RV is for Regular Visit!

Back to The Works , which if you are a regular here, you will know I might as well be the prime advertising agency for! Sadly they don't give me a penny for all the publicity I give them, but hey! These are from a few weeks ago, but Internet has been problematical recently...Voda-no-fone! [Accurately; Voda-intermittent-pricey-fone]

So, as I say a visit the other week, it's all ephemeral, eclectic stuff which - I know - leaves the purists thinking "What the hell?...", but there you are, I try to cover a little bit of everything, and this pocket-full ticks a few boxes;

Pencil Tops, erasers, Sky TV, zombies, moles, monkeys, media toys...all for £4.24, which I spent so you wouldn't have to!

Close-ups, on the top row are the Ugo la Talpa figurines (by Giochi Preziosi), these are a Sky (Italy) character, presumably now on the clearance warehouse list somewhere and snapped-up by The Works for sale-on here in the dis-UK. They are flocked with the exception of accessories and the 'oscar' (Ugar?), although his base is flocked.

The semi-flat zombies (Bluesky - who also made the spaceman topper we looked at a while ago) are hideous, and are only here for the sake of completeness, seemingly transfer-printed onto Identical cut-outs, I later went back to check and all the cards have the same three images and the same duplicate figure. The monkey climbers (also Bluesky) are also supposed to hold the pencils up, but their bottoms aren't flat enough, so you have to prop them-up!

On the same trip I found these in Poundland, a 'Lucky Bag' (Funtastic) with no sweets and some pretty poor contents, but...it's a pound

RV is also for Return Visit!

So, obviously I needed to find out who Ugo la Talpa is, now my foreign-talk is just about able to work-out that Ugo is Italian for Hugo which is French, Spanish...er European for Hugh, and then to assume that la Talpa is 'the mole'?

First stop; He has a Website - it's in Italian...
Second stop; he has a Facebook page, if you're registered on Facebook - it's in Italian...
Still Italian; A blog-page with the Range in Question

Ok...something to go on, there's only - apparently (I don't 'do' Italian!) - eight in the range, but...hold on...I've got an 'Oscar' and a Roman that don't seem to be listed...back to the Works methinks, they are my namesake after-all, I've got to add them to the collection...haven't I?

So back to the store...four more, no more! Thinks "That's OK, I'm in Basingrad tomorrow, I'll try there"...three more, damn, that's one at the full 59p! Reading on the Wednesday gave up another and I had the 10 from the blog I'd found, plus two others I can't find anything else about, tennis player and climber. Note how Sky gets itself onto three of them...didn't Private Eye have a running gag about that?

I wonder if (assume!) they are related to specific episodes, like the old British TV's Mr Ben? How many others might there be? No! That will do, they might be named after me, but future uses for 50mm, flocked, anthropomorphic moles who only speak Italian are as limited from here as they were several weeks ago!

Google had also turned-up Something in English

While I was running around the various branches I also found....

...a four-colour pen rocket, in the style of the old Bic multi-biro. It's a pen, with FOUR colours and a ROCKET!