Fifty years ago today, it was time to play the music and time to light the lights. On 5 September 1976, the British public first met the Muppets – an epochal moment in the history of light entertainment whose reverberations are still felt to this day. This was the show that saw Rita Moreno conclude a performance of Fever by smashing a puppet’s head between two cymbals, Alice Cooper convince the characters to sell their souls to the devil and Vincent Price cover Carole King’s You’ve Got a Friend, accompanied by ghosts.
The Muppet Show was not like other television programmes. Jim Henson had made his name as a puppeteer on Sesame Street, a show that remains the gold standard for educational kids’ television. It debuted in 1969, the same year Monty Python’s Flying Circus first aired, a programme Henson adored and one that was produced in the country where The Muppet Show would eventually find a home.
Henson, one of television’s true originals, was unwilling to be typecast as a children’s entertainer, so as the years passed he began to conceive of a more adult-oriented project with Kermit the Frog at its centre, a character who had first appeared on screen way back in 1955. Two specials were produced for ABC in 1974 and 1975 but did not lead to a series. Then Lew Grade of ATV in the UK came to the rescue, understanding the potential of a puppet show in a way his US counterparts initially did not.
Crucially, Henson’s Muppets featured in the first season of Saturday Night Live, which meant the team learned how to create a show from scratch in a week, as well as getting a list of contacts for the great and the good of American entertainment in the mid-1970s. It did not work out for Henson and his team at SNL, but they bounced back in style on arrival at Elstree Studios in Hertfordshire. In the first season of The Muppet Show, the creative team were forced to beg stars to travel to Britain to guest on the show.
Somewhat incredibly, when the first episode aired, Joel Grey was at the centre of the mayhem, reprising his role as the master of ceremonies from Cabaret. This was a role for which he had won an Oscar, a Bafta, a Golden Globe and a Tony – and now he was singing Willkommen to a nightclub full of Muppets. The perfect air of anarchy was established from the get-go.
Showtunes were just a small part of the astonishingly eclectic mix of music in every episode. There were novelty songs (I’m My Own Grandpaw), classical pieces, light opera, poems set to music (Halfway Down the Stairs, Jabberwocky) and pop penned by the likes of Randy Newman, Harry Chapin and Harry Nilsson – whose song Coconut was used years before Quentin Tarantino thought to use it in Reservoir Dogs. It shouldn’t have worked, but it resolutely did.
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