I didn’t watch a lot of TV when I was a kid. My parents generally limited my siblings and me to a half hour of “screen time” a day. The exception to this limit was when we were home sick from school. On one of those days I spent on the living room couch drinking Capri Sun and feeling sorry for myself, I saw an episode of a show that would remain buried so deep in my memory that I would spend years wondering if I had imagined it.
The images started surfacing in my mind in junior high. A cluttered shop, like an old antique store. Toys and little figurines on every shelf. Little dolls in a bed. A pair of little troublemakers – goblins – climbing around the shelves and making mischief. And, most vividly, a beautiful woman carved from wood, the figurehead of a ship, watching over the store, singing from time to time.
I had these images, but no words to go with them, no character names or show titles. I asked my sister, trying to describe what I remembered. She thought she remembered the goblins; she said that one of the kids in the store let them out of a toy box in the first episode and they’d been causing trouble ever since. But neither of us could remember the show’s name, and neither of our parents remembered the show at all.
Over the next few years I would occasionally remember the show again, mainly the singing figurehead. I could never recall what it was she sang. At one point my brain supplied a recording of “Oh What a Beautiful Morning”, but the voice was from one of the tapes we used to listen to all the time, not from this show that nobody but me remembered. Even though my sister had remembered it before, when I brought it up in subsequent years, she would just shrug. I tried asking my friends at school if they remembered it, but nobody did. At some point I tried Googling it, but “antique store children’s show” didn’t bring up any results.
By the time I went to college, I was fairly certain that I had imagined the show. It wouldn’t be too surprising. I had a vivid imagination and was always making up stories, and memory is not a perfect recording, except in some rare cases.
I’m now a senior in college, and a couple weeks ago I was ushering an event at the Englert. While waiting for the doors to open, I started chatting with another usher, a woman a few years older than me. Our conversation landed on the TV shows we'd watched as children. I thought about the singing figurehead, and I thought, “Why not try one more time?”
So I described the pictures in my head to this stranger, of the goblins and cluttered shelves, and she said, “Oh yeah, and there was a sort of counter in the center of the room.”
And I said, “Yes! Yes, there was!”
She didn’t remember what the show was called, but the picture in her head lined up with mine. Suddenly I had validation: whatever this show was, I had not made it up!
A couple days later I went home for Thanksgiving break and started chatting about the whole thing with my mom. She suggested that I try Googling it again. This time I typed in “children’s tv show singing figurehead.” And the first search result was the Wikipedia article for an early 2000 PBS show called The Noddy Shop.
As soon as I read the name, I could hear the theme tune (“Here at the Noddy Shop…”). I scrolled down the article. It was set in an antique shop. The kids would tell stories with the dolls on the shelves. There were two goblins, “Lurk” and “Snipe.” And there was a character named “Island Princess,” described in the article as “A wooden carving, rather like a ship's figurehead, in a traditional Hawaiian costume. She sees everything that goes on in the shop.”
I immediately searched YouTube for an episode and watched the opening credits. There was the shop. And there were the goblins. And there she was, about twenty seconds into the video: the singing figurehead who’d stuck in my mind for all these years.
Memory is a funny thing, isn’t it?
