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Lift Off! With Coppers and Co!

NO RELATION to your rug-cutting frug-promoting Ayshea affair, oh no. This was an appalling sketch shitathon coralled into existence every week by DAVID “COPPERS” COPPERFIELD. Based on LIFT OFF!, an earlier music and variety effort linked by Mat Irvine-style special effects “lift with a mind of its own”, except now without the music, variety or indeed effort. The warnings were there: not one but two fucking exclamation marks in the title.

2 Comments

2 Comments

  1. Applemask

    January 4, 2016 at 10:26 pm

    There was another programme called Lift-Off that just about scrapes into my cream-era (the early nineties), an Aussie import that was intended to be their answer to Sesame Street, with puppet-flavoured narrative bits intercut with frantic quasi-educational animation about letters and/or numbers. It was mostly notable for its central puppet, an eerie, voiceless baby in a red onesie with no face whatsoever that crawled about and seemed to be trying to communicate, unware that it had no mouth. It was called “EC”, which was supposed to stand for Everychild, and it was the most horrible thing in the world. It was like Guillermo del Toro had moved into edutainment. Back home, he was inexplicably given his own spin-off game show, despite the fact that Australian kids hated him just as much as the seven or eight British ones who bothered to watch in when it was shown on Channel Four circa 1993, during that period where they’d happily grab any old musty imported kiddie show for weekend mornings, from cartoons that even the dying TV-am had turned down (Pro-Stars, Hammerman, Little Shop) to eerie knockoffs of Sesame Street like Lift-off and Eureeka’s Castle.

  2. Jason

    October 20, 2018 at 6:41 pm

    I was in the audience for one of the shows. A sketch was being filmed at my local Asda in High Wycombe, and the TV folk told this impressionable 10 year old that I could see the show being filmed at BBC TV Centre. So a few weeks later, I went with my parents one Friday evening.

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