It's 20 years since Dustin the Turkey first sidled on to The Den, having been won by Zag as a booby prize in a golf tournament. Zig and Zag were unimpressed with the talkative and ghoulish-looking bird, and intended to eat him for their Christmas dinner. But for better or worse Dustin survived, after a helpful guest pointed out that he was part vulture and as such unfit for consumption. And as the TV seasons passed, the insidious bird moved to centre stage.

He was from Sallynoggin and proud of it, and seemed to have shadowy connections in the building trade, but Dustin secretly nursed grandiose and megalomaniac ambitions. After Zig and Zag followed the big money to Channel 4 in 1993, Dustin became the main man on The Den and would outlast four human presenters: Ian Dempsey, Ray D'Arcy, Francis Boylan and Damien McCaul. He became the bane of Pat Kenny's life and a regular on the Late Late Toy Show, but that wasn't achievement enough for this insatiable bird. During his remarkable career he would run for President (imagine if he'd won), represent us (none too gloriously) in the Eurovision Song Contest and release a series of hit albums.

This Sunday, on RTE1, an hour-long documentary will celebrate Dustin's extraordinary career in showbusiness, and include contributions from friends and admirers including Ray D'Arcy, Gay Byrne, Louis Walsh, esteemed colleague Bosco, Marty Whelan, Twink, Amanda Byram and Bob Geldof, who describes the talkative turkey as "part Jagger, part Obama". Indeed, Dustin's fame has even reached Britain -- in a recent article a Guardian journalist described him as "a foul-mouthed avian bigot". Which sums it up rather neatly, I feel.

Apart from his many other accomplishments, Dustin is a perfect example of how puppets have thrived in the TV age, and not just in kids' programming but, more recently, as all-licenced, x-rated adult entertainers. When a puppet swears, the contrast between its childish form and foul utterance is irresistible, but raunchy marionettes such as Podge and Rodge and MTV's Fur TV are engaged in nothing new. Because since the earliest times, puppets have been used to saying and doing things that actors just wouldn't get away with.

Hieroglyphs from 2000 BC describe 'walking statues' that appeared in Egyptian plays, and there's evidence of puppets being used in Persian theatre a thousand years before Christ. These were apparently used for mocking, humorous purposes, and from their earliest days puppets and their masters were generally considered proletarian and subversive. The satirical traditions of the commedia dell'arte only developed in 16th-century Italy after the Catholic Church had banned puppets for being too outrageous and disrespectful to their betters (including bishops).

The violent traditions of the Victorian Punch and Judy show survived into the 20th century, but puppetry experienced an unprecedented boom following the invention of television. Of course, many of the puppets seen on early TV shows were squeaky clean marionettes intended for the edification of innocents. There was nothing remotely subservice about Bill and Ben, and Judge the Dog was no revolutionary either, though that Mr Crow was always my Wanderly Wagon favourite, and he was something of a cynic.

There was nothing particularly subversive about Sesame Street either, on the face of it. The US show was launched in 1969 by a non-profit organisation with high-minded motives about educating children without the hectoring voice of an adult. But Jim Henson's winning puppets always had a certain edge to them: Oscar the Grouch's misanthropy felt a little grown-up for his audience, and Bert and Ernie indulged in touches of Three Stooges-style black humour.

Then there was the quiet desperation of hard-working roving reporter Kermit the Frog and his doomed attempts to get a decent interview out of a fairytale character. He, of course, would graduate in the mid-70s to The Muppet Show, where the darker edges of Henson's creations would find full expression. Apart from Kermit and his on-off relationship with imperious diva Miss Piggy, there were the absurd antics of the Swedish chef, the frankly scary death-defying feats of The Great Gonzo (which usually involved hanging by his nose from a great height) and my favourites Statler and Waldorf, a pair of old cynics who heckled from the sidelines and gave poor old Fozzie Bear a terrible time.

The Muppet Show effortlessly bridged the gap between children and adults' funny bones and was way ahead of anything happening here or in the UK. In Britain, class-consciousness obtruded into the puppet world in the shape of Basil Brush, an upper-class fox who dressed in tweeds, had a famous laugh and whose act mainly consisted of getting his human co-host to read stories then constantly interrupting them.

Less sophisticated altogether was Emu, a silent, psychotic bird who attacked celebrities for laughs, most famously Michael Parkinson. Rod Hull, his human sidekick, became so inextricably linked with the mad bird that he could never shake the puppet off, and later in his life plaintively remarked that "I want to be a comedian in my own right, but Emu won't let me do it".

Almost fittingly, Hull died in 1999 when he fell off his roof while attempting to adjust his TV aerial.

Things turned nasty on the puppet front in Margaret Thatcher's Britain, as Roland Rat became a best-selling pop star and Spitting Image took to the airwaves. There was nothing remotely cute about Peter Fluck and Roger Law's latex grotesques, which cleverly but sometimes cruelly lampooned the great and good of British life (including Mrs Thatcher, who was recast as a most convincing dominatrix). Their sketches were funny but also nasty, and sometimes left viewers feeling as though they'd been implicated in something unsavoury.

Back home, the puppet flag was flown through the 80s by the altogether more innocent Bosco. Bosco lived in a box and had blameless encounters with the likes of Fiachra the Frog and Freddy the Fox. But an element of punk rock was introduced to the world of Irish puppetry in the late 80s by a pair of ragged-looking, googly-eyed aliens called Zig and Zag.

Though in appearance they were not unlike the glove puppets you and I would have made from socks as children, Zig and Zag were far scarier. After becoming regulars on Dempsey's Den in 1987, they loomed aggressively into the screen and played havoc with Ian Dempsey's carefully laid plans. Zag (the purple one with the green spots) was the sophisticated older brother who claimed to be a lady-killer who jet-setted to Hollywood to dine with the stars. Zig (the one with the antennae) was an aimless dimwit who struggled to keep up with anything.

The anarchic presence of Zig and Zag attracted a cult adult audience to The Den, and in 1993 the extraterrestrial twins were lured off to Channel 4, where they became stars on The Big Breakfast, a show not coincidentally produced by Bob Geldof's Planet 24 company. But Zig and Zag's inventors, Ciaran Morrison and Mick O'Hara, would get even greater mileage out of another pair of puppet twins.

Podge O'Leprosy first appeared on The Den too, as a sinister baddie who always tried to spoil the fun. But when Morrison and O'Hara teamed him with a twin called Rodge they hit on something special. In A Scare at Bedtime, they took obscene puppetry to new lows as Podge told a spooky story that usually involved scatological unpleasantness while Rodge interfered with himself beneath the blankets while thinking of Mary Black. The unstoppable brothers would reach even greater heights of crudeness when they launched their own chat show.

Incidentally, in his early days Podge did not see eye to eye with fellow Den regular Dustin, and once locked the turkey in a cupboard and attempted to pose as him with the help of a few feathers and a coffee cup for a beak. But as he subsequently found out to his cost, there's only one Dustin.

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Dustin -- Twenty Years a Pluckin' will screen on Sunday at 6.30pm on RTE1

- Paul Whitington

Irish Independent