CBB pulls strings to get Staffordshire puppeteer

David, from Stone in Staffordshire, then worked through the holidays, creating the lookalike dolls of Emma Willis and Rylan Clark ready for broadcast on Wednesday last week.

The puppets served as a hint at one of the show's trials, which involved half the contestants being puppet masters and the other half being the puppets.

David, who organised Stone Puppet Festival with Richard Jones and who runs Pelham Puppets, is no stranger to the tight deadlines of television, and took up the task.

He said: "Initially they just wanted to borrow some puppets but over the course of the conversation they asked if I could make them some puppets of the presenters.

"I have had a surprising amount of feedback on them and they've been shared on Facebook and Twitter."

He starts by building the model in Plasticine, then builds the head, body and hands. His wife, Sandra, makes the costumes.

David was involved with puppets and puppet theatre from a very young age and has produced and presented shows in theatre and television in the UK, Canada, USA and Spain.

He was born and raised in Stone, where he attended Christ Church and Alleynes schools.

Now the official historian for Pelham Puppets, he makes the new range of Pelham branded toys.

Last year he made a puppet for and appeared on Collectaholics, where he presented host Mark Hill with a wooden lookalike.

David said it was too early to talk about whether there will be a puppet festival in Stone this year, but said there had been preliminary meetings between the people involved. Thousands of people descended on Stone for the first Puppet Festival on August 8 and 9, for a weekend that was anything but wooden.

From Alice in Wonderland and The Gruffalo to a real life sized Punch and Judy family, the high street was filled to the brim with marionettes and glove puppets.