children's itv's bosses had noticed how successful puppet characters (such as gordon the gopher and edd the duck) had been on its rival, children's bbc, so they decided to create their own version, which was scally the dog. he was operated and voiced alternately by three different puppeteers, who were richard coombs, john eccleston and michael j. bassett. coombs was the original operator of scally and also built the puppet of him too. however, due to him working on other tv projects at the time, he had to share the duties of doing scally with both eccleston & bassett too. during his time at children's itv, there was also a short-lived "scally" cartoon strip in the children's tv magazine, "look-in" as well.