Mini Hungarian language lesson: water spider, wonder spider.

Unusually, I need to start with a content warning: if you can't tolerate spiders, not even in cute cartoon form, please look away now.

"Vizipók-csodapók" was one of probably only a handful of kid's programmes where the protagonist was an arthropod, and not even a cute little beetle, a jaunty crab or a busy bee (as in the Japanese anime Maya the Honey Bee) but a spider.

A diving bell spider.

Only known as "vizipók" ("water spider") in Magyar, these fascinating spiders live almost their entire lives underwater in ponds and lakes, fashioning a diving bell from silk, where they cultivate an air bubble for them to breathe from.

As it happens, I know all of this from this very cartoon series, and so do most people who were children in the late seventies and eighties, when the three series of this show were aired.

The adventures of our hero and his friend, a grumpy diadem spider just stuck with you.

It was all the idea of Ágnes Bálint, a brilliant children's author who was behind most of the domestic animated series of the era, but when she pitched an educational show about aquatic invertebrates to the bosses of Hungarian Television, they weren't overly enthusiastic.

The show was of course still commissioned but with a shoestring budget that forced the crew to compromise and improvise on every level, yet they produced something both endearing and enduring.

But the idea that really made the programme what it turned out to be was to ask a professor of biology, György Kertész, already famous in university circles for his love of ecology and entertaining lectures, to co-author the series.

His knowledge and love of the little critters and her expertise in how to tell stories to kids was a perfect mix.

We were educated without ever noticing we were being educated at. From aquatic snails to copepods, we discovered them all throughout the programme.

Altogether they produced only 39 episodes of 5 minutes, surprisingly little compared to how large it looms in my childhood memory. (The first two series were later compiled into a feature-length film too.)

Of course most of this thread is just childhood nostalgia but the concept of balancing scientific accuracy with a simple narrative and overwhelming cuteness, despite featuring animals we usually consider as pests, is genuinely one that would be worth reviving in some form.