Some days this blog will just be something like "Hey, have you seen Rik Mayall's Grim Tales?"

   

This story is also told in Jim Henson's The Storyteller as "The Luck Child".

 More dressing-gown fun. Only tyrants have favourites, but Grim Tales will always be one of the things for whose existence I'm most grateful. Rik Mayall hits so many notes I never got to see him take a shot at anywhere else; you can actually imagine him being your friend in this. I also love the music and the look of the show, although it was only ever made available on VHS, so apologies for the fuzz. Until now, I'd assumed every episode was assigned to a different animator, because each approaches its tiny budget so differently, but looking at the credits it turns out all to have been the work of this guy, Bob Baldwin. And while I loved The Storyteller, I looked forward to Baldwin's no-budget worlds at least as much, whether he was building cities out of paper for The Griffin, above...
 

Princesses made of sweet-wrappers de-louse-ing a dragon for The Gnome...

A magic fish fahioned from tights for The Fisherman And His Wife... 

 A murderous brother in The Turnip...  

 And a Royal Ball that's just eyes on stalks for King Thrushbeard...