The Big Knights

Parents who take their little ones along to this big-screen ‘Big Knights’ experience may initially feel a little ripped off. This isn’t a new feature-length adaptation of the BBC series, first shown over the Christmas period in 1999, but just a bunch of episodes slapped together (with credits in between and everything). What’s more, the digital animation looks ultra-cheap: the programme was one of the first to be created on home software, and it shows.

But those trifling concerns go out the window once ‘The Big Knights’ gets going. This has to be one of the funniest, goofiest, most ideas-stuffed kids cartoons in decades – and voice work from the likes of Alexander Armstrong, Prunella Scales and a bellowing Brian Blessed doesn’t hurt a bit. Set in a Pythonesque world where knights in armour, hydroelectric dams, mobile phones, witches, mad scientists and East European peasantry coexist in relative harmony, it’s the kind of show where logic plays second fiddle to wild invention. Any programme that can get back-to-back laughs out of theoretical physics and dinosaur slapstick is okay with us.