REMEMBER Cabaret Mechanical Theatre, that fantastical cross of seaside postcards, slot machines, the artist’s eye and the craftsman’s hand?

For 15 years the collection of 130 beautifully carved figures performing impossible tasks at the insertion of a 10p coin was the carrot that persuaded thousands of kids to go to Covent Garden, that had dads committing weekends to producing cardboard cut-out recreations, and gave mums an hour’s leave for some personal shopping.

Then it disappeared, first from London and then from Britain altogether, in a fog of financial naivety and misplaced trust.

Well, the core collection has been stuck in Los Angeles, frozen by contractual law. It’s coming back into the open, though. On Friday, Cabaret opened in San Francisco as a three-month exhibition in the Exploratorium, the science and art museum created by the atomic physicist Frank Oppenheimer. In the autumn there will be a permanent version in Baltimore and another opening in Paris; and a touring version is expected to go on the road to venues including Singapore.

Its creators, Sue Jackson and her daughter Sarah Alexander, were not at the opening; instead they were tied up with lawyers in Britain trying to release the main collection. Taking the name from her favourite film, Bob Fosse’s Cabaret, Sue Jackson began in 1979 in Falmouth High Street as a crafts shop selling knitted clothes, patchwork quilts, terracotta jugs — “anything people made, nothing manufactured,” she says.

A fellow Falmouth Art School graduate, Peter Markey, sold carved figures, and gradually other artists followed, and Sue persuaded them to add movement with hand-turned mechanics, and then coin-operated motors. Traffic jams were caused when she had a slot made for the outside of the shop to operate the window display.

The artists couldn’t make them fast enough, and Sue decided to formalise the idea when a frustrated American tourist, finding everything already sold, exclaimed: “This is a museum, not a shop!”

Pieces were commissioned, with originals on display but copies for sale. A community of artists developed, relying on Cabaret. The Crafts Council put on a hugely successful exhibition in London, and Jackson, by now with her daughter in partnership, moved to Covent Garden in 1985. A decade and a half of success followed. But rent and rates rose beyond the level they could charge customers, and insolvency beckoned.

Cabaret was rescued by the new owner of The Kursaal, Southend-on-Sea’s entertainment precinct, and in 2000 the collection moved there. After initial success, though, the draws of bowling and video games left the more refined Cabaret models largely ignored by day, and many vandalised at night.

Meanwhile, another opportunity had opened for Cabaret model makers. The developer of Sheffield’s Meadowhall shopping centre commissioned a £1.3 million “Ride of Life”, a journey by sofa through a dream world of 20 automated scenes, including the Kitchen of Insanity, in which a housewife is consumed by the waste disposal unit, and the Adam and Eve pub, where a naked landlord and landlady are harangued by a parrot. But the Ride never ran. The scenes went into storage where all but one have been irretrievably vandalised. But it could be revived, Sue and Sarah believe.

A co-ownership deal with Hollywood, a scenery-making company anxious to tour the machines through the United States, seemed the answer. The final papers were signed just as recession struck in the US, and within days of September 11.

The American partners could not make satisfactory bookings, the English partners made arrangements for shows the Americans would not approve, and there was deadlock. “We had good faith, they had good lawyers,” Sarah says. A £165,000 buy-out to free the automata was demanded, and the two women have so far been able to raise more than two thirds, largely from faithful customers.

But they already had a friendly relationship with the Exploratorium, where they had conducted workshops for Mike Petrich and his wife Karen Wilkinson, heads of science and art information there, who had first been to Cabaret in 1998 while on holiday. “It made me realise how little I know about how simple mechanics can work. I’d seen nothing like it before,” Petrich says.

Last Christmas, Sarah and Sue put on a Christmas exhibition at the Oxo Tower of 50 new creations, with some newer artists such as Carlos Zapata and Keith Newstead, and the show was a critical and financial success.

“We have nothing like it in the US, and I decided we had to have the models for the Exploratorium, at least for an exhibition,” Petrich says.

Now it seems likely that, except for a few pieces, the principal collection will be reclaimed in time to help fill a new wing in the American Visionary Arts Museum in Baltimore, opening in November.

“We have been enormously lucky with our customers, who have helped us to survive, and we’re delighted by the success in America,” says Sue. “What we’d really like, though, is to be able to bring the main collection home, if only we can find a permanent site.”

Models are for sale at Cabaret’s website, www.cabaret.co.uk