This is a charming animated series produced by
Queensgate Productions between 1984 and 1986. It was all animated in
plasticine,
a la a very low-budget
Wallace And Gromit.
Willie Rushton provided the voice.
Very distinctive style: Berk is a big fat blue blob with little cartoony eyes perched on top and a small smiley mouth; he waddled about on errands for "'im upstairs," on his great flapping flat feet, while Boney offered bone-dry taunting and abuse, and Drut or Durk or whatever it was called* blew raspberries, ate everything, and generally got in the way. In the midst of all this, Berk would realise he needed some crucial cake ingredient, or something, and would have to venture into the trapdoor... where who knew what nightmares would be unleashed?
* Drutt, apparently. Thankyou Oolong.
And then there were these worms that crawled all over the place. Really, all over everything. God, everywhere you looked... So many worms... All wriggly and clammy... The worms... God, I remember the worms...
It took on the conventions of yer Hammer Horror spooky castle, and sent them up, albeit gently. The scripts benefitted from the short-episode format: only five minutes long, but packed with 'mayhem.' What really made this show special, though, was the voiceover talent of the dearly missed Willie Rushton. He was perfect for the job, inspired, bringing Berk's long-suffering but cheerful provincial nature to life, drawing out the vowels as only he can. There are few men who could say "Oh, globbits" with the bitter edge of inevitable doom it requires: Willie could, and he made it funny.
The
ZX Spectrum game of the show actually does quite a good job of animating the characters (nice big
sprites) and capturing the general madness of it all, despite not being very much fun to play. Generally I'd open the trapdoor, and a great big
pogoing chicken-beast would leap out, then Boney would shout "
Send it back!" and everything would just go horribly wrong and I'd be stomped on.
You don't get entertainment like that any more.