Olga da Polga: the beloved guinea pig of the author of Paddington Bear arrives on the small screen | Children’s television

PAddton Bear ranks among the most beloved characters in British children’s literature, a status confirmed by the two hit films made about his adventures and his recent screen appearance with the late Queen.

But in the heart of its creator, the writer Michael Bond, there was enough room for another favourite: a guinea pig called Olga da Polga. The star of a popular series of children’s books, this wildly inventive furry creature will now feature in a children’s television series, just as the author had always hoped.

“Olga’s time has finally come,” said Bond’s daughter, Karen Jankel, whose childhood pet inspired her father’s books. “They were really wonderful stories and he always believed they would work well on television, filmed that way, with a combination of live action and animation.”

The series, Olga de Polga, is coming to CBeebies this fall and will use real actors and animals, switching to animation to tell Olga’s elaborate and not entirely reliable stories. The books, released in 1971, were just as beloved as Bond’s tales of the famous Peruvian bear.

“It all started when my dad came home with a guinea pig for my eighth birthday in 1966,” Jankel recalls. “I named her Olga da Polga, an idea that could well have been suggested by my father because she was a tricolor Abyssinian, therefore of Russian origin.”

Bond had previously found success with his Paddington books, as well as his animated television series The herbsbroadcast on the BBC in the late 1960s and 1970s. The arrival of the new pet sparked his imagination.

“My own Olga lived to be seven and a half; not bad for a guinea pig. My dad built her a hutch as well as a pen so she could go out in the garden,’ said Jankel, who ran the Bond literary estate for 30 years until the business the family had formed to be sold in 2016.

Program makers from Maramedia, a Glasgow-based production company specializing in animal filming, approached Jankel with the idea of ​​making a show based on the books. Some of the characters in the new 13-part series are taken from her childhood, just as they were in her father’s original stories.

“There’s Noel the cat, who we also had at home, and then there’s the adults, Mr. and Mrs. Sawdust, who was based on my parents, and of course Karen Sawdust, who I guess was me. That’s where the similarities with us ended. But the stories also have Graham the turtle and Fangio the hedgehog. Scottish sitcom star Greg Hemphill Always the gamewill play Mr Sawdust opposite Balamory Mrs Sawdust by star Julie Wilson Nimmo.

Jankel was close to her famous father, who had previously worked as a television cameraman for the BBC and who died five years ago aged 91. combined with animation for her fantasies,” she recalls. “So much so, in fact, that he acquired another pet, Olga, later in 1989 and started doing a pilot show himself. A friend helped him get a turtle from London Zoo and our new cat played Noel. But Fangio the hedgehog had disappeared. Even though I lived in Pimlico, not the countryside, one day I found a hedgehog curled up near the trash cans. I called dad and he put it in a cardboard box where it hibernated for a while. My dad eventually filmed them all in my stepmother’s beautiful big garden, where we all discovered that filming with real animals is a lot harder than we thought.

Bond wrote scripts for an entire series, and when Jankel saw the adaptations put together by Maramedia, she was struck by the similarity. “It was remarkable. Everything is exactly as my father imagined, although Olga is not a tricolor guinea pig. It is now sandy, for continuity reasons, because they had to use four different animals. She does have rosettes though.

Jankel said his father’s writing always included animals, from his books about Mouse Thursday to his adult detective series about Monsieur Pamplemousse and his trusty sleuth Pommes Frites: “One way or another, he could see the character of an animal shine through.

But Bond would be amazed, she thinks, by the close association her bear now has with royalty: “The moment of the Platinum Jubilee meant that the last time many people saw the Queen up close was was in the lovely tea time movie she directed.But there are people who love Olga, more than Paddington, because she really meant something to them when they were kids.

Maramedia co-founder Jackie Savery is one such longtime fan. “After years of working in children’s television and with animals, I wondered if it would be possible to portray Olga’s funny and irrepressible spirit,” she said, adding that directing the series, in consultation with animal welfare experts, “has been a total labor of love”.