Ripped straight from the pages of Get The Freebles (which ran in The Face magazine) the show stars Jaime (daughter of Ray) Winstone as insane teenage anarchist Whitey Action, the wearer of vivid hairstyles and short shorts, and Eddie Shin as Terry Phoo, a Buddhist kung-fu cop who has borrowed the moves and wardrobe of Bruce Lee. Plus, (and here is the coolest thing) Carl Weathers as Whitey Action’s tough-as-nails cop dad Ben Benson! The show also stars the gorgeous Talulah Riley as Lady Eleanor Rigsby and Danny Webb who plays the sinister and power-hungry Lord Rothwell.
Set in 2012, a group of Freebles (a set of mutants who control the world’s media) led by Jimmy Freeble, who looks like Zippy from Rainbow but with a basketball for a head, break into Buckingham Palace and assassinate the queen. With the help of his gang that look like droogs from A Clockwork Orange (a luchador-mask-wearing mutated bouncer and a seven-foot purple ape that looks like a refugee from the Banana Splits), he tries to take over the world at the request of a shadowy cabal of bad guys.
All that is stopping them is Phoo and Whitey, equipped with a retro-futuristic car borrowed from Speed Racer, some help from Prince William and Harry and a few nifty numbers on the dance floor… and all compressed into one hour of telly.
Overall, this is a brave move for BBC3 and a commendable effort to translate a cartoon/comic to the screen. While it maybe doesn’t translate perfectly, Phoo and Whitey are picked right up and dropped from the page onto your telly. With mutants, monsters, anarchy and Carl Weathers there is no other show on TV that could match this for sheer entertainment value.
