Peter Jackson: A Film-maker’s Journey. Brian Sibley

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      Following the completion of Bad Taste in November 1987, there was an agonizing wait until the film was to be screened at Cannes in May 1988. I was unemployed, broke and still living at home, so I filled in the time writing Braindead with Stephen and Fran, and devising the idea for Meet the Feebles with Cameron. Eventually Cameron and I started building puppets to bring our ideas to life.

      by these characters that have the same flaws and weaknesses as any human being.

      Unlike the mild-mannered Muppets – whose frailties and idiosyncrasies are charmingly portrayed and utterly inoffensive – the Feebles, as the puppets in this version were to be called, were to be blatantly into anything and everything that was either illegal or immoral, or both! Although the name suggested that this devious, dubious bunch of crooks and perverts were somehow related to the clean-living characters created by Jim Henson, Peter never saw the idea as being a parody of The Muppet Show.

      Essentially, the Feebles were satirising human greed and weakness; we were sending up human beings and human nature, not puppets themselves.

      The original concept for using the Feebles had sprung out of a suggestion by Grant and Bryce Campbell for a possible late-night television show hosted by an elderly, cantankerous character called Uncle Herman who would tell a series of unlikely (even unsuitable) bedtime tales.

      Uncle Herman’s Bedtime Whoppers, as we called it, was to be a series of outrageous one-off, half-hour films devoted to different subjects, featuring different actors and probably made by different film-makers. In fact, they’d have nothing in common other than being introduced by Uncle Herman. Talking with Cameron, Stephen and Fran, we decided that this puppet thing featuring the Feebles might be a good candidate for one of Uncle Herman’s Whoppers!

      Stephen and Fran roped in another of their friends, writer, actor and cabaret comic, Danny Mulheron, who had directed Stephen’s satiric musical, Big Bickies and was collaborating with the playwright on an outrageous farce, The Sex Fiend. Described as possessing an ‘unstoppable curiosity and twisted perception of the world that is truly frightening and thoroughly entertaining,’ Danny was a suitably anarchic talent to be invited to join in the creation of the Feebles’ madhouse of mutated Muppets. Danny joined Peter, Stephen and Fran in writing the script as well as contributing lyrics for songs while Cameron Chittock began designing the stars of the show that was now being called Meet the Feebles.

      Peter was feeling decidedly happy with life.

      I thought, ‘This is fantastic! This is a five-month project that will keep me busy until May when I go off to Cannes and get the money for Braindead.’ We applied to the Film Commission for some funding – not much, $30–40,000 – convinced that it was a pretty much guaranteed certainty. After all, I had finished Bad Taste…True it hadn’t yet been released or sold anywhere, but they’d seen it and knew what I could do. They were hardly going to turn us down for an inexpensive half-hour TV show.

      But they did. The Film Commission declined the application on the grounds that Peter had assumed would make them assist: Meet the Feebles was not a feature film project, but a one-off TV programme which was never going to have any sales in the film marketplace. The money requested might have been relatively small, but it was an unsound investment. The group explained that Feebles would be part of a TV series, but it was a series that had yet to be commissioned and funded.

      We had a council of war and were very angry with this – as you always were in those days, whenever we got turned down or knocked back! Stephen, Fran, Cameron and me decided that we would fund it ourselves. It felt a bit like Bad Taste all over again, except that we were going to be doing it on a reasonably professional level: we were going to have a small crew, shoot it in a block and get it done. So we drew up a minimal budget of $25,000 and all chipped in equal shares. We put together a crew and Cameron and I started building puppets, getting together each day in the basement under his flat, chopping up foam and carving and sculpting these characters.

      Characters like Bletch the Walrus, a lascivious impresario and, literally, a ‘cat-lover’; Arthur the Stage-manager, a cockney worm in a flat cap and jumper (knitted by Peter’s mum); Wynyard the Drug-and-war-crazed Frog with a perilous knife-throwing act; and the star of