"With children's shows, when the cameras aren't on, we were doing all these rude things with puppets," said Gemini award-winning Gosley, who stuck his hand up a few backsides (puppet backsides that is) during his time on children's classics like Fraggle Rock and Sesame Street.
Yes Victoria, not all puppets are the demure, brightly coloured rhyming friends-with-everyone stereotypes we love to see on television or on the big screen. After all, it was only last year when Team America, the feature film from the creators of TV's South Park. stirred the censor pot with a scene showing simulated oral sex between marionettes.
Maybe the ills of society have finally taken their toll on the happy-go-lucky bunch that used to make up the puppet world. Or maybe they're just sick of competing with all the computer animation that's taking over television and film. Whatever the reason, puppets have turned the tables on characters like Big-Bird and the Cookie Monster.
The latest breed of puppets are characters like Rocko, who shows up weekly on the Canadian television comedy series Puppets Who Kill. The show, which is up for best comedy series at this year's Gemini Awards, explores four incorrigible puppets whose careers plummeted due to unseemly and criminal behaviour.
While these characters are a far cry from Lamb Chop or Howdy Dowdy, they are indeed here to stay. And it's about time, said Theatre Inconnu artistic director Clayton Jevne, who has incorporated puppets into his theatre productions for more than 20 years.
"In Europe it's always been an all-age thing," Jevne said. "There's shows for kids of course, but the big exciting draw for people is the adult stuff and people go crazy over it."
"For kids, if you want them to know it's a nasty puppet then you're going to make it look really nasty. The more sophisticated your audience is, the more subtle you want the art form to be so the audience can get the feeling of having achieved something."
Gosley is currently working on bringing another adult puppet show to the small screen. Joe Spleck: Dead Detective, which was recently screened in Cannes at the the World's AudioVisual Content Market (the Cannes Film Festival equivalent for TV). Gosley created the show with the help of two Toronto production companies and honed his writing, acting and puppet-making skills for the first 15-minute pilot episode. He's hoping networks will scoop it up so it can become the next puppet hit.
If the show gets picked up, he imagines it will be aimed at the 12 to 35 audience demographic, depending on what direction he takes. But that can easily change.
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