Uncle Grizzly
Voiced By: Nigel Planer
The narrator of the eponymous grizzly tales for the first six series.
- Chuck Cunningham Syndrome: He is dropped by the seventh series, with the retool changing location from the Squeam Screen theatre to the HotHell Darkness and the Night-Night Porter serving as the new narrator.
- Depraved Kids' Show Host: Aside from taking delight in the horrific fates subjected to the children in the stories he tells, he also abuses his pet spider Spindleshanks a lot.
- Evil Laugh: He will frequently cackle maniacally.
- Horror Host: He presents the show's stories by starting the projector at the Squeam Screen theatre, frequently making quips about the bad behaviour and unpleasant fates of the children featured in them.
- Jerk with a Heart of Gold: While he's an overall unpleasant person who constantly abuses his pet spider, in the end, his goal is to help kids be better people, even if his methods involve outlandish stories with ludicrous endings.
Spindleshanks
Uncle Grizzly's long-suffering pet spider.
- Butt-Monkey: Almost every episode has Uncle Grizzly subject him to injuries and torture.
- Chuck Cunningham Syndrome: He was dropped from the show by the fifth series as a side-effect of the stop-motion Framing Device being truncated to the point that Uncle Grizzly's only featured appearances were the story being preceded by stock footage of Uncle Grizzly starting the projector as he narrated in addition to occasionally ending with stock footage of Uncle Grizzly laughing maniacally.
- Fuzzball Spider: He looks more like a purple ball with eight limbs than he does a real spider.
Night-Night Porter
Voiced By: Nigel Planer
A sinister concierge who replaces Uncle Grizzly as the narrator for the show's retool in its seventh and eighth series, where the setting was changed to the HotHell Darkness.
- Child Hater: He really enjoys torturing kids, plus the episode "Frank Einstein's Monster" has a speech where he compares children to dogs and remarks that he despises both.
- Devilish Hair Horns: He has tufts of hair shaped like devil horns to accentuate his sinister nature.
- Horror Host: Like Uncle Grizzly before him, his role is to present the stories, this time in the form of reading them from a visitor's book containing entries on the naughty children held prisoner in his hotel. Some episodes even end with him revealing to the audience the kind of torture he's subjected the child to once they wound up in the HotHell Darkness after the events of their tale.
- Suspiciously Similar Substitute: He's effectively Uncle Grizzly in all but name, still serving his role as the stories' narrator in addition to having the same voice actor (who already did all the characters' voices anyway) and identical aside from his concierge uniform, mustache, goatee and hair horns. Unfortunately, he does not get an unlucky pet to fill in the void left by Spindleshanks.
