My life has been plagued by loathsome little girls! Deborahs, Hollys, bleuch!
YouTube randomly recommended me the first episode of the fifth series of T-Bag (or "T. Bag" as I see they traditionally punctuated it, but somehow writing it with a dash feels more natural), and it takes me back. I remember watching that episode, particularly T-Bag's line above, when it first aired in January 1989. I was twelve, and I'd been a fan since at least the second series in 1986 (the one with the numbers), though I'm not sure if I'd seen the first series (with letters) the year before.
1989 was the one with the spoons, and the last one with Elizabeth Estensen as T-Bag. It declined a little after that, but I kept in touch right until the ninth and final series (late 1992 rather than early 1993, to get it shown before Thames TV disappeared). That one really wasn't very good at all.
But the point is, if you haven't heard of T-Bag, it was a British children's TV institution! Each series of ten episodes followed a strict formula - the evil T-Bag was embarking on some kind of nebulous evil scheme, which was thwarted by scattering a group of objects across time and space, and one heroic young girl had to travel around and gather the objects before T-Bag and her assistant T-Shirt could find them. Each episode would feature exactly two guest actors who the girl would interact with and end up retrieving one of the objects, and in the final episode T-Bag would be defeated. It was great.
You were meant to cheer for the girl (Debbie for the first three series, then one with Holly, two with Sally, and I don't remember the rest), but in my usual chauvinistic way I didn't care about them at all. Not even Sally, who turns out to have been played by Kellie Bright, who I subsequently watched in The Upper Hand and Maid Marian and her Merry Men, and plenty of other things too. No, I was always watching it for T-Shirt.
T-Shirt's story arc was the same in each series. Thomas starts out free and happy in the antique shop he apparently inhabits with Debbie, but then is dragged back into T-Bag's service, struggling against it until he's magically mind-controlled to be her willing slave and tea-caddy. Over the course of the series he gradually starts to rebel, and by the final episode he's broken free and joined forces with the girl to vanquish T-Bag once and for all (until next year). He was very cool.
It's possible that I don't like the later years so much because I was growing more mature, but of course T-Shirt was doing the same. Played from start to finish by the wonderful John Hasler, he's around nine years old when they made the first series, and so of course he's around seventeen by the end. Fans of the series got to see him grow up, roughly a year ahead of me, and the way his character and interactions with T-Bag grow and develop while staying true to the consistent feel of the show in general is just brilliant. They should make some more episodes today, it'd be just the same, and I'm sure it'd be a big hit!
