Basil Brush very aggressive Scottish hedgehog also made by Peter Firmin. In the mid-1960s Basil became a supporting act for the magician David Nixon, upstaging Nixon on the latter's BBC1 show "Nixon at Nine-Five" in 1967 and "The Nixon Line" (1967–68), to such good effect that the fox was offered his own show. Basil thus acquired his own television series on the BBC, "The Basil Brush Show", which ran for 12 years from 1968 until 1980, in which he was supported by various famous stooges: first, in 1968, by the actor Rodney Bewes, known on the show as "Mr Rodney"; next, from
Mandrake the Magician to New York and checked himself into the Chelsea Hotel to work on the rewrite. Three weeks later, he emerged with new draft in hand, but by then the studio had changed heads, and in as little time as his revision took, the project was dropped. NBC made a pilot for a "Mandrake the Magician" TV series in 1954, but no other episodes were made. Stage magician Coe Norton starred as Mandrake and Woody Strode as Lothar. Mandrake and Lothar first appeared in animated form with the Phantom, Flash Gordon, and Steve Canyon in the 1972 television special, "The Man