship with his children from his first marriage.
‘My other kids, you know, from my other marriage, I heard through the grapevine that their mother passed in the pandemic.’
I tell him I’m sorry to hear that.
‘Yeah, it’s tough. We were happy at one point, you know? I tried to be a good father, and I was when everythin’ was going well. I was famous, I was on TV! And the money was decent enough. We didn’t have to worry about bills or food on the table.’
He sighs and runs his hand over his mouth.
‘Things changed when I left Rainbow. I just got stuck in a rut, you know? My wife was the breadwinner in the house and, fuck, I was a young proud bear. I just couldn’t take it. I suppose you’d have a fancy word for it like it toxic-masculinity or something these days. But I couldn’t take that she was earnin’ money and me, the guy who was on telly, was a nobody in line at the dole office.’
Joe turned to “the drink” as a means of solace. He says he fell in with old friends from a time before he was on television.
‘What they don’t tell you about when you leave showbiz is that your showbiz friends leave too. It’s a package deal. You’re only seen if you’re broadcast into people’s houses.’
This last remark strikes me as remarkably insightful, poetic even.
‘Yeah, well, I’m not just a pretty face, am I?’ says Joe smiling but with that same sadness in his eyes.
Joe spent every penny he could on alcohol and drugs while his wife held the family together, eventually divorcing him two years after his exit from Rainbow.
‘She did the right thing. I was in a bad place. They didn’t need that shit in their lives.’
I say to him he clearly has regrets.
‘I’d be a monster if I didn’t. I’m just glad Nana-bear was there and stuck by me when I hit rock-bottom.’
Nana-bear played a formative role in the early years of Joe’s youth.
‘Firm but fair. That’s how I’d describe her. She took no nonsense, that’s for sure.’
Joe’s mother had died tragically when he was cub.
‘She was taking a walk in the woods and some hunter saw her and thought she was a wild animal.’
Joe shakes his head angrily at the thought.
‘Anyway, he only got done for manslaughter. Stupid bastard. Hasn’t been wild bears in Britain for hundreds of years.’
Joe’s father moved them both into his father’s parents’ house not long after the shooting where Joe’s grandparents helped raise him.
‘They say my dad was never the same after that. He didn’t last long anyway. Broken heart.’
Joe’s father had a massive heart attack when Joe was five years old.
‘I don’t really remember my father. Mainly the photographs of him I remember most.’
Joe’s grandparents took on full responsibility for his upbringing after that.
‘They was incredible really. They wasn’t young, you know? But they raised me like their own anyway.’
It was Joe’s Nana-bear that helped him get through school and into trade work. And it was she that encouraged him to take on the role of Bungle when approached by the director of Rainbow.
‘She was my guiding light. I sometimes think she was more disappointed than me when I was replaced.’
Joe laughs again.
Joe doesn’t speak much about this grandfather beyond saying he was a hard man, more old fashioned in his ways. I decide not to push Joe any further on the matter. His grandfather died in 2017 and Nana-bear died in early 2019.
‘I’m glad she didn’t live through the pandemic. It would have killed her not being able to see the kids.’
There’s a shout from across the street. A man in his late fifties jogs towards us with his hand raised waving slightly.
‘You’re Bungle from Rainbow, ain’t ya?’
Joe looks at me with a smirk and a wink.
‘One and the same,’ he says getting to his feet.
‘I grew up watching you. You was better than the other one.’
Joe’s face lights up. The man asks Joe for a selfie and Joe duly obliges.
After the interaction is completed, and the man is on his way wearing a broad smile, Joe sits back down.
‘That happens now and again. You never really leave showbiz.’
He says this with a cheeky smile, and this time I detect no sadness in his large, sparkling dark eyes.
###
‘Did you know I met the First Lady?’
I’ve only been with Olly for around five minutes when he asks me this over a coffee in a small diner. Olly Woodcock portrayed Big Bird from Sesame Street in the early years of the show.
I tell him I did not know this. It turns out the Christmas episode of Sesame Street, December 1970, contrived to have Big Bird meet Pat Nixon and to gift her a feather, plucked from his own body no less.
‘It was surreal, if I’m honest. I never thought in my wildest dreams I’d meet the First Lady of the United States.’
I ask him if Richard Nixon had been present. He laughs.
‘No, President Nixon didn’t make it on to the show, but he was a fan.’
I had to look this up too. I was in for a surprise. Nixon, the antithesis of progressiveness, was apparently very fond of Sesame Street going so far as to write a letter of support and praise to Joan Ganz Cooney, one of the show’s founders.
Olly is wearing a black shirt with large white cuffs, his signature yellow feathers erupting from them all brilliant yellow; if not quite as radiant as when he debuted on Sesame Street in 1969.
I ask Olly, as I did with Joe, if he missed the work.
‘I wouldn’t say that. The character they had written for me was a bit on the, um, slow side I suppose. Not like the current version who’s fairly sharp.’
I ask Olly how he came about landing the role of Big Bird. He visibly grimaces every time I say those words; Big Bird.
‘My agent got me the gig. I turned up for an audition and they loved what I brought to the table.’
Olly says this with a certain amount of pride and confidence.
I ask him what it was like being at the beginning of what would become an American institution and playing such a central, iconic character.
‘I suppose it’s nice to have on the CV and all but it was a job, a character. I’m not Big Bird.’ he says ‘Big Bird’ with finger air-quotes. ‘Big Bird is an idea, an ideal even. I sure as hell ain’t that.’
An ideal he certainly isn’t. I met with Olly a few times over the course of a week (he seemed to like having me around, at least at first) and he always wore the same shirt (maybe he had multiples) and was often with cookie in hand. He has a serious sweet tooth. He says it was something he picked up on the set of Sesame Street.
‘The guy who played the Cookie Monster, dude was one of those um, whatcha call it,’ he says and snaps his fingers, ‘method actors, yeah that’s it. He ate cookies for real, like, all the time. He even did this whole bit where he’d push it on other members of the cast too. I went along with it, I mean it was fun and exciting being around other actors of calibre, who was I to question the madness? Anyway, yeah, I leaned into the cookies in a big way when I left the show. It gave me comfort I guess. The guy who plays the Cookie Monster, he kicked the habit years ago.’
Five years ago Olly was diagnosed with type-2 diabetes. He says that when he sticks to a strict diet the symptoms subside and he lives a normal life, no insulin injections. But, as was very apparent, he was prone to slips in his eating habits, he says he carries insulin at all times, just in case.
I ask Olly about needing to lean on cookies for comfort. Did he take being replaced hard?
‘Ha, you’d love that in your little story wouldn’t you?’ he says eyeing me suspiciously.
I tell him that I’m what he can think of as an impartial observer. I don’t want anything other than the truth. Olly scoffs.
‘The truth? There’s a novel concept. Haven’t you heard? We live in a post-truth world.’
I begin to sense a hostility in Olly. I’m not sure he wants to be here with me. I ask him if he’d like to call it a day and resume tomorrow.
‘Yeah, good idea. I’ve got shit that needs doing anyway.’
Olly leaves a dollar tip and gets to his feet, says he’ll message me in the morning, and he stuffs his hands in his pockets and leaves the diner.
The following morning comes around and I haven’t heard from Olly. Around 09:30 I decide to message him. I ask if he’d like to go for a stroll along the waterfront. I get a terse reply:
‘Sure. Meet you at pier 19 in 30.’
We’re in Manhattan and I make my way down to Pier 19 on the East River. I work up a sweat to make it within the agreed thirty minutes. I’m clammy after my half-walk half-jog and as I wait for Olly I take in the scene. With Brooklyn Bridge over my shoulder I stand looking at the large crane operating on the dock. There’s the rear of a carpark to my right. This is a scene of beauty mixed with grim, rusty industry.
I’m leaning against a railing at the side of the river watching cyclists zip past on the bikeway. Olly is twenty-five minutes late when I see him climbing over the carpark dividing wall.
‘Morning,’ he says nonchalantly.
I greet him back and we begin walking along the waterfront. I wonder if he deliberately chose a spot away from typical tourist haunts.
We exchange some small-talk and pleasantries and I steer the conversation back to where we left off yesterday.
‘Look, I was a kid back then, okay? Sure I took it hard when they left me go. Who wouldn’t take it hard having the rug pulled from under them?’
I press gently on the cookies for comfort comment from yesterday.
‘I probably overstated that. I just had more time on my hands overnight and I ate a few too many cookies.’
I decide to leave the cookie discussion there.
We eventually come out from the shadow of the carpark and the walkway above it and emerge onto a more populated area. Olly nods in the direction of some store fronts. There’s an old-fashioned sun-bleached arcade sign on one of them. We make our way towards that.
We’re standing inside a time warp. The arcade is full of old arcade machines. All the classics: Pac-Man; Space Invaders; Donkey Kong. I ask Olly if this is a hipster joint. He throws me a steely-eyed look.
‘Do I look like a hipster?’ he says.
I say, well, actually, he does a bit. Olly doesn’t say anything to this and we walk deeper into the belly of the time bubble.
For a spell in the late 70s and early 80s Olly had reinvented himself as competitive gamer. He had even managed to obtain sponsorship from a local car dealer – owned by his aunt’s husband – for a period of time. I ask him why he stopped competing.
‘Well, it ultimately wasn’t sustainable. Once those home consoles came on the scene that was it for me.’
Olly found himself in the right place at the wrong time; again. The release of the NES in 1985 changed the gaming landscape forever. People stopped caring about arcades. People still played there of course but the draw wasn’t the same. The sponsorship deal left with the crowds.
‘Why would anyone want to come and see a dude in his twenties play Space Invaders in the arcade when they could play it on their television?’
I ask him if he thinks that had he been a younger man now would he have tried to become a professional gamer in the modern console world, since in recent years it was a viable income for some.
‘Who knows.’
I get the impression Olly’s patience is running thin. He seems more pissed off than yesterday.
Olly slots a coin into the ‘Crazy Climber’ machine, first released in America in 1982, and begins a game without another word. After a few minutes of watching Olly play in silence I notice a gaggle of hipsters at the back of the arcade playing Pong, and decide to take a stroll down to them.
I start to watch the hipsters, who are in their late teens, play Pong with the earnestness one might expect from a surgeon, and strike up a conversation with the two not playing. I ask them if they see Olly in here often. The tallest of the four says:
‘Yeah, he’s here a couple of times a week. Keeps to himself. He’s probably a serial killer.’
His friends laugh at this, while glancing in the direction of Olly.
When I ask if they knew about Olly’s past as a children’s entertainer they seem less than aware of the specifics.
‘I heard he was some kind of clown or something, but didn’t have what it took to make the big time.’
I tell them that he was on television for a year, on Sesame Street.
‘Get outta town? No shit. You wouldn’t know it lookin’ at him.’
And he was right. You wouldn’t know to look at Olly.
Thinking back to Joe being approached by a fan in London, I rejoin Olly and ask him if people ever recognise him. He says it happens sometimes, but he doesn’t encourage it.
‘Not like the other guy though, right?’ laughs Olly with eyes that don’t share the apparent mirth.
He is of course referring to the performer who replaced him on Sesame Street.
‘It’s funny, the dude they picked even looks like me,’ he says and takes a tired bite from a cookie he seems to have produced magically from thin air.
I ask him if he watches the current incarnation of Sesame Street.
‘Not really,’ he says. ‘I mean, I see it on in the background sometimes or whatever. I’m aware of its impact on the culture around the world, I’m sure most people remember Tickle-me Elmo. Poor kid.’
I ask him what he means by poor kid.
‘I mean, I know I had it rough, but I got out okay. You can’t say the same thing for a lot of kid actors, can you?’
Looking at the cookie crumbs accumulating on the Crazy Climber controls I want to say that arguably he didn’t get out entirely unscathed, but think better of it. Instead, I tell him I’ve heard Elmo, by all accounts, is a well adjusted kid with sensible parents who have been putting most of his earnings into a trust that he won’t be able to access until he completes his education and is over twenty-five years old.
‘That’s good to hear. Maybe things are changing for the better.’
He doesn’t look convinced.
We leave the arcade and go our separate ways for the day. Olly says he’s busy tomorrow but would like to meet one last time the day after before I catch my flight back to LA. I agree.
We meet in the same diner as we did on the first day. Olly still seems to be carrying a barely concealed anger. He orders an enormous cookie to accompany his coffee. I join him sans cookie.
During our conversation I pitch an idea to Olly about meeting Joe Carpenter who had a somewhat similar experience to him. I tell him Joe will be flying into New York in six months time and I could fly back and introduce them. He doesn’t seem very keen on the idea.
‘Yeah, I dunno. I’ve never heard of the him or the show. I don’t really think our experiences are that similar.’
I tell him to think about it, and he agrees. Before we part ways there’s one thing that has been niggling me this whole week. I decide I have to address it.
I tell Olly that according to my research it wasn’t his Big Bird that met the First Lady, Pat Nixon, but rather the actor who replaced him; that season 1 ended on May the 8th 1970. The Nixon episode aired on December that year, season two having started in November.
A change comes over Olly in an instant. He gets to his feet swiftly, the chair he’s sitting on scrapping loudly across the floor.
‘Fuck you, buddy,’ he says to me.
I try and defuse the situation.
‘No fuck you, man. And fuck that British bear too. Pair of fucking nobodies.’
And with that Olly, cookie in hand, storms out of the diner and out of my life.
I was left with a certain melancholy after my experiences with Joe and Olly. I find it deeply tragic that they were both pioneers of children’s television, bringing joy to kids in their homes, and that both were discarded without much of a thought just because of their appearance; something they had no control over. I guess it speaks to the superficial, the airbrushed, the just-so society we live in.
While I found Olly difficult to connect with I could tell his rejection from Sesame Street, as well as his lost career as a professional gamer, had moulded him into the angry, bitter man I had spent a week with in Manhattan. Joe, on the other hand was kind, and generous, and much more philosophical about his time on television. Both had their lives changed irrevocably by their stints as TV personalities, for better or for worse, and Olly and Joe are people after all. And, at risk of belabouring the point, it’s a shame, a real great shame, that we as a society decide the course of a person’s life based on their appearance.
###
Some months pass since I parted ways so acrimoniously with Olly when I receive a hand-written letter in the mail. Olly says he was getting in touch to apologise for how he’d behaved when we’d last seen each other. He says he’d since accepted help and was making positive changes in his life. He also says he’d reconsidered my offer and would like to meet Joe. So, I go about arranging the meeting.
‘We’re like the B-Team,’ says Joe with a laugh.
It takes me a second; but I get there. I wonder if he thought this quip up on the flight from London.
Olly eyes the cookie selection but shakes his head and orders a black coffee instead. A man in his late fifties approaches us.
‘Hey, ain’t you that guy off of Sesame Street? The big friendly bird. You were my favourite when I was a kid.’
Olly looks and me and raises an eyebrow as if to say, did you put him up to this. I raise my hands, shaking my head, and say it has nothing to do with me; which it doesn’t. I’m relieved the man hasn’t called him the B words.
I leave them there, in the cafe exchanging old war stories. I think it’s the first time I’ve seen a real smile reflected in Olly’s eyes. Their mutual experiences, their suffering, brought these two together. Decades in the making. Their studios discarded them, threw them aside, but the the sea of time washed them both ashore on this small island in the heart of New York. They found their way to a small cafeteria on Redemption Street.
Images used for photoshopping via: Alexandra Avelar and Simon Goetz.
This story originally appear on F DuBois’ website, The Space Between Work.