I haven't got any screen grabs or proper pictures of Crow & Alice unfortunately (hopefully somebody else can step in there?) but here they are in Buttons comic -
Crow & Alice were in You and Me from the very beginning (well actually, I don't know for sure whether they were in the unbroadcast pilot episodes, but I think they were). At first they were going to have a crocodile and a rat or something like that, but they soon came up with the idea of a crow & a hamster. Alice was a hamster in order to give her "a rounder personality" than a tortoise, which was the second choice for that character. Crow was chosen to be "omniscient about out of doors".
Anybody add anything? I don't think there's any particular websites or anything about the series...
I'm not sure about those 1986 titles just have lots of kids dancing about really, the whole point of it being called You And Me in the first place was that it was about the interaction between parents/adults and children, and how they could play together - as opposed to Play School, say, which was just about kids playing.
Those puppets you're thinking of are the fantastic Cosmo (Frances Kay) and Dibs (Francis Wright):
Going back a bit, I found this contemporary review on the original introduction of Crow & Alice...
"The realism of these puppets is a pleasant relief after some of the recent grotesque arrivals on the puppet scene, though it might be preferable if the hamster was a slow learner rather than actually ESN [educationally subnormal]. It is good to see that the producer has avoided the combination of puppet and human which has been unsuccessful in varying degrees in other programmes for this age group."
I'd bet that the "recent grotesque arrivals on the puppet scene" was a sleight at the ITV lunchtime shows for pre-schoolers that had all been starting up in the previous year or so - Rainbow, Pipkins, Mr Trimble and the like. I mean they really were horrific...
(Can't find any picture of Pipkins, & the abominable Hartley Hare, at the minute, but there's plenty here.)
And that stuff about the unsuccessful combination of puppet and human - don't worry, this was eight whole months before Wordy's debut!
What an interesting way to get people interested in reading! Book trailers are like movie trailers, but for books! You can find them all over the internet now, but here is a site that's featuring them on YouTube. http://www.youtube.com/booktrailers