Tufty vs The Ice Cream Van

For a long stretch of the 20th Century, UK road sense was synonymous with a little red rodent with brilliant manners and an impeccable grasp of the kerb drill. 1953 saw the genesis of Tufty Fluffytail, an anthropomorphic squirrel created by Elsie Mills of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA) as part of an initiative designed to instil safety awareness in the very young. By 1961, the character had grown sufficiently in stature that a Tufty Club was formed, and would be an educational powerhouse for the ensuing two decades. Tufty's adventures were detailed in a series of stories, written by Mills and illustrated by Kenneth Langstaff, each with an explicit teaching about avoiding some form of calamity. Tufty lived in a community of creatures known as the Furryfolk, and was frequently seen with his friends Bobby Brown Rabbit, Minnie Mole, Harry Hare and Willy Weasel. Though the campaign was predominantly associated with a common concern facing wildlife and small children - how to avoid becoming road kill in a world increasingly dominated by traffic and tarmac - the Tufty tome dealt with all manner of safety considerations, to hidden hazards around the home to playing safe near water to sensible behaviour at firework displays. Attempting to steer these guileless youngsters in the right direction were an assortment of adult authority figures, including Tufty's parents, the perpetually stern Policeman Badger, schoolteacher Mrs Owl and a hedgehog crossing guard whose moniker eludes me.

I recall Tufty being a pretty ubiquitous part of my early childhood - I had multiple books, an audio cassette and I think even a Tufty board game - so I find it interesting just how few other Millennials I've encountered, even older Millennials, who seem to remember who he was. I've entertained the possibility that he might have faded a bit by the late 1980s and I had all this Tufty stuff due to coming into some 70s kid's unwanted junk through a car boot sale. And yet, as per the timeline on RoSPA's official website, Tufty was still around by the early 1990s, when he was subject to a modern redesign that presumably did not resonate well with the Nintendo generation; from there, things dropped off until 2007, when an appearance on the BBC time travel drama Life on Mars gave him momentary relevance.

Whether you regard Tufty as a beloved childhood icon or an archaic obscurity, I hope it won't go amiss if I confess my deepest darkest secret regarding the bright-eyed blighter - I actually didn't like him that much. Oh, I liked the stories and the Furryfolk in general, but there was something about the lead character that I always resented. My big lingering reservation about Tufty, as a child, was that he always did everything right. And that's terrible.

Far be it from me to question the effectiveness of the Tufty campaign. It ran for four decades, at its peak the Tufty Club boasted over two million members and 25,000 branches, and just a year after the club was launched, the director general of RoSPA, Brigadier R.F.E. Stoney, had already noted a significant reduction in deaths among children under 5. That's all very excellent. Go Tufty! For me, though, there was little appeal in a hero who was so stainless and who made so very few mistakes. I appreciate that Tufty was supposed to be a character who modelled good behaviour and whom kids could look up to, but the trouble is that he wasn't at all relatable. I remember precisely one Tufty tale, from that audio cassette, in which Tufty had his turn at being the fuck-up, and it involved him leaving toys on the stairs and causing his mother to take a tumble. That story was one of my favourites, because it was so satisfying seeing the goody two-shoes be knocked off his high horse for a change. Otherwise, you had your occasional example of Bobby Brown Rabbit doing things wrong (often relating to his two younger sisters, whom he was hopeless at looking out for) but duties for modelling bad and unadvisable behaviour typically fell on Harry Hare and Willy Weasel. Harry was basically the anti-Tufty, in that he was a cocky bastard whose understanding of consequence was practically zero, while Willy was a pliable milksop who could be easily led astray with the wrong influence (ie: Harry). Neither character was malicious or actively looking to cause trouble, but they had a heck of a knack for inviting it. The species alignment is unsurprising - squirrels and rabbits are considered cute and innocuous, while hares have an Aesopian association with impulsive bravado and weasels are traditionally depicted as the little seeds of chaos of the animal kingdom (even if, in Willy's case, that chaos has no basis in any predatory instinct). If you're wondering where Minnie Mole fit into the equation, she was the token female friend whom I recall got largely sidelined. Off the top of my head I only remember one story where Minnie was the central character, which involved her getting impatient waiting for her mother to collect her from school and wandering into the street by herself.

To me, Harry was the most interesting character because he was the most fallible of the bunch. Something about his rebellious spirit, however ill-fated, evoked admiration. His naivety and his difficulty in differentiating right from wrong gave him an endearing vulnerability. He was a character the reader could learn along with, as opposed to having the superiority of an already perfect character rubbed in our faces. I found myself rooting for Harry to come through, however probable it was that he was going to come a cropper. Just as any rare instance of Tufty being humbled was received with great satisfaction, any intermittent yarn where Harry was able to demonstrate sound judgement, or at least not become the cautionary example, was something to be savoured.

With the immense popularity of Tufty tales, it was all but inevitable that animated outings would follow, and these came courtesy of John Hardwick and Bob Bura of Stop Motion, an animation team best known for the "Trumptionshire Trilogy", a series of programs comprised of Camberwick Green, Trumpton and Chigley. Their Tufty collaborations began in 1967 with the 12-minute theatrical short The Furryfolk on Holiday, which dealt with various aspects of safety at the beach. In 1973, a series of television fillers followed, featuring narration by Bernard Cribbins. The most infamous of these among public information film connoisseurs is "Ice Cream Van", which depicts what happens when the titular vehicle stops at Tufty's street and Tufty and Willy each go to get a soft serve. Tufty does the sensible thing and asks his mother to accompany him, whereas Willy heads out without adult supervision, with disastrous results. On this occasion, Willy didn't need the peer pressure of Harry to lure him into taking risks, with the promise of ice cream proving incentive enough.

 

The Tufty fillers were targeted at children under 5, and were accordingly a gentler breed of PIF, steering clear of the muted eeriness of the "Charley Says" series or the nightmarish metaphors of "Lonely Water". There is a warmth and geniality both to the animation and to Cribbins' narration. "Ice Cream Van" does not, nevertheless, soft pedal its message, emphasising the van's deceptive duality as a vendor of exciting treats and a potential deathtrap drawing children to the hazardous roadside. Having collected his ice cream, Willy makes the mistake of crossing out beside the parked van, so that an incoming vehicle does not see him until he's immediately in front of it. The moment of impact is tastefully obscured by the van, though a dull telltale thud is highly audible, making it obvious what kind of grisliness is playing out behind it. The good news is that Willy does not seem too seriously injured - he's last seen sitting upright, fully conscious - although the sight of his inert leg and dropped ice cream make for pitiable signifiers of shattered innocence. Cribbins mournfully observes that, "Willy has been hurt, and all because he didn't ask his mummy to go with him to the ice cream van", before the PIF ends on a moment of comfort, in having Tufty and Mrs Fluffytail walk out and stand compassionately over their wounded compatriot. Significantly, they walk together and retain their tight hold of one another's hands, a wholesome gesture that reinforces the PIF's message whilst underscoring the sorry absence of parental vigilance around our wayward weasel. Cribbins' narration places the blame for the accident squarely on Willy, but maybe the greater onus was on his parents to not allow such a young child to wander the streets unsupervised to begin with (I'm assuming Tufty and his friends aren't meant to be significantly older than the audience they were aimed at). One notably dated component is that Cribbins explicitly identifies it as the mother's role to look out for young children - the notion of the father having caregiving responsibilities is apparently unthinkable. 

A slight quirk of these Tufty fillers is that, for those who know the squirrel primarily as a PIF character and not from the Mills books, it is Willy Weasel who's remembered as the neighbourhood shit-stirrer. By comparison, Harry got off surprisingly lightly in his animated form. He had a somewhat harder time in The Furryfolk on Holiday, when an impromptu swimming session necessitated his being rescued by Policeman Badger. His television presence, however, was restricted to a single filler, where he himself didn't suffer any repercussions for his ill-advised actions, outside of the trauma of witnessing Willy being knocked down by a car...again. Yes, this is by far the grimmest thing about these Tufty animations - they somehow made Willy being hit by traffic and breaking his leg into a running theme. The first time it happens, in "Ice Cream Van", it's stark and upsetting. When it happens a second time, in "Playing Near The Road", it takes on a slightly more unintentionally comedic edge, since you rather get the impression that this whole neighbourhood might have it in for Willy (a suggestion not dispelled by Policeman Badger's total indifference to the motorist who knocked him down, or the distinctly unprofessional manner in which he hauls the injured Willy to his feet and lets him stagger back to the pavement). It casts a darker shade upon the Furryfolk - bright-eyed, bushy-tailed and suspiciously slow to brake for weasels.