Mukpuddy co-founder Ryan Cooper tells Alex Casey about bringing Badjelly to a whole new generation of New Zealand kids.
They conjured Badjelly back with a simple tweet. It was sometime in 2018 when Ryan Cooper’s co-founder of Mukpuddy animation studios Alex Leighton was sketching a witch, and wondered aloud if anyone had ever made an animated Badjelly the Witch series before. The answer was no, so Cooper then turned to the bubbling cauldron of Twitter and unleashed an incantation: does anyone know how I could get in touch with someone who has the rights to Badjelly?
Written for his children as an improvised bedtime story and later published in 1973 to enchant many more, Spike Milligan’s Badjelly the Witch follows siblings Tim and Rose as they go on a mystical and sometimes terrifying search for Lucy the missing cow. The Badjellyverse contains a place called Bare Bottom Land, an eagle wearing jim-jams, and the eternally funny utterance “Stinky poo! Stinky poo! Knickers! Knickers, Knickers!”
Badjelly’s powers also have a stronger hold over Aotearoa than anywhere else in the world, including Milligan’s home country. As Gemma Gracewood explored in her incredible five part series about our obsession, this was in part due to the repetition of the radio play version on children’s shows across the 1970s, 80s and 90s, and the 1977 stage adaptation which has since been licensed for performance well over 150 times across New Zealand and Australia.
Cooper’s introduction was seeing the Badjelly stage play at his primary school. “I remember thinking ‘what is this weird thing?’ It felt a bit like Monty Python, which was something I was really into. I just loved silly stuff.” He believes the repetition of the story on radio had a lot to do with the popularity, but also thinks Badjelly’s magic is in her darkness. “I think Kiwis like something with a bit of a darker edge. We don’t like things to be too sanitised.”
It was that concoction of a “quintessential children’s story” and “a crazy witch who wanted to chop up children” that drove Cooper to send out his plea to Milligan’s estate over Twitter several decades later. In classic New Zealand style, someone knew someone, who knew someone, who knew Spike Milligan’s old assistant in the UK. “That’s where we got started, but it was really slow going, because she was in her 80s. Emails were once a month, if that.”
When the emails stopped coming, Cooper thought Mukpuddy had lost Badjelly for good. But many months later, they were contacted by a New Zealander living in the UK who had taken over Milligan’s licensing – his former secretary had sadly passed away, but the family was still keen to see Badjelly head down under. “They loved that New Zealand adopted this particular story. Spike had a massive affinity for New Zealand too – there’s a bench in Wellington dedicated to him.”
Before production began, the Mukpuddy team headed over to the UK to meet with Milligan’s children, Jane and Silé, the former of which Badjelly is dedicated to. “That was very, very cool,” says Cooper. “They got to show us around their dad’s little museum, the typewriter that he typed Badjelly on, and all his boxes and boxes of ideas scribbled on paper.” They all discovered a similar sense of humour, and Cooper remembers feeling “they really trusted us to just run with it”.
The international relations didn’t stop there, either: Badjelly soon became a triple-headed co-production. “We knew it had to be a bigger series than we had ever produced before, which meant getting the money all from New Zealand probably wasn’t going to happen,” says Cooper. While the NZ on Air premium fund provided a good financial base – only after Mukpuddy lobbied for animation to be included in the criteria – they also secured funding from the UK and Canada.
Having different countries involved also meant many early morning Zooms spent with UK-based writers Zoë Tomalin and Charlie Dinkin. “It was really awesome to be so thorough with it,” says Cooper. Whether it was drawing inspiration for Tim and Rose from his own children or writing winky gags for the adults (“show me ‘children for soup’ in my area” says Badjelly), Cooper describes writing Badjelly as “an absolute joy – especially when we got to think about who would voice it”.
Miriam Margolyes was their first pick for Badjelly, especially after Cooper saw her give a varied performance on the Graham Norton couch one evening. “There was this one moment where she was all very polished, very nice, and then she snapped to a real gangster-sounding voice, and just thought ‘that’s our Badjelly’,” he says. Taskmaster also proved fruitful in the hunt for voices, with Kiell Smith-Bynoe and Katherine Parksinson both catching Cooper’s ear from his lounge in Aotearoa.
Along with other big international comedy names like James Acaster and Joe Wilkinson, the Badjelly cast also includes plenty of local stars in Rhys Darby, Rose Matafeo, Cohen Holloway and Kura Forrester. To meet their Badjelly in her natural home, Mukpuddy flew over to the UK for a week with Margolyes. They also managed to weave some more Milligan magic while they were there: Jane Milligan is credited as the singing mushroom in the enchanted forest in episode one.
Settling on the look of Badjelly was all about balance. “We wanted a real darkness to it, but we also wanted it to have Spike Milligan’s silliness,” says Cooper. Drawing on everything from The Wizard of Oz to Labyrinth, they also “wanted to make something really unique and new” when it came to the design of Badjelly herself. “She’s quite an unusual design, but we drew inspiration from the villains we always loved,” says Cooper. “A big one was actually Jim Carrey’s The Grinch.”
When it comes to the moment in Badjelly that he’s the most proud of, Cooper says the final episode is “essentially a movie” crammed into the 21 minute duration. “I wrote it quite big – which you should when you’re having a big battle with a witch, kids, a giant eagle, a goblin, a worm, a mouse and a banana – and we can’t believe what the crew would have managed to do with it. It’s really, really, really cool.”
Now at the end of a seven year journey that began with a single tweet, Cooper says Badjelly has been his “dream project” to work on. “We’ve always had the confidence in our crew and the artists and animators and illustrators in New Zealand, so it’s really nice to be able to show off to the world what we can do here.” He is also chuffed that Badjelly is releasing on TVNZ+ over the New Year’s break, as families across the country are all on holiday together.
“It’s definitely that time of the year where everyone is looking for something to watch together, I think that Badjelly is the perfect, perfect show for that.”
Badjelly arrives on TVNZ+ today
