Bleep and Booster Annuals

Bleep and Booster was a much loved cartoon series by William Timym (aka Tim) which was featured on Blue Peter from 1963 to 1977. During this period 313 five minute episodes were run.

Booster was a boy from Earth who travelled around space with his alien pal Bleep having adventures on weird and wonderful planets.

Bleep was from the planet Myron and his father was the top commander of a Myron spaceship which flew around the universe doing good deeds for other planets and keeping mischievous alien creatures in check. Invariably Bleep and Booster found themselves in trouble whilst performing innocuous errands for the said commander and thence requiring rescue.

Bleep and Booster used a technique called animatic animation which involved still pictures being slowly panned, with narration from Peter Hawkins. Hawkins was better known as the voice of Captain Pugwash but returned to the science fiction genre as the voice of one of the daleks on Doctor Who.

Bleep and Booster cartoon strips by Tim featured regularly in the Blue Peter annual books and became so popular that they even had their own annuals between 1966 and 1968.

William Tymin was born in Austria and studied at the Vienna Academy of Art but fled Austria in 1938 following Nazi occupation. His cartoon The Boss had been widely published in Czechoslovakia and Scandinavia. Tymim settled in England and continued his career drawing newspaper and magazine comic strips in the 1940s. His best known cartoon strip was about a dog named Caesar published in the Sunday Dispatch. Tymim was also a wildlife sculptor and his works included the bronze bust of Petra the dog which stood in the Blue Peter Garden and a well known statue of Guy the Gorilla which is close to the ape pavilion in London Zoo. William Timym died in 1990, aged 87.