The entertainer Carol Lee Scott, who has died of cancer aged 74, took time out of her career as a singer on the cabaret circuit to play one of children’s television’s most colorful characters, Grotbags, complete with green hair and skin, a blacked-out tooth and increasingly outlandish outfits.
Wearing moon boots and looking like a pantomime villain, Scott first played the wicked witch in Emu’s World (1982-84 and 1988) alongside Rod Hull, trying to lure his anarchic puppet Emu to her castle, Gloomy Fortress, so that she could use its special powers to control the aAll-singing all-dancing children from the Pink Windmill – “brats”, she called them. She kept her own servant, Croc, in line by hitting him with her bazazzer, an umbrella-shaped stick with a pointing finger at the end.
Scott continued with Hull in his subsequent programs, Emu’s All-Live Pink Windmill Show (1984-85), Emu’s Pink Windmill Show (1986), Emu’s Wide World (1987-88) and EMU TV (1989), as well as voicing the witch in his 1991 cartoon series, Rod ’n’ Emu.
Then, with the puppeteer Richard Coombs – who had worked with Jim Henson – she devised her own series, Grotbags (1991-93), whose new characters included Dorris the Dodo and Colin the Bat. She also played Auntie Kipplewick in some episodes and the shows became a cult hit with university students as well as children.