kids' classic Danger Mouse: inside the remaking

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfiIlfwGy-8

Anyone aged between 30 and 50 can conceivably claim Danger Mouse as a vivid TV memory. It was on ITV through most of the 1980s and into the 90s, running for 161 episodes. A ramshackle cartoon about a mouse secret agent and his speccy hamster sidekick Penfold, its homespun anarchy made grown-ups feel like kids, and vice versa. It’s not just a great children’s programme but a hunk of fine British comedy, with David Jason and the late Terry Scott leading the original voice cast.

 Armstrong is taking his role in the swish new CBBC version very seriously, or at least as seriously as one can when the director’s instructions include things like: “Should that sneeze be more… elephant-like?” He’s aware that any remake is met initially with arm-folding disdain by people who act as if it might somehow wipe away the old show. But he’s jubilant because he’s confident that Danger Mouse 2015 has nailed the tricky task of updating the form without losing the spirit. Did he study the David Jason original, or ignore it? “I had a memory of it, but I deliberately didn’t go back. I knew if I did, I’d end up copying him.”So what’s his Danger Mouse voice like? “There are two extremes. Sometimes he can be [whispers] a little bit Richard Briers. And SOMETIMES he can be a LITTLE bit John CLEESE. I have to keep him quite high in my register. [Co-producers] Fremantle are keen that he should be young-sounding. On the balls of his feet.”

“God, I’m excited. It comes out in September, right? Woo-hoo-hoo!” Alexander Armstrong is 45 years old, but has just emitted a genuine whoop of joy. The Guide is crashing the final day of voice recording for a show that, even in the wake of several high-profile reboots of beloved children’s classics, has a lot of people jumping up and down. Armstrong is your new Danger Mouse…  “I’ve never wanted a job as much as this. Plenty of parts you go up for and you don’t really mind, but not getting this would have devastated me.”

This year’s Danger Mouse is more explicitly a Bond spoof than the original, which drew just as much on 1950s adventure serials. As well as Stephen Fry as M-like boss Colonel K, Shauna Macdonald is prominent as Q-ish gadget queen Professor Professor Squawkencluck. (She’s a professor whose first name is Professor.)

A sign either of how impressive the new scripts are, or how high the budget is, or both, is the starry supporting cast. John Oliver plays a mad scientist, Armstrong’s Pointless mucker Richard Osman is a hyper-intelligent jellyfish brain in a tank, and Game Of Thrones’s Lena Headey is US agent Jeopardy Mouse. In the Christmas special, Brian Blessed is Santa, Richard Ayoade’s the Snowman, and Miranda Richardson is Queen Of Weevils.

One odd quirk of the make-do-and-mend original was that David Jason not only voiced the main character but provided narration, too. The remake can afford a separate narrator and casting was a no-brainer: it’s Come Dine With Me’s voiceover-gone-rogue Dave Lamb. “The Come Dine With Me voice has turned into a howling, camp lunatic,” Lamb explains. “For this I’ve reined it in. The director will say, ‘That was a bit Come Dine. Calm down.’”

The new Penfold, Kevin Eldon – splashing contentedly on to a sofa having just performed the catchphrase “Oh, crumbs!” in six impressively different ways, in case of editing emergencies – says his approach was different. “There won’t be a fag paper between Terry Scott’s Penfold and mine. I tried various voices but then I thought: ‘No, he had it.’ My daughter is three and she loves the originals. I said to her: ‘You know there’s going to be some new ones?’ She went: ‘Oooooh!’ I have done the voice at home, yes, but she thought it was just one of the many stupid voices I do.”No formal blessing was bestowed on Armstrong by David Jason, despite Jason happening to be working in the same Soho studio complex one day. “We did ask if he wanted to come in [to the DM studio],” Armstrong recalls, “and he very graciously said no. It must be a bit weird for him. It’s like if you’ve been Doctor Who or James Bond, going back to the set where there’s a different incarnation.”Fire up the 1980s Danger Mouse on Netflix and, despite its bottomless charm, the flaws are evident. Slow build-ups to creaky jokes are everywhere, and if money can be saved through repetition or making things stay still for a bit, that happens. Eldon: “Some of the pacing is, oh, yawn. They’ll run across the screen, then run back, and after 10 seconds you go, ‘Come on!’ But it’s 30 years ago, isn’t it? There’s room for zhuzhing it up. Ours is pretty damn pacy.”Indeed, the crucial opening episode (Armstrong: “I’m going to be… slightly braced”) is unapologetically chaotic. Within three minutes, Danger Mouse has been to outer space and back, destroyed half of London including Buckingham Palace and, consequently, been fired. “It’s a very American approach to scriptwriting,” Armstrong says. “Five laughs on each page.”The wonky look of the original was something else the new version couldn’t feasibly keep. Like the revivals of Clangers and Thunderbirds, this Danger Mouse doesn’t patronisingly simulate glue-and-string shakiness. It has clearly been made on big computers in 2015; it can do more, so it does. “Animation has really come on,” says Eldon, who points out that Danger Mouse’s app-enabled new “iPatch” is a logical development of the show’s penchant for gadgets. “This is better without losing anything. They used to use photo backdrops, which they’d draw over and cartoonify. We’ve kept that.” Photos or paintings are indeed often used, with 2D animation and a bit of 3D modelling on top. Eldon and co get through four episodes in London a day; each 11-minute story is then three weeks’ work for a team of 12 animators in Dublin.It’s telling that amid all the gloss, the characters look identical. Danger Mouse, Penfold and Blofeldian nemesis Baron Greenback (Ed Gaughan) are untouched. “They haven’t diverged much from the original set-up, which is that Penfold is a lovable coward who dotes on Danger Mouse,” Eldon explains. “He can’t believe his luck. He’s like a little brother. I’m loth to go into too deep a psychological profile, though, because he’s a cartoon mole. “Not hamster,” Eldon adds, incorrectly, in what’s probably a cheeky bid to prolong the is-Penfold-a-mole-or-a-hamster debate that’s raged since 1981.What this Danger Mouse really gets right, just as the first version did, is making everyone laugh together. Old DM fans can hope not just that they’ll enjoy the remake, but that it will tempt their kids away from The Next Step, Yu-Gi-Oh!, and YouTube videos of men with squeaky voices commentating as they play Minecraft. Eldon: “I wasn’t a kid when the original came out, but as a young adult you used to catch it and go: ‘That’s really good.’ There are smart gags in here that kids will have to think about, which is great. But at the same time there’s simple Looney Tunes slapstick: smacking into something and your face is a different shape.“If this had been some kind of abomination like Scrappy Doo, doing nasty stuff on the grave of the original, I couldn’t have been doing with it,” Eldon concludes. “But it’s been done with… a certain amount of integrity.” That last phrase comes out in a Stupid Voice, but he means every word.