Tugs, the one that got away

One of the reasons we set up Bluebird Studio at Shepperton was David & Bob had moved Clearwater Features from Battersea to Shepperton to handle The Thomas work but also, they had big plans to produce their own show - Tugs.

At first Britt wasn’t too happy about the similarity between Tugs and Thomas, but the only similarity was that the boats had faces. The storylines, music and feel of the show couldn’t have been further apart.

This was a big budget children’s television series. Each episode was originally going to be 30 minutes long, but they decided to edit them down to 20 and finally 15-minute episodes although some remained at twenty – all a bit confusing and I can’t recall all the details about that. TVS commissioned the show to be made under the watchful eye of Nigel Pickard, a nice guy and still going strong today. We had high hopes for Tugs and thought it would be a runaway success.

David and his crew created the set for Tugs on T Stage. The boats were all on wheels, so a huge water tank was built for the boats to move around in. It was only about twelve inches deep, and the buildings were all on the shoreline – it was very impressive to see up close. Dave didn’t do anything by halves, and I have to say it was an honour to have worked with him, he is still sadly missed.

This was an amazing time for us as we were working on 2 major children’s tv shows so having our own studio, Bluebird at Shepperton Film studios was a good move for us. We had to build the studio internally from scratch, but we had a deadline to finish it due to the upcoming work. We couldn’t wait to open it up for business.

As we now were now the proud owners of our very own studio, and we knew we had the next Thomas series in the bag and Tugs was now in pre-production we also got the job to record the dialogue for the show at Bluebird. This was a serious learning curve for us, but we had promised Dave and Bob, we could handle it. Talk about the deep end!!

Rather than recording each actor separately it was decided the best way to do this was to have all the cast in the vocal room at the same time, recording it on 24 track and treated it like a radio show.  It worked really well, and the actors liked working together like that. Bob was the producer, and I engineered the sessions – great fun.

We scored the music to a guide dialogue track, usually Chris Tulloch, and David if remember correctly.

As Thomas was only 5 minutes long, we didn’t have a lot of time to develop the music but with Tugs being much longer there was a lot of opportunity to stretch our legs and musically develop each episode almost like mini movies.    

Tugs was an achievement to all who worked on it though it wasn’t popular enough with the television audience. In my opinion the stories were too complex for a preschool audience but too young for the older children in any case a second series was never commissioned and despite Bob’s attempts to rebadge it, it never took off.  

 Dave was very good at promotion, and he produced a load of Tugs badges. He handed them out to all the crew, but I managed to get a silver one which is my pride and joy. 

Tugs has a cult following now but it was a great show to have contributed to and a very exciting time for Junior and I.