Harvy's House

Harvy's House is a Kuboian television show that ran on Vision 1 from 1993 to 1997. Hosted by Roddy Graston and the titular puppet character played by Mike Marion, it was a variety show with games, songs, celebrity interviews and previews of upcoming programmes. Each episode was broadcast in front of a live studio audience.

Format
Roddy Graston and Harvy presented Harvy's House live in front of a studio audience that consisted mostly of pre-teen children. Every episode began with Roddy and Harvy entering the stage to discuss what they had gotten up to over the past week; in series one, this was typically something embarrassing or humilating on Graston's ends, though in later series this was changed to mischief Harvy got up to elsewhere in Kuboia during the week.

Each episode featured a celebrity, who was often a popular singer or pop group at the time who would perform one of their latest or upcoming singles live. Each episode also featured a certain number of "Viewers of the Week" (usually two boys and two girls between the ages of nine and thirteen, though there were exceptions) who would try to play games on the show for prizes.

Other features included "Harvy's Sneak Peak", which showed a preview of a programme that would be aired on Bumper's Block later that day. This was eventually dropped in later series.

Gunge
Harvy's House featured gunge, typically during the last game of each episode. This typically involved one of the "Viewers of the Week" playing against the episode's celebrity guest. Assuming the child contestant won, they and the other "Viewers of the Week" would win a prize, which was often a video games console and a game.

Starting with series three, the prize game was moved to an earlier part of the programme and instead the finale of each show involved gunge in a different way. During the first part of series three, the celebrity guests were normally gunged by default, though if there was more than one in an episode, viewers at home voted for who they would want to be gunged, as the gunge tank was only designed to hold one person. This was changed partway into series three, where all of the children, guests and even Graston himself took part in a quick challenge (e.g. collecting an item and bringing it back to the starting point), with the person finishing in last place being gunged.

Graston himself was gunged on the show on two occasions; during the Christmas special of series two and during an episode of series five. Harvy himself was never gunged; Graston stated the producers avoided gunging Harvy because there were fears that the gunge substance could possibly ruin the material used for the puppet.

Broadcast
Although generally associated with the Bumper's Block programming strand, Harvy's House never actually aired as part of it, instead airing during the Saturday night 6:30p.m. slot, which was between Vision News and Bumper's Block. After the latter's discontinuation, the show ran for one more series before concluding after its final episode on 27th December 1997.

As the show was broadcast live, it would occasionally run on for slightly longer than the producers intended, which resulted in TVVC having to reduce the length of advertisement breaks in order to keep the schedule on track. This was normally compensated by airing longer advertisement breaks during the Vision News update at 10:00p.m.

Harvy
Harvy is a purple alien creature voiced by Mike Marion and originally created by Lilian Pond in 1991 as an early concept for the Bumper character who co-hosted Bumper's Block with Naomi Karma and Felix Olajide. In the 1993 Christmas episode of Harvy's House, Harvy is revealed to be Bumper's younger half-brother.

Legacy
After Harvy's House came to an end, reruns of the show aired on Nickelodeon Kuboia from April 1997 until April 2004.

Sometime in either 2004 or 2005, TVVC junked every edition of the show on Dominic Halls' request, though the "Viewers of the Week" were all given copies of the episodes they appeared in. Roddy Graston was also able to obtain every episode from series four and five, as they were the series usually reran on Nickelodeon Kuboia.

In October 2021, Monica Mesman, who appeared in a series three episode, set up a YouTube channel, Bumper Legacy, that was dedicated to finding footage of Harvy's House and other content relating to Bumper's Block by trying to find out the whereabouts of previous contestants to ask about their time on the show and if they still have the copy of the episode they were given. When Graston was interviewed by Mesman, he criticised Halls decision to junk all of the tapes, accusing him as "erasing history, our history".

Harvy himself has made sporadic appearances in other media since the show's cancellation, with Mike Marion reprising his role as the character on most occasions.

2023 tour
Graston and Marion reprised their roles for a Harvy's House live tour from September to December 2023.