And he is!
Didn't old Pearcider claim to be upping sticks and ceasing to inflict his glovular antics upon the townfolk due to abuse and lack of people popping coins into his cap?
Then he came back for a one-off comeback special.
And unless I'm mistaken, he's been a constant irritation since!
Has he been replaced by a Terminator? Is the original puppeteer lying in a ditch, and a puppet in his place? He never seems to get any older. He looks like puppet man, dances like puppet man, plays the same music as the puppet man, but he's not the puppet man*...
Gone is his mic...
Actually, come to think of it... gone is the puppet dog on a string...
I reckon that he's some evil force from the future - after all, what's more innocuous than a barmy old man with a stereo in a pram, madly making merry in his eccentric little way.
Aha!
I reckon one day he gashed his hand, so out went the puppet onna string, and he had to cover the hand with a full hand-glove puppet to hid the shiny gleam of his titanium endoskeleton.
And how he has TWO glove puppets - clearly bother hands have had some sort of injury, and he needs to keep his mechano fingers hidden from the public!
It's a damn good ruse - sooner or later, everyone in the city will have passed by The Puppet Man, and when the object of his mission strides past, it'll be off with the puppet, and pulling pistols out his pants and taking out the future resistance leader.
Or his mum.
He does seem to like The Pretties... perhaps he's scanning them with his laser eyes, and cross-referencing the data with his microprocessing unit to see if the lady in question is the Norfolk equivalent of Sarah Connor, destined to rear her son to be a Leader of Men.
Taught warfare on the battlegrounds of Mile Cross and The Larkman...
* HE'S A POD PERSON FROM THE PLANET MARS!!!!
