Richard Cadell, 51, puppeteer and magician
I LOVED Sooty as a child and was doing puppetry and Punch and Judy when I was six or seven. I had Sooty, Sweep and Soo puppets and made a puppet booth out of a clothes horse and would hide behind it and up they’d pop.
When I was 15, I won the Magic Circle’s young magician of the year and part of the prize was to go on The Sooty Show. I made friends with everybody and later I became a regular on the show with Matthew Corbett. And he eventually went and I stayed and that was 20 years ago.
The people who owned the rights to Sooty then tried to change it so much to try to sell it into different countries and ITV just went ‘you know what, we don’t want any more of these’ and they stopped it and for a time it wasn’t on TV. I was out of a job and I was upset because I loved Sooty. So when I read in 2008 that Sooty was for sale, I said to my brother who’s my business partner in an amusement park ‘we are having this – we’re going to buy it and we’re going to put it right’. It was a moral calling. But to buy the rights, you’re talking close to a million pounds and we knew we had to get it back on television. ITV said go and make a pilot and they asked for 26 episodes and we’d cracked it.
The appeal of Sooty is his simplicity. Most people have either owned or know someone who owns a Sooty puppet and when the kids put that puppet on their hand, it's exactly the same as the TV and it talks the same and behaves the same.
The relationship between me and Sooty is like father and son. You have a little character running rings round the adults which children relate to. Sooty is mischievous whereas Sweep just gets everything wrong. It’s a classic double act. People relate to Sweep’s squeak and can almost understand what he’s saying.
The way we do the show hasn’t changed over the years but what has changed is the way we access television. In my young days, if you wanted to watch Sooty, you ran home from school and if you weren’t there at 4.15 you’d missed it. Now we find that the biggest viewing platform is Youtube. Kids will watch what they want to watch. Our Youtube channel is relatively new but he has had over 18million views and 30 per cent are in America.
I absolutely love doing the stage show and I know that over 60 per cent of the audience will be adults. They will have children with him, but after every show I do a meet and greet where you can meet Sooty and there will be four adults to one child and all the adults want their picture taken with Sooty.
Sooty’s Magic Show is in Ayr on April 9, Glenrothes on April 10, Stirling on April 11 and Hamilton on April 12. For more information, see www.thesootyshow.co.uk
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