Rimini Riddle

 

Right, this blog post was necessary, someone needs to talk about the frankly terrifying children’s television series that appeared in the early to mid Nineties and left god knows how many children scarred for life, me included.

There’s barely any information on Rimini Riddle on the internet: if it wasn’t for the stuff on Boards.ie, I’d still be wondering if it was a figment of my imagination, since the programme has disappeared off the radar with remarkable efficiency. I suppose it’s hardly surprising that RTE aren’t showing any re-runs, it’s not exactly the sort of programme that anyone should have shown children the first time around.

Here’s the basic plot of the story, from what I can remember and from the fragments of information online:

It was a puppet show about these three children who were sent to live with their Aunt Vera, who ran a guesthouse.  The youngest kid was called Leo, and another was called Rory. I have a feeling that the third child could have been a girl, but those puppets were fairly asexual to look at, so I’m not really sure.  Leo had a stuffed toy called Otto who came alive when the others wern’t looking. And it was an EVIL possessed toy as well, which made it so much worse.

There was a picture in the sitting room of two girls beside the sea, and it would come alive and occasionally the children would go into the picture. It turned out that the two girls in the picture had both died from drowning, and I think that they may have been related to the children, though again, I’m not sure.

As if that wasn’t enough, there was a really creepy man called Jeffrey who came to the guesthouse who wanted to marry their aunt, but only so that he could take her money. The dead girls in the picture figured out what was going on and alerted the children. I think the man ended up getting trapped in the picture.

Other random facts about Rimini Riddle:

There were two series.

There’s no evidence to suggest that it came to any sort of conclusion, if anyone knows what the riddle was or if it was solved, please, please, leave a comment.

Claudia Carroll (Nicola from Fair City) was one of the girls in the painting.

The worst part about the programme was its downright creepiness and the way it made you feel as if you were going mad. Everyone that can remember it seems to share this view, including the people that I’ve talked to about it. Whenever I mention Rimini Riddle, the people who remember it seem to either hyperventilate, have a panic attack, or confess to a phobia of puppets.

Dominic Moore was the puppeteer – he’s done a lot of work for RTE, including the puppets for the Morbegs, and Marie Hannigan (who wrote for Fair City) wrote at least some of it.

If anyone can remember anymore about Rimini Riddle, please leave a comment…  it would help a lot. In the interim, I guess I’ll just carry on ranting on about it to anyone who’ll listen to me…

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