I starred on legendary kids’ TV series The Tweenies – here’s what was really inside the costumes
THE Tweenies were not as they really seemed – 25 years on from the beloved BBC series.
The show – which first aired in 1999 – was adored by millions of viewers across its three series.
It starred Justin Fletcher, Bob Golding, Sally Preisig, Emma Weaver, Colleen Daley and Sinead Rushe who all played Bella, Milo, Fizz and Jake.
They were cared for by two adult Tweenies as well as their pet dog.
And as the series celebrates its 25th birthday, Bob Golding has revealed the actors weren’t actually in the iconic costumes.
While he and the rest of the cast voiced the beloved characters, ‘skin’ actors wore the heavy costumes.
Speaking about the hit show, he told The Sun: “It was all done in stages.
“The skin actors would go in first to rehearse with the director what the scene content would be. They were all five foot or under and very fit and obviously strong because the strain on your neck with those heads was huge. So they would go in and rehearse that without all the costumes on and just move around like actors.
“We would learn the songs with the musical directors, Graham Pike and Liz Kitchen. And then we’d meet the week after to start work on watching the skin actors and what scenes they’d done.
“Then they did exactly the same again and we voiced it. They put the heads and the costumes on and our voices were played back in.”
The Tweenies had an impressive 390 episodes before its the curtain came down in 2002.
Bob added that there was a secret mechanism which made the characters look realistic.
He said: “It was called the PAC system, the Performance Animatronic Control System, which had like foot pedals and little wheels at the ends of gloves that you tweak and the thumb was the jaw.
“It was crazy. So that took us months to kind of get to any sort of standard.”
It even won a BAFTA TV award for Best Pre-school Live Action series in 2000.
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