The Magic Roundabout (known in the original French as Le Manège enchanté) was a French-British children's television programme created in France in 1963 by Serge Danot, with the help of Ivor Wood and Wood's French wife, Josiane. The series was originally broadcast from 1964 to 1971 on ORTF (Office de Radiodiffusion Télévision Française).Having originally rejected the series as "charming... but difficult to dub into English", the BBC later produced a version of the series using the original French-stop motion animation footage with new English-language scripts, written and narrated by Eric Thompson, which bore little relation to the original storylines. This version, broadcast in 441 five-minute-long episodes from 18 October 1965 to 25 January 1977, was a great success and attained cult st