Why I'll never forget Cartoonland's Glen Michael

The Herald Scotland

10-07-2025

The first two are obvious but the power of Michael was immense. Here was a man with a foreign voice (Devon English) with the ability to transport a 10-year-old to a place he had never even imagined existed. To Cartoonland. This was a world of cheeky, friendly ghosts, wily coyotes and a cute mouse who made his feline housemate's life an unrelenting misery.
Glen Michael introduced us to a sailor man with a cute South Pacific hat and much less cute tattoos, and a love for tinned spinach. And through the presenter the youngsters of Scotland were given direct access to traditional Americana via a very loud rooster, a canine sheriff's stolid but stupid deputy and a couple of bears that lived to steal from the picnic baskets of gullible and undeserving humans. And of course, we didn't catch on straight away that the greatest cartoon of all, Top Cat, was a cartoon copy of Phil Silvers' Bilko. But Glen Michael certainly did.
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And we loved Glen Michael almost as much as we did the cartoons he showed us when we came home from school. To be honest, aged 10 in 1966 when the presenter's stint began, I was a little too sophisticated to be captivated by Paladin the talking lamp with the dark voice that hinted at something of a pernicious soul.
But thanks to the great selection of material – who couldn't laugh at the sheer malevolence of the Roadrunner – the children of the time were happy to go along with Michael's broadening of the programme, to turn it into a mini-variety show with a sense of theatre in which he revealed performing dogs (Rusty and Rudi), used bluescreen to enable him to walk into cartoons and join the action and invited star guests.
Glen Michael (Image: Andy Buchanan)
It was many years on interviewing Glen Michael that it became obvious how – and why – he had turned a cartoon screening show into variety television. He was variety. Born Cecil Buckland in Devon, his father was a high society butler who once worked at the real-life Downton Abbey. Michael learned by osmosis the power and the need to maintain a fixed smile. Yet, his parents were also part-time performers. "My father was a good singer,' he recalled. 'My mother was a cabaret singer. In those days they would go around doing dinners.'
There is no doubt Glen Michael was compelled to become an entertainer. He recalls walking five miles down a country lane at the age of 12 to see a show. "I sat in the audience and was stage struck. From then on, there was nothing else I wanted to do but go on stage. I would come back from school and go up to the bedroom in front of a long mirror and would act things I'd seen in the pictures - Humphrey Bogart and such.'
On leaving school, with just £4 in his pocket, the teenager took off for London to pursue a career as a performer. He heard about ENSA, the Forces entertainment service and after a stint driving trucks, he landed a 'spot', in which he performed solo for the first time. (It was also where he met future wife Beryl, a singer and actor. The couple married in 1946, when Michael was 19 and Beryl 23.)
His acting career developed, landing a role in a part in the 1950 classic Ealing film, The Blue Lamp, starring Jack Warner and Dirk Bogarde. I didn't know at the time but the director Basil Dearden reckoned Michael could be the next Ian Carmichael.
Glen Michael at STV (Image: Scottish television)
However, Glen Michael took a bold chance and changed his name and headed north, "On November 15, 1952, I turned up at the Victoria Theatre in Paisley to start rehearsals with Jack Milroy and I didn't know what the hell I'd come to. I didn't know anything about Glasgow or Scotland - and I never went back [to England]. I loved it, I loved the people."
I never did see Glen Michael in theatre, but I did see him in television in the early sixties when he appeared as a straight man in the Francie and Josie Show. And he proved to be a perfect foil. (The fact he became friends with the immensely difficult Fulton suggests Michael featured as much grace as he had tolerance). And he proved to be quite perfect as the presenter in Cavalcade. The viewers certainly thought so, at one time receiving over 2,000 letters and postcards a week and he achieved a staggering 98% of Scotland's television audience.
Glen Michael loved the adulation. He was showbiz. But when it all stopped, the demand for the personal appearances, the panto runs (surprisingly often cast as the baddie) the broadcasting stints dried up, the man whose cartoons made us laugh 'till we were sore wasn't laughing at all. He didn't enjoy retirement at all. 'Not really. Because I was forced to stop."
In later years he enjoyed daytime detective programmes. And football. He didn't much rate children's television today – perhaps a little too fruity, given he sometimes censored the action in the cartoons he fronted. And there was an aura of sadness about the man who felt he could – and should – have performed forever.