Scally The Dog

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A Children's ITV promotional photo from early 1989, of Scally The Dog & his first co-presenter, Mark Granger.

Scally The Dog was a puppet mongrel dog character, who co-presented Children's ITV (CITV) afternoons service, from January 1989 - April 1991. Children's ITV (CITV) is the brand name used for the majority of children's television output on ITV in the United Kingdom.

[edit] Children's ITV

CITV's bosses had noticed how successful puppet characters (such as Gordon the Gopher & Edd the Duck) had been on it's rival, Children's BBC (CBBC), so they decided to create their own one, which was Scally the Dog. He was operated and voiced alternately by 3 different puppeteers, who were: Richard Coombs, John Eccleston & Michael J. Bassett. Coombs was the original operator of Scally and also built the puppet of him too. However, due to him working on other TV projects at the time, he had to share the duties of doing Scally with both Eccleston & Bassett too.^[1] During his time at CITV, there was also a short-lived Scally cartoon strip in the children's TV magazine, Look-In as well.

Scally first appeared on CITV in January 1989, alongside his first human co-presenter, Mark Granger. When the independent production company, Stonewall Productions took over producing CITV in April '89, Scally was kept on and appeared alongside the new presenter, Jerry Foulkes in the afternoons for the rest of '89. In Summer 1989, when CITV's summer mornings service launched, he appeared with new recruits, Clive Warren and Jeanne Downs as well. Scally had several catchphrases that he often used on CITV, one of which was: "Yes, indeedy!", which he usually said when he was happy about something. Another one was: "We're still here!", which was often said by both Foulkes & Scally during their links, referring to them still being on-air at the time.

Foulkes left CITV at Christmas '89, and Downs took over presenting in the afternoons in January 1990, along with Scally. This continued until April 1991, when Stonewall lost the contract to produce CITV back to Central Television (who had also done it previously from 1983 - 1989). They were both replaced by a solo, Tommy Boyd. However, both Downs and Scally made a welcome return to CITV 12 years later on 3 January 2003, when they appeared on a special one-off programme called, CITV's 20th Birthday Bash, which was celebrating CITV's 20th birthday on that day. Other former presenters appeared on the show too, such as Gary Terzza, Roland Rat and Matthew Kelly.

[edit] After CITV

According to a post by Downs on the TV Forum website in 1998, the puppet of Scally now resides at the Museum of the Moving Image in Birmingham, and is reported to be owned by someone who used to work on the BBC Saturday morning kids' show, Live & Kicking. (ref: www.knightmare.com).