it was simply faster to get there by those means. The show has a distinctive visual style. The set is a brightly coloured and stylised park containing the eponymous roundabout (a fairground carousel). The programmes were created by stop motion animation, which meant that Dougal was made without legs to make him easier to animate. Zebedee was created from a giant pea which was available in the animation studio and was re-painted. The look of these characters was the responsibility of British animator Ivor Wood, who was working at Danot's studio at the time (and who subsequently animated The Herbs, Paddington Bear, Postman Pat, Gran and Bertha). English-language version Narration in the British BBC version was entirely new and bears no resemblance to the French version. It was created by Eric Thompson from just the visuals, without any translation of the French scripts by Serge Danot. The first British broadcasts were shown every weekday on BBC1 at 17:50, just before the early-evening news at 17:55. Although the exact time of the early evening news varied over the years, The Magic Roundabout kept its slot before the bulletins for the duration of its original broadcasting, except for 16:55 time slots during October to November 1966, and earlier times during parts of 1972 and 1973. This was the first time an entertainment programme had been transmitted in this way in the UK. The original series, which was a serial, was made in black and white. From the second series onwards it was made in colour, but the series was still broadcast in black and white by the BBC; the first colour episode of the show ("Chocolate Soldiers") was transmitted on 5 October 1970. 52 additional episodes, claimed to have been not previously broadcast, were shown in the United Kingdom from January to March 1992 on Channel 4's "The Channel Four Daily". Thompson had died by this time, and the job of narrating them in a pastiche of Thompson's style went to actor Nigel Planer. These episodes actually had been previously narrated by Thompson (particularly from the 1970-1971 series), being redubbed editions of the original French colour episodes by AB Productions (with different music and slightly different voices) broadcast in 1990. An additional 43 episodes were narrated by Planer from April to September 1993, this time, with most of the episodes coming from a batch of new French episodes broadcast during that same