The Dodgiest Episode of Rainbow Ever Made (No, Not That One)

Question: What do they call a McDonald's in that warm, fuzzy patch of childhood utopia up above the streets and houses where the rainbow's climbing high? Answer: Nothing so brand-specific, but in 1983 Zippy, George and Bungle were made aware of the existence of the Golden Arches, boy howdy, did they want their viewers to know that its product was the greatest thing since sliced bread. I promised you some strange and unique fast food promotions to mark the year 2022 (aka the year of the Soylent Green), and I'm not sure they get much stranger than that time an episode of Rainbow was transmuted into full-blown commercial encouraging children to eat at McDonald's. For all the valid criticisms you can make of The Wacky Adventures of Ronald McDonald, and its raison d'être as extended fast food promotions designed to stoke brand loyalty in young consumers, at least with those titles you really ought to know what you're getting from the outset. Zippy, George and Bungle shilling for McDonald's within the context of their regularly scheduled programming is frankly not something I ever saw coming. The only thing that matches it in egregiousness would be that Christmas movie from the mid-1980s that momentarily stops the narrative to show you a vision of how wonderful the atmosphere must be down at your local McDonald's. But we're a few months off December yet.

When it comes to UK pre-school programming of the 1970s and 80s, you would be hard-pressed to find one more charming and non-condescending than Rainbow, the Thames Television-produced puppetry series centred on the adventures of responsible adult Geoffrey Hayes (himself)  and his adopted (well, I presume) children, Bungle the bear (Malcolm Lord, among others), George the gender-bending hippo (voice of Roy Skelton) and Zippy (also Skelton) the...actually, like everyone else I don't know what Zippy's supposed to be. As a child, I assumed he was some kind of reptilian (possibly a tortoise short of a shell), but he has the most unusual distinguishing feature of having a zipper for a mouth, meaning that the other characters can forcibly silence him, should he get on their nerves. Which he does, frequently, although I'll confess that whenever I revisit Rainbow nowadays I'm usually privately rooting for Zippy. He may be a punk, but he's blatantly the black sheep of the Rainbow family, and as such he has a lot to be rebelling against. Besides which, when I was a pre-schooler, Zippy was the character to whom I best related. Time and experience may have made me increasingly like George, but Zippy will forever feel like the imprint of the exuberant tot I once was.

A regular feature of each Rainbow outing were its trio of residents musicians, Rod (Burton), Jane (Tucker) and Freddy (Marks), would intermittently drop by to provide musical interludes, and episodes typically had Geoffrey or a friend of the family reading the puppets a story. Topics ranged from guinea pigs to narrowboats, and occasionally episodes would touch on some fairly weighty issues, such as unemployment and conservation. Then there was this one really dubious installment that aired on 18th November 1983 (as per Wikipedia) under the title "Fast Food", suggesting that Thames Television's mission to bring children a quality educational show could be intermittently compromised by the lure of the mighty pound. The premise is that Geoffrey (looking very sun-burned) is out shopping for flowers with a couple of young children, Rory and Daisy, whom he treats to a dine-in McDonald's, before ordering take-out to compensate for arriving home too late to prepare dinner for Zippy, George and Bungle, who are awed to have something so miraculous right there on their doorstep. I kept waiting for what seemed like the inevitable disclaimer, for Geoffrey to smile at the camera and say, "Yes, fast food makes for a nice treat now and then, but it's important to eat a balanced diet and also to exercise regularly." But it never came. Apparently they really were going with the angle that fast food was the great innovation of our age, and why on earth would you be going to all the trouble of preparing your own meals when you can just stroll into your local burger joint and pick up an unforgettable luncheon in a brown paper bag? The caveat seems to have been that they weren't allowed to mention McDonald's by name, but they do just about everything else in their power to shove the big Mc in your face. 

Before I talk about "Fast Food", a couple of disclaimers of my own are in order. Firstly, I have the YouTube user VideotapeFTW to thank for uploading this episode, otherwise it might never have come to my attention. Secondly, I have no actual evidence that McDonald's provided any kind of monetary incentive for Thames Television to create an episode of Rainbow singing its praises, and I am not going to claim as such for a fact. There are, however, more than enough tip-off elements in "Fast Food" as to arouse suspicion. And I do find it entirely plausible, given that Rainbow aired on commercial children's television, and the entire commercial children's television enterprise was being propped up by salt and sugar money (as became apparent when stricter regulations on junk food advertising were put in place in the early 00s, and CITV immediately went down in flames). A more charitable interpretation of the episode is that it was aspiring to look at some aspect of modern life to which kids could relate, and by 1983, visits to their local fast food joint were now a regular feature of many a British child's day to day experience (the first McDonald's in the UK having opened in 1974). The problem there being that there's very little in "Fast Food" that could be conceivably described as educational - it isn't looking at how fast food is made (though that's probably for the best) or why preparation times are so much faster than those of a more traditional restaurant experience. Nor is it attempting to put the consumption of fast food into a broader nutritional or lifestyle context. The point it's really eager to impress is that fast food is easy and convenient, while also letting you know of the variety of food you can buy at your local McDonald's. It has all the educational depth of a regular McDonald's ad, and it certainly isn't accomplishing anything more.

The other possible defence you could make is that this kind of programming was par the course for the 1980s, when extended advertising for popular toy lines accounted for a sizeable chunk of children's content. That's certainly true, but then Rainbow was branded as an educational series and primarily targetted at very young children, and this kind of flagrant product placement does strike me as an abuse of that particular format. All the same, watching "Fast Food" in the 2020s, I have rather ambivalent feelings toward the episode. On the one hand, my moral compass dictates that what Thames Television were attempting here was off the charts in its odiousness. And yet, this long after the fact, and with this kind of unashamed product shilling firmly regulated to the "Well, you couldn't do that now" bin, it's probably okay to laugh at just how egregiously unsubtle "Fast Food" is in pushing its "McDonald's is the greatest!" agenda.

"Fast Food" starts out innocuously enough, with Zippy, George and Bungle stuck at home, all wondering where Geoffrey has gotten to and complaining of their hunger pangs. Zippy has already set the table, less out of a desire to be helpful than as an act of protest against the universe's apparent insistence that they will not be fed this evening, as if placing the plates on the table increases the likelihood that food will come along to fill it. It's here that we get the only aspect of the episode that could reasonably be described as educational, when Bungle points out to Zippy that chips are made from potatoes.

We then cut to Geoffrey, Rory and Daisy (are they just a pair of random kids Geoffrey is with, or do they show up again in other episodes? If so, is it ever established what their relationship is to Geoffrey?), who'ved parked themselves conveniently right outside a McDonald's just as Rory declares that he's hungry. As noted, they were clearly unable to identify the restaurant by name, so the shot has been cunningly framed to cut out the lettering in the McDonald's signage, but with most of the Golden Arches logo still in sight. And on the windows, posters featuring one Ronald McDonald. You're certainly not going to mistake this venue for a Wimpy Bar. Noting how little time they have, Geoffrey declares that what they really need is some fast food. Rory or Daisy are both blissfully unaware of the meaning of the term, so Geoffrey leads them into McDonald's to get them started on their brand new unhealthy eating habit.

Here are all the tell-tale signals that we've just crossed the threshold from a pre-school educational show into a bona fide commercial:

• As we go inside the restaurant, we're greeted by even more visual brand reinforcement, by means of a close-up shot of the Ronald McDonald mural on the wall of the restaurant. They really were doing everything in their power to make sure you knew that the magic was happening at McDonald's.
  
• Geoffrey reads out a list of the menu items available at McDonald's...twice. "You have sandwiches, hamburger and chips, hamburger without chips, cheeseburger and chips, cheeseburger without chips, an extra big cheeseburger, you have ham and egg in a bun, fish in a bun, you have milkshakes and apple pie, coffee, milk..." This is worked in under the guise of a dubious gag wherein Geoffrey initially says everything too quickly (since it's meant to be fast food and all), meaning that he has to repeat everything at a pace with which his two young charges can keep up. Actually, I heard everything he said perfectly clearly the first time around.
  
• The second time, when Geoffrey goes through the menu items more slowly, we're shown close-up pictures of a number of the items on offer, juxtaposed with shots of Rory and Daisy licking their lips in an exaggerated manner. Are those Pavlovian urges kicking in for you kids at home yet?
  
• You'll also notice that Geoffrey apparently has no qualms about offering the children coffee. I don't know if children were big coffee drinkers in 1983, but it would appear to indicate that he's giving viewers a general pitch of what's available at McDonald's, as opposed to one catered specifically to the two small children at his side. Offering children coffee is, it itself, is another thing I suspect you wouldn't do nowadays - not so much for the caffeine content (in my experience, the UK was never as concerned about that kind of thing as the US), but for the scalding risk.
• The speed at which you receive your meal is...somewhat exaggerated. Geoffrey literally gets handed a tray of food right immediately ordering, with the packet of French fries strategically directed at the camera so that you won't miss those Golden Arches on the front. Geoffrey then turns buoyantly to the camera to ask the viewer if they've ever been to a place like this.
  
• Once Geoffrey and the kids are done eating, Geoffrey demonstrates the versatility of the McDonald's experience, by ordering three additional meals to take home to Zippy, George and Bungle.
• When Geoffrey surprises his trio of Muppet children with this unexpected bounty, Bungle asks where he got it all from. "I went to a cafe where you can buy food and take it home, and they served me very fast," says Geoffrey, still being reticent with brand specifics, but by now there can be no ambiguity as to which venue he's promoting.
  

After that, the episode eases up a little on the shameless commercialism. Having been fully indoctrinated into the brilliant innovation that is fast food, Zippy, George and Bungle are inspired to role play that they are running their own fast food restaurant, leading us into a fantasy musical sequence with Rod, Jane and Freddy, but the McDonald's brand shilling is momentarily put on hold. If anything, I think their sloppy presentation methods make the fast food on offer look positively unpalatable. And then in walks Geoffrey's friend Kat to read us today's story, about a witch named Mildred who opens her own fast food business, MacMildred's. In real life, Mildred would obviously have been fast-tracing her way toward a lawsuit, but here it's just another stealth means of impressing that more prolific Gaelic-sounding brand name upon the Rainbow audience. On the surface, the goal here was blatantly to make children hungry for McDonald's, and to pester their parents to take them for an extra big cheeseburger with coffee. The underlying narrative, though, is clearly one for the parents themselves, in emphasising just how easy and convenient fast food is when you've got a bunch of hyperactive kids to feed. This is reinforced by Zippy and Bungle's discussion at the start of the episode about the impossibility of having chips when you've no potatoes in stock. It is the only part of the episode to establish a connection between the raw ingredients and the final product, yet it implies a redundancy in so much as having to contemplate that connection - that dealing with potatoes is an absolute faff when when McDonald's are on hand to take care of all the peeling and slicing for you. Just as our relationship with what we eat becomes increasingly distant so too does our relationship with those we meet. Something noticeably absent from Geoffrey's visit to McDonald's with Rory and Daisy is any kind of meaningful interaction with the human employees. Although customer-employee interaction is a feature of the role-playing game assumed by Zippy, George and Bungle, in the scenes inside the actual McDonald's, employees are non-entities. Geoffrey gives his order to an off-screen employee who immediately hands him a tray without a word. Dealing with strangers is as undesirable as dealing with potatoes, and one of the implicit perks of the fast food experience, as presented by Rainbow, is a world in which all of that human-to-human messiness has been conveniently streamlined out of existence.

To give "Fast Food" some credit, it does at least promote good etiquette by showing Rory emptying the debris from his tray into one of the on-site bins, rather than leaving it for the staff or next customer to deal with (the poor kid actually has some difficulty with operating the bin handle with one hand and emptying the tray with the other). In fact, there's something charmingly quaint about how Geoffrey insists on certain dining formalities that should, in theory, have also been made redundant by the fast food procedure. Zippy ups his protest by hurling his fork to the floor, only to be reprimanded by the returning Geoffrey, who insists that he'll need to use it to eat the take-out he's brought him. Actually, I thought part of the appeal of this kind of fast food is that it's mostly finger food and you can bypass the use of cutlery (and plates) altogether, but I guess Geoffrey's too civilised to allow that kind of behaviour in his home, even when he's dealing with a bear, a hippo and a zip monster.

Rainbow ran on for the rest of the 80s, although budget constraints at the end of the decade meant that they had to axe the segments with Rod, Jane and Freddy (even with all that salt and sugar money on their side). Then came the 1990s, which were a dark time for Zippy & co - oh sure, the characters appeared in an episode of The Word doing a toytown techno version of their iconic theme song, but that was absolutely where things peaked. The original series was cancelled in 1992, with various ill-fated attempts at revival projects across the decade (sans Geoffrey and most of the original puppeteers and voice actors, who ended up working on a rip-off show, Mole in The Hole). The 2000s proved much kinder, now that the franchise was old enough to be considered a hot nostalgic property among the kinds of people who hung out at student unions or shopped at Birthdays; Rainbow merchandise started popping up everywhere, and it wasn't long before the characters were featuring in legitimate advertising designed to take advantage of that rejuvenated interest. In 2002, Zippy appeared in an (actually quite good) advert for Marmite, in which he revealed the spreadable yeast extract to be the one thing that could make him self-zip, thereby outing himself as a passenger on the "Hate It" train. Around the same time, Geoffrey Hayes was the subject of a surprisingly mean-spirited campaign for Virgin Money, lampooning the real-life downward trajectory his acting career had taken after Rainbow, to the point that he was currently driving taxis for a living. More recently, Zippy, George and Bungle were featured in an ad for Pizza Hut, as part of a wave of particularly noxious advertising in which nostalgic characters are flaunted heavily but only tenuously linked to the product in question. Unlike that aforementioned Marmite ad, it didn't feel like the work of people who understood the appeal of the Rainbow characters. Like Bungle would ever use the word "traitor".