That year Martin acompanied Bert Plagman for his audition for Tommie. Bert enjoyed improvising with Pino and for the fun of it Pragt started to improvise with Tommie for a while. That gave rise for the directors of the show to hire him as puppeteer for Tommie that year. Every now and then, Pragt and Plagman (who became Tommie's steady performer in 1979) shared the part in one episode: their Tommie voices sounded almost alike. Martin left after the third season for a carreer in education and only had small parts in several other productions.