Nick Park, Aardman extraordinaire and the genius behind Wallace and Gromit, is talking to me about the worst creature on the planet. “Over the years, I’ve been constantly surprised by the amount of people who genuinely hate him,” he says, with the gentle giddiness of your favourite art teacher. “They think he’s evil. But look…” He holds a model of the beast in question up to the lens of his Zoom camera. “He’s only a four-inch tall piece of plasticine.”
Feathers McGraw – thug, monster, penguin with a glove on his head – first debuted in Aardman’s Oscar-winning 1993 short The Wrong Trousers, in which he (shiftily) moved in with Wallace and Gromit while (eerily) plotting to steal a priceless diamond from the local museum (nastily). Feathers’ rottenness served as a blueprint for the series in the aftermath, the beloved duo going up against a cyborg dog, a werewolf-rabbit and a baker-murdering serial killer. And now, in the new Wallace and Gromit feature-length film Vengeance Most Fowl, Feathers is back: the most ghoulish presence on the BBC One Christmas Day line-up who isn’t in the Gavin & Stacey finale.
