Housed in a musty-smelling former temperance hall in a leafy north London back street, the Little Angel theatre has been staging innovative and intoxicating puppet shows since 1961. Two years after it opened, a 15-year-old schoolboy named Ronnie Le Drew attended a production of The Little Mermaid and fell in love with the theatre and its marionettes. Within a few months, he had been accepted as an apprentice puppeteer.

“My headmaster wasn’t impressed,” he tells me as we repair to a cramped room backstage. “He told my mother: ‘Your son is leaving school for what I would assume is a hobby rather than a job.’” Le Drew, 67, with fluffy white hair and pink cheeks, has been a stalwart of the theatre ever since. Right now he is rehearsing the Christmas show: a revival of the gleeful musical adaptation of Roald Dahl’s The Giraffe and the Pelly and Me, about a trio of animals who form a ladder-less window-cleaning company.

Ronnie Le Drew with a miniature Zippy and other puppets at the Little Angel theatre, London. Photograph: Alicia Canter/The Guardian

But his best-known work has been for television. From 1973 onwards, he starred in Rainbow – conceived as a UK equivalent to Sesame Street – as the oval-headed, zip-mouthed show-off Zippy, who lived with Bungle the giant teddy bear, George the marshmallow-voiced, eyelash-batting pink hippo, and their human caretaker, Geoffrey. In later years, Le Drew also took over the puppet’s vocal duties from Roy Skelton. Several times during our hour together, he breaks into Zippy’s distinctive strangulated squawk, which is not merely alarming: it’s also enough to send any child of the 1970s into a nostalgic reverie.

For those of us who were goody-goodies in the George mould, Zippy could be a love-him-or-hate-him character. Le Drew understands this, not to mention the nails-on-a-blackboard effect Zippy had for many viewers. “Oh absolutely!” he laughs. “I even did a Marmite ad a few years ago. He’s a cheeky know-it-all and we’ve all got a bit of that in us.”

Rainbow’s producers called at the Little Angel in the early 1970s to try to interest the theatre’s founder, John Wright, in providing puppets for their new TV show (it still has its own onsite workshop). Wright turned them down. “But I was doing a show of my own here,” says Le Drew, “and I had this brown potato character with a zip across its mouth. I wonder if the producers noticed it when they visited. The first time I saw Zippy, I thought, ‘Ooh, that looks familiar.’”

The Rainbow gang – Bungle, Zippy, George and presenter Geoffrey Hayes. Photograph: Thames TV archive/Rex Shutterstock

He says this without chagrin – but then, he has done very nicely out of Zippy. “We got so much more money than a puppeteer could ever have dreamed of.” With the nostalgia market booming in the 1990s, the Rainbow gang even reunited to play clubs, pubs and student unions. When It’s Raining Men came on, George would wear a feather boa while Zippy sprayed the audience with a Nerf gun. They even tried a more risqué act, littered with swear-words and sexual innuendo. “The audience didn’t like it. They’d come to see the Rainbow they remembered.”

Ronnie Le Drew in the workshop at the Little Angel theatre in Islington, north London. Photograph: Alicia Canter/The Guardian

On the morning we meet, Le Drew is preparing for Zippy’s next job: providing commentary for a live football match for BT Sport. “I told them I don’t know anything about football. They said: ‘That’s exactly what we want.’” He was hired recently to help with character movement in a new live-action and CGI film of Beauty and the Beast starring Emma Watson, and he operated the prehistoric birds in Pan directed by Joe Wright, who is the son of the Little Angel’s late founder.

Operating everything from marionettes to rod, glove and tabletop puppets, Le Drew’s film career has included such popular classics as Labyrinth and Muppet Christmas Carol. But his proudest movie moment was on Little Shop of Horrors. “I had various bits to do: one was when you see the plant dialling the phone. It was only a few seconds but it was a close-up!”

Le Drew also tours a live show in which he talks about his career and brings along some of the puppets he has worked with. “Occasionally I do care homes, like the one my mother was in for the last few years of her life. If I bring out Muffin the Mule, they’ll all sing along: ‘Here comes Muffin/ Muffin the Mule…’ It’s lovely.” He tells me he has seen a change in the public’s response to puppetry. “Shows like War Horse or Avenue Q have helped people understand that it’s sophisticated, and perhaps not only for children.”

Whatever the audience, the principle remains the same. “A good puppeteer puts ideas across clearly. You’re looking through your puppet when you’re performing.” Of course, there is a tradition of horror films (Dead of Night, Magic) in which ventriloquists are possessed by their dummies. Le Drew says it doesn’t ring any bells. “I’ve certainly never heard of a puppeteer being taken over by their—” And with that, his head rears back, his mouth is suddenly agape and a familiar abrasive whine is filling the room: “Aaaaarrrrrgh, Geoffrey!”