Sooty - Miscellanea

Miscellanea

• In Sooty's late-1960s' and early-1970s' shows, a musical act featured were The Sooty Braden Showband. This featured Sooty and friends on various instruments playing alongside Musical Director Alan Braden and his band. The Sooty Show would close with a rousing performance from the band.
• Richard Cadell actually made a guest appearance in The Sooty Show Christmas Special in the 1980s - 10 years before taking over from Matthew Corbett.
• A large number of shows ended with or contained a song relating in some way to the episode, although over the years a number of songs were repeated and quickly became classics - the most famous being "Battle Of The Drums" and "Home Is Where the Heart Is."
• Twice during the Sooty Heights era, television channel ITV2 declared Christmas Day as being "Sooty Day" - and dedicated its schedule to episodes and documentaries about Sooty.
• Sooty appeared on Kellogg's "Puffa Sugar Stars" cereal in the 1960s, then on "Puffa Puffa Rice" cereal starting in 1973.
• The Doug Anthony Allstars wrote a song describing Sooty as a skinhead.
• There used to be an extremely popular 'World of Sooty' museum in Shipley, West Yorkshire open in the early 1990s, but this was later replaced by an animatronic cat exhibition, which was in turn replaced by a marketing agency. There were also Sooty related attractions at the now defunct Granada Studios Tour in Manchester, Camelot Theme Park in Lancashire, and also at The American Adventure Theme Park in Derbyshire until the late 1990s. The park has since closed.
• The original Sooty now resides in the northern UK village of Brancepeth near Durham, with Charlotte Lonsdale who also owns a more recent version of the puppet.
• In the television series "The Final Cut", one of Francis Urquhart's junior ministers, Geoffrey Booza Pitt (played by Nickolas Grace) is referred to disparagingly by the Opposition MPs as Sooty in reference to his being a sock puppet for Urquhart.
• The action of many episodes of Sooty and Co. takes place on a street that appears to be the Coronation Street set at Granada Studios, although none of the famous landmarks, such as The Rovers Return or The Kabin, are visible. The set was possibly used as an exterior location because Sooty and Co. was filmed in the same studio complex.
• Sooty appears in Bring Me the Horizon's music video "The Comedown."
• On 23 March 2007 The Sun newspaper reported that a potato looking like Sooty had been dug up by Mick Audus in Ely, Cambridgeshire.
• The Magic Circle contains a showcase in their museum room to commemorate Sooty's magical exploits.
• In 1996 Sooty featured on the 26p stamp issued by the Royal Mail as part of the "Big Stars from the Small Screen - Children's TV Characters." set.
• For many years Sooty has featured on the charity collecting boxes for the Royal National Institute of Blind People.