In 1958, Hetherington created Mr. Squiggle, a moon-dwelling marionette with a pencil for a nose; and, and the character first appeared on the Children's TV Club on ABC TV, as MISTER JOLLY SQUIGGLE by "Heth". Hetherington was granted the copyright (no.8027) for Mr. Squiggle in 1962; and his application stated that he had first created "Mr. Squiggle" on 1 August 1958).
…Mr. Squiggle… looked much like Noddy but with a long pencil for a nose. Mr. Squiggle was a visitor from outer space, and would arrive to the show in his spaceship. Mr. Squiggle would interact with a female host, and make drawings from sent in by children. As the sketches included nothing more than a few random lines, the alien would often turn them into drawings of people, animals and so forth — using his pencil nose. The images would rest on Blackboard, a grumpy character who shouted "Hurry up". "Upside down" was often heard from Mr. Squiggle, and to the audience’s delight, the drawing would be incomprehensible until the host turned it upside-down. Hetherington was operating the puppet from above, so saw the drawing upside-down himself.
The Mr. Squiggle puppet is a Sicilian style of marionette, with a rod running through its head. This him to provide enough force to be able to draw with its nose — and presumably why the character such a tall hat.
The marionette had a very heavy head, and it was always manipulated by and voiced by Hetherington himself as the sole operator. The gentle politeness of Mr. Squiggle, and the gentle strength of Hetherington's well-modulated voice was immediately attractive to children, at a time when most of the other Australian TV channels had violent, raucous, and brash ventriloquist acts associated with their children's shows.
Exploiting the "fusion" of his skills as both puppeteer and cartoonist, he used the tip of the pencil that formed the puppet's nose to convert "squiggles" that had been sent in to the television station by young viewers into full-realised drawings and cartoons. Most significantly, given all of the mechanics of his marionette's performance, all of these "squiggle" conversions by Mr. Squiggle were always performed with the original children's drawing up-side down.
When asked, in 2009, in one of the "Moment in Time" segments of the ABC TV programme Can We Help?, on behalf of a viewer, Miriam Webster, whether Mr. Squiggle had lead in his pencil or whether it was "something more extraterrestrial", Norman Hetherington replied: "It started off with a very large felt pen, a very thick felt pen; but, in Studio 23, we were very close to the lights, and the heat would dry up the felt, and it wasn’t very good, so we graduated to crayon, and then to oil chalk, and then chalk."
Initially intended as a temporary fill-in, the show ran on ABC for 40 years, Mr. Squiggle's first appearance on ABC TV was on 1 July 1959, and he drew his last picture on ABC TV on 9 July 1999.
When interviewed by Sarah Collerton in 2009, Hetherington told her that "I taught Mr Squiggle to draw and now he draws better than I do".
In May 1999, Mr. Squiggle was honoured by Australia Post with his own 45c. postage stamp.
Read more about this topic: Norman Hetherington