Small kid, large dog and last house naked

Winter is coming in the Pyrenees. You can tell this because all the leaves obligingly dropped off the conker trees outside The last house before Spain, leaving this normally chaste and discreet edifice delectably undraped in all its eccentric glory. Revealed for the first time are the perky little dormer windows, the full extent of the bizarre iron tat on the roof and the two ends of the wonderful gallery on stilts affair that goes all the way around the back of the house as well.

I suppose it's not surprising that the place is snoozing a bit these days compared to its adventures in the past. Back in the Franco era, there were customs officers at the border and even the vague little track outside the last house possessed its own checkpoint.

However it was sufficiently off the beaten track to get quite lively deep in the night when the officers of les douanes were all safely tucked up in beddy-byes. Girlfriend Claire, whose mum's house this is, tells me that when she was a child, you quite often heard knocked-off cars and lorries loaded with whatever contraband making a run for it in the dark. And it wasn't unknown for the last house itself to harbour the odd refugee from time to time.

It all reminds of that children's TV classic Belle & Sébastien, a prog so indelibly stamped on my generation that there's still a Scottish indie rock band named after it. I borrowed a French DVD of it and the whole thing comes back like it was yesterday.

For a start the BBC put an English narration straight over the top of the original French soundtrack so you recognise all the voices. We used to get a lot of Euro kid's TV like that. Either the Beeb hadn't invented dubbing yet or was too tight to bother.

Curiously we also watched, without fail every holidays, a French version of Robinson Crusoe, complete with similar el cheapo narration. Presumably the Beeb was again too tight to make their own stab at this most English of stories, but it still seems a bit strange on reflection.

B&S, you may remember, concerns the adventures of the orphan Sébastien, and Belle, a Pyrenean mountain dog big enough to flatten him with a single lick.

The boy is adopted by the somewhat stern homme de montagne César, who is quite a bon oeuf really and brought up with his own older grandchildren, the deeply fit Angelina and her own adolescent kid brother (a bit of a prong). It all sort of goes on from there with lots of mountains, snow, suspicious villagers and customs officers.

I don't suppose English kids would be allowed to watch it these days. For a start Nasty Norbert, the villain of the piece, tries it on with Angelina and gets the kid brother paralytic down at the village bar. But worse, much much worse. They ALL smoke; even César with his wise, reflective, manly old homme de montagne pipe.

I'm happy to say that the gorgeous but sensible Angelina has les hots only for the handsome young village doctor and rebuffs Nasty Norbert in no uncertain terms, and actually I don't think that she smokes either, but I don't think even that would be enough to save B&S from the PC police.

I have to admit I'm a sucker for kid's TV from when I was a kid. It's a good job The Clangers weren't French, I can bore for England on the genius of Oliver Postgate. I even named our coffee-maker after the Soup Dragon.