Extras: Trailer Gallery, Creating Trumptonshire with Gordon Murray
Series Creator and Producer:
Gordon Murray
Narrator:
Brian Cant
Music:
Freddie Philips
"Here is the clock, the Trumpton clock. Telling the time steadily, sensibly, never too quickly, never too slowly. Telling the time
for Trumpton."
And, like its compatriot, Camberwick Green, each episode runs for fifteen minutes
and concentrates mostly on one of the individuals, after the clever into with
the two clock figures.
Proof of its greatness also came with a dance single released in July 1992, A Trip To Trumpton,
which made No.6 for Urban Hype.
Narrated by Playaway's Brian Cant, for this release there are 13 episodes compared to
the
DVD released in 2002
which only contained 8 for no apparent reason, making the 2003 'Complete' boxset sounding more
like it should have been done for going against the Trades Descriptions Act.
The 'stars' of Trumpton include Nick Fisher, printing posters for the local
band concert, Miss Lovelace arranging a window display in her shop, the mayor
keeping order in the town hall and Mrs Cobbit hawking her cheesy wares in the
town square, ie. selling flowers. Oh, and don't forget the fireman. Hugh, Pugh,
Barney McGrew, Cuthbert, Dibble, Grub.... presuming I've got those names right.
The thirteen episodes cover the stories: The Bill Poster, Miss Lovelace
& the Mayor's hat, Mrs Cobbit & The Ice Cream Man, Miss Lovelace & the statue,
Mr Platt & The Painter, The Mayor's birthday, Telephone, The Rag & Bone Man, The Window Cleaner,
Cuthbert's Morning Off, The Plumber, Pigeons and The Greenhouse.
# "Y.M.C.A. It's fun to stay at the..." #
The programme is presented in 4:3 fullscreen, but for this release while they've
cleaned up a lot of the print scratches in the remastering, it still appears to 'buckle' quite often.
This is very bizarre and not what's expected.
The sound is in mono which comes across clearly enough.
However, there's still only one chapter per episode which is very poor. When I make my own DVDs,
recording programmes from TV, I add a chapter after the opening credits, one before the
closing credits and then spaced out at five-minute intervals as a minimum, which would
mean each of these (at just under 15 mins) would have 5 chapters per episode.
One plus this DVD has is some extras, albeit not many. There's a Trailer Gallery (3£mins)
which, apart for one from this series, doesn't feature the programmes you'd expect, so the line-up goes
Trap Door, Trumptonshire, Lavender Castle, Postman Pat & The Great Dinosaur Hunt and
Little Red Tractor: Glorious Mud, the first two in 4:3 and the other three in anamorphic 16:9.
The other supplemental is
Creating Trumptonshire with Gordon Murray (3 mins), an except from BBC's Animation Nation,
presented in anamorphic 16:9 with programme clips in 4:3 within the 16:9 frame. Both of these are the
kind of thing you'll watch once and that's about it.
The menu has subtle animation and is scored with the main theme, making it look like the town's
noticeboard, plus when you select the options within it segues between with some characters walking
or driving about to the 'busy' music from the series. Sadly, again, there are no subtitles.
Trumpton is a truly unmissable series, and this DVD is an improvement on the last release, but
it still needs work doing on it in terms of creating subtitles, sourcing an adequate amount of extras
and getting the picture right.
DVDs reviewed by the editor are watched on a Panasonic TXW32R4 32" widescreen TV
connected to either a Creative Dxr2 DVD-ROM player or Microsoft Xbox and
played through a Sony STR-DB930 amplifier.
PC games reviewed by the editor are on:
Since Nov 2005: Intel Pentium D 830 3.0Ghz, 1Gb RAM, 128Mb nVidia GeForce 6700XL, Windows XP
Since Aug 2003: Intel Pentium 4 2.66Ghz, 512Mb RAM, 128Mb GeForce4 MX440 graphics, Windows XP
Since May 2003: Intel Pentium 4 2.6Ghz, 512Mb RAM, 128Mb ATI Radeon 9600TX graphics, Windows XP
Since Jun 2002: Intel Pentium III 600Mhz, 384Mb RAM, Windows 98 SE, 64Mb ATI Radeon 8500LE
Since May 2000: Intel Pentium III 600Mhz, 384Mb RAM, Windows 98 SE, Voodoo 3 3000 AGP
