Fifty years ago today, it was time to play the music and time to light the lights. On 5 September 1976, the British public first met the Muppets – an epochal moment in the history of light entertainment whose reverberations are still felt to this day.
This was the show that saw Rita Moreno conclude a performance of Fever by smashing a puppet’s head between two cymbals, Alice Cooper convince the characters to sell their souls to the devil and Vincent Price cover Carole King’s You’ve Got a Friend, accompanied by ghosts. The Muppet Show was not like other television programmes.
