Trivia / The Sooty Show

• Acting for Two: In the Sooty & Co era, Brenda Longman voices Soo and also plays Mo, the two often appearing in the same scene.
• Disowned Adaptation / Keep Circulating the Tapes: Richard Cadell totally despises the animated spin-off Sooty's Amazing Adventures. In an interview he had after he purchased the franchise in 2008, he claimed that he destroyed all the master tapes to the series.
  "...they made a cartoon, and it was shocking. It was awful and when I bought the rights to Sooty... I actually got the master tapes of this cartoon series and put it all in a big blue skip and had it burnt. I never wanted it to ever be seen."
  • However, this claim was actually debunked by a fan who knows Richard in real life. The master tapes are still intact within the ITV archives, but will never be shown publicly within Cadell's wishes.
• Promoted Fanboy: Richard Cadell, made clear in an interview for CITV's 30th-anniversary celebrations.
• Seasonal Rot: The entirety of the HIT Entertainment ownership was this and a bit of Executive Meddling.
  • At first, the Gullane purchase of the franchise seemed fine, and the 2001 series went off without a hitch despite some minor flaws. But then, bring in HIT Entertainment, who purchased Gullane in 2002. HIT's only interest in the purchase was the Thomas & Friends property, and this led to the company heavily decreasing Sooty's budget significantly, with Series 2 and 3 featured heavy Flanderization to the cast including Sooty and Sweep becoming more naughty, Soo becoming more bratty, Richard and Vicki interacting with the puppets a lot less, repetitive "Three Strikes and You're Out" plotlines that always had the characters apologising at the end of every episode, and the (almost) complete absence of Scampi in favour of having Butch and Miki appearing more. It also led to several long-time cast members, like Brian Sandford and Brenda Longman, the voices of Sweep and Soo, leaving production and being replaced with new puppeteers/voices. The quality decrease was so noticeable that ITV pulled the series within only the second episode of Series 3, while the rest of the series did not air until the launch of the CITV Channel in 2006.
  • Meanwhile for HIT, while they licensed the characters for several live theatrical stage shows, they had trouble with exactly what they wanted to do with the character. What is more, HIT didn't try to export Sooty, as they felt the franchise had "limited international appeal" and attempted to sell the joint-venture off to another third-party like Entertainment Rights. When this fell though, according to Richard Cadell, HIT's attempts to try and "internationalise" Sooty had failed significantly, as he tried to pressure HIT into bringing the franchise back to its roots while HIT's management was threatening to get rid of him and all humans entirely to produce an animated series (likely to be CGI animated) that featured Sooty speaking out loud.
  • The many attempts by HIT to produce a new series for ITV had failed by the end of 2006, and by this point, the company was under heavy debt and was under the ownership of firm Apax Partners. HIT began selling properties they didn't see fit, had little international appeal, or were tired of using, and Sooty was one of them for all-three categories. The company put the franchise, as well as the Sooty Limited/Bridgefilms venture, which also held the rights to Magic Adventures of Mumfie up for sale in October 2007. Britt Allcroft would re-acquire Mumfie in March 2008.
  • Cadell did every way to get Sooty out of corporate faires and successfully acquired the property from HIT in June 2008 (while Britt Allcroft purchased back Mumfie in the same year). He successfully got the franchise out of Seasonal Rot with the production of the direct-to-video movie Sooty: The Big Day Out in 2009, and produced a new television series in 2011. In his words in an interview after he purchased the franchise in regards to HIT's meddling:
  "It became almost a school lesson with not a single joke in the damn thing, and ITV said, ‘Kids aren’t watching it like they used to.’ It was a terribly sad day for Sooty."

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