Mini Hungarian language lesson: stowaway.

Yesterday I said Bertalan Farkas was the only Magyar to have been in space but that isn't entirely true. Even if we ignore Charles Simonyi's later stint as a space tourist, there is someone else.

Someone more famous than either of them.

The Tévémaci ("Telly Teddy") was a stop-motion animated bear who first appeared on the screens of Hungarian television in 1963 as the main character in the ident for the evening children's programme Esti Mese ("Evening Story").

With only one TV channel and this being the main weekday kid's programme, he became a household name almost instantly and stayed that way for many decades.

Or maybe I should say SHE became a household name?

In a surprisingly progressive move, Tévémaci's gender was left officially undetermined, with a wardrobe that was girly in one era, boyish in another.

The idea was that kids should make their own minds up about it, and I can report that as a kid I couldn't care less.

It received its first makeover in 1968 for colour television, and was now doing various other activities beyond just brushing teeth.

It was redesigned several more times, always preserving the main character and the basic felt-on-cork-on-wire-skeleton design.

This means that just like you can date English people by asking them who their Blue Peter presenter was, you can tell our age by asking which one was our Tévémaci.

Mine was this:

Of course what we didn't realise as kids was how much it was treated as a political tool to educate for socialist values. Not wild propaganda of course, just little things: like how Tévémaci lived in a tower block rather than a cottage, as they were new and unpopular at the time.

Then there was the teeth brushing, which was fairly obvious but less obviously on the eve of November 7th (the anniversary of the October Revolution) it wasn't allowed to spit.

At least according to TV insiders at the time, it's difficult to tell urban myth from insane reality.

And so it came to pass that the great propaganda opportunity of human spaceflight also saw Tévémaci don a very lifelike space suit and accompany Bertalan Farkas on his journey to Salyut-6, to help him read a bedtime story from space.

What more can I say? Tévémaci is part of our lives, our culture from a time when nationwide shared experiences via television was the norm.