David Sant, voiceover artist

A famous Italian clown called Carlo Bonomi voiced the first four series of Pingu. He did all the characters, using an invented language of noises that became known as Penguinese. When a British company bought the rights in 2001, they needed someone who could speak Penguinese as well as Bonomi did, so I sent them my CV. I needed the money. I’d been touring with my physical theatre company and things were always a bit hand to mouth.

The language sounds random – “moot moot” and the rest – but it’s actually quite precise. Theatrically, it’s like Grammelot, a technique that has been used in theatre and commedia dell’arte for hundreds of years. It’s designed to sound like a real language, and the audience can sort of guess what it means, but it’s basically gibberish.

The BBC were worried about Pingu tipping his sister's potty over his head

Recording was exhausting. The animators would script each episode in English, then film it with the puppets. Afterwards we had to translate the scripts into Penguinese, recording each part while watching the characters talking on screen. I shared Pingu with Marcello Magni, who also had a background in physical theatre. We did about 17 characters, from Pingu’s baby sister Pinga to Robby the Seal and the rest of the family. We made up about 95% of the words on the day, though some would recur: “toy” became something like “tellibelli”, I think, and “drink” was “ciochilani”.



The show was created in the 1980s by a Swiss-German called Otmar Gutmann and, right from the start, it was unembarrassed about things like bodily fluids, nappies, potties and their contents. It could be quite controversial. I remember the BBC getting worried about one episode where Pingu tipped his sister’s potty over his head. We had to do two versions, one substantially messier than the other. I think that version went straight to DVD.

We didn’t get royalties, just a day rate. We didn’t know anything about that side of the business: we were just guys who did physical theatre. If we had, we’d be millionaires by now.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘No patronising moral, just naughty characters – people love that.’ Photograph: Hit Entertainment

Steve Cox, animator

After we bought the rights, we went over to Gutmann’s studio in Switzerland and brought back everything we could find, right down to Biros that had run out. The puppets were all falling apart, but they still looked pretty scary, like zombie penguins. So we made moulds and recast them out of resin.

We used “replacement animation” rather than stop-frame. When Pingu walks, eight different puppets are needed: you take the stationary puppet off the set and replace it with one raising a leg, and so on. We had hundreds and hundreds of puppets, doing everything from stretching up tall to squashing down flat into a pancake. Movements like that would take ages if you used Plasticine puppets that had to be constantly resculpted.

The animators would each make their own episodes. I put a lot of pressure on myself. I imagined myself into Pingu’s world, looking out at it with his eyes. I’d ask myself: “What do I want to do?” And I’d think about Pingu wanting that extra bit of food, or doing that naughty thing. I’d strip away all adult notions of consequences and have Pingu just doing things without thinking, charging in, getting in trouble, and then wondering how he can get out of it. Can he hide the broken thing – or blame his sister? Some animators didn’t quite get it. Their character looked like a penguin, not Pingu – dead behind the eyes, doing things without any real motivation.

Some parents didn’t like Pingu because he was too naughty and they didn’t want their kids to copy him. Others weren’t keen on the gobbledegook, since their kids weren’t learning anything. But I think it transcends all that. There’s no childish narration over the top, no patronising moral, just naughty characters. And people love that.







