It must have looked like a madcap scene straight out of Paddington Bear – and one the nation’s favourite duffle-coated Peruvian would have enjoyed immensely.
Hollywood star Hugh Bonneville was down on the carpet with Michael Bond at the Paddington author’s home in Little Venice, London – near Paddington station – making a cardboard castle for guinea pigs with scissors and glue (Paddington would certainly have brought marmalade into the proceedings with only helpful intentions...).
Hugh became a friend after starring as Mr Brown in the first Paddington film and he, his wife and son were over for lunch.
While he was a bear enthusiast to his core, Michael was also a life-long fan of guinea pigs and since the mid-60s he regularly kept two as pets – one of them always called Olga.
Olga was, of course, the inspiration for another of his children’s books, The Tales of Olga da Polga, published in 1971.
By the time of Hugh’s visit, he was on his seventh Olga.
His hope had always been that a TV series based on his Olga books would be made – so much so that in 1989 he wrote a script and spent months filming his pet rodent, along with the family cat, a tortoise and even a hedgehog, to make a pilot episode in his own garden.
Sadly, nothing was ever done with his amusing and painstaking footage. But some 30 years on, a 13-part live-action series, Olga da Polga, filmed with real animals, is finally appearing on CBeebies to charm a new generation of children.
“The television episodes are beautiful, I’m so proud and my father would be thrilled,” says Michael’s daughter Karen Jankel, who got the family’s first Olga as a pet for her eighth birthday in 1966.
The character Karen Sawdust, in both the books and TV series, is based on her, while Mr and Mrs Sawdust are based on her father and her mother, Brenda.
“For months on end, he was on his hands and knees making the pilot! He got very stuck into it,” she recalls, remembering how she would find him chasing an aloof cat or coaxing a hungry Olga to communicate with an uninterested tortoise.
“It was very difficult. My father discovered filming animals is not an easy thing,” she goes on. “He always thought it would be lovely but it got put away and nothing was done with it. It was a kind of hobby project.
“The idea pitched for this TV series after he died is so similar, it was such a coincidence. He would have loved it, it’s exactly what he had in mind.”
And what of any similarity to Olga’s celebrity cousin, Paddington – a national treasure, not to mention a favourite of our late Queen?
Karen chuckles. She still finds Paddington’s new tier of stardom, following his appearance in a sketch with Elizabeth II for her Platinum Jubilee, hard to fathom.
“It’s pretty hard to reach Paddington’s fame,” she laughs. “Olga is quite different from Paddington, she’s quite a feisty character and tells tall stories. Paddington is a character we would all love to have in our lives, whereas Olga is a bit more of a madam!
“Paddington is probably the kinder character, but my father enjoyed writing the Olga stories every bit as much.”
Karen recalls how even before his death in 2017, aged 91, Michael would still sit with his two guinea pigs on his lap, feeding them baby sweetcorn or French beans – because each pig preferred a different snack.
I was lucky enough to meet them, and admire Hugh Bonneville’s handiwork, when I interviewed the author at home a few months before he died. Roaming free, the guinea pigs had made the dining room – and a variety of chewed wine boxes – their home.
Michael scooped them up playfully and introduced them with delight.
Movingly, Karen reveals: “The final Olga died literally a couple of days after he did.”
Michael had owned his first two pet pigs as a boy, calling them Pipsqueak and Wilfred.
When Karen was eight, he surprised her by taking her to pick up their first Olga in a cardboard box.
He made Olga a hutch and a run himself, which appeared in his pilot. The hutch in the new TV series is “exactly like that my father built for the original Olga,” says Karen, who is touched by the attention to detail.
And Michael based his books on Olga’s real-life exploits – like the time she escaped her run in the garden.
“She didn’t get too far, luckily. She was quite a greedy pig. She liked her food, so she was fairly easy to catch!” says Karen.
Then there was Boris, the neighbour’s guinea pig, who would regularly visit.
“We thought they would have babies but then we discovered he wasn’t a boy after all!” laughs Karen. “Artistic licence went into the stories.”
It was much later, after Karen had grown up and Michael was living with his second wife, Sue, that he tried to make the Olga pilot – with a later Olga as its star.
His whimsical, grainy footage shows the little guinea pig snuffling in his garden, nibbling grass, staring at the blue summer sky and eyeing up her playmates: Karen’s cat, who played her original childhood cat, Noel; Graham the tortoise, who Michael claimed as a pet via a friend who worked at the London Zoo; and Fangio the hedgehog.
Fangio stumbled into the thespian life after Karen found him beside the bins outside her house one morning in Pimlico, Central London.
“It was sitting in the bottom of the basement well curled up, a little prickly ball,” recalls Karen. “This hedgehog in the middle of Pimlico had just arrived! A baby hedgehog.
“So I put him in a box and rang my father and said, ‘I’ve got you a hedgehog’. He was let loose in the garden, they fed him and he chose to stay for several years. He was very amenable to the filming.”
After seeing Paddington reach new heights in the world’s affections in recent years and becoming a key fixture in tributes after the late Queen’s passing – with Paddington toys and marmalade sandwiches left alongside all the floral tributes – Karen is now thrilled to be seeing her father’s TV ambition for Olga realised.
She’s also delighted that it’s so true to the books and that the Sawdust family – with Mr and Mrs Sawdust played by real-life husband and wife Greg Hemphill and Julie Wilson-Nimmo and her own character, Karen, played by Isla Mercer – are so true to her family.
The only difference is the accents, as the animals all have regional ones – and Olga sounds like a proud Lancastrian. “But it only adds to her character!” Karen says.
- Olga da Polga, CBeebies, 5.35pm Saturdays and Sundays. Also on BBC iPlayer.
