I HAD HOPED YOU’D SEE MY FACE [488]

Before Wallace & Gromit, “Chicken Run” and Shaun the Sheep, stop-motion specialists Aardman Animations was known to the young me for both the Chaplinesque adventures of Morph on the BBC, and for five-minute pieces for Channel 4 based on recordings made with members of the public. Our family had a VHS cassette that collected these latter works: alongside Aardman’s celebrated video for Peter Gabriel’s song “Sledgehammer” were vignettes about a social security office, a newspaper editorial meeting, memories of living during the Second World War and, in Nick Park’s Academy Award-winning “Creature Comforts”, living on housing estates or in old people’s homes recontextualised as animals living in a zoo.

The one that has stayed with me the longest, outside of the further series of “Creature Comforts”, was “Ident” (1989), directed by Richard Starzak (credited as Richard Goleszowski), a film that adapted improvised noises from the comedians Arthur Smith and Phil Nice that suggested conversation while rarely using words, creating a story of someone being made to wear masks in various situations. It is very mature, spiky, comic and surreal, the sort of film that makes you develop a taste for something similar.

I became used early on to strange-looking animation, as Channel 4 often followed lunchtime broadcasts of “Sesame Street” at the time with animations from Eastern European countries like the former Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, rich in traditions of abstract and suggestive animations that rarely used words, so I never found “Ident” scary, like commenters have claimed. The flattened 2D-like style and rough texture of the characters, including a dog that became the star of Starzak’s later series “Rex the Runt”, were already par for the course.

“Ident” was part of “Lip Synch”, a five-part series of “vox pop”-based films made by Aardman and shown by Channel 4 in 1990. David Lord, a co-founder of Aardman and director of two of the films, “War Story” and “Going Equipped”, has said there was no overarching theme for the series, but his contributions, and “Creature Comforts”, are most straightforward in their construction. Barry Purves’ “Next”, an almost-entirely wordless film featuring William Shakespeare auditioning, either for a stage role or for a place in Heaven, by acting scenes from his own plays, is as much of a standout as “Ident” is, but the “vox pop” theme is not found.

Meanwhile, Starzak has either turned Smith and Nice’s improvised sounds into a story or applied them to one – I just wish I knew. The film is set in a maze, arrows featuring throughout. Our unnamed lead character gets ready for his day by pulling his face into shape. After yelling at his dog, he passes a window, pulling down a blind with a better view printed on it. A figure I first took as being like a Roman statue, but also could be their wife, says letters of the alphabet while putting a mask on them, for a more acceptable face. When the mask is rejected, the statue’s words create makeup that spats onto the character’s face, creating a mask regardless, the angry reaction crumbles the statue into a smaller version of itself. 

Arriving at work, a clock on the wall moving as slowly or quickly as they perceive time, the man and their manager wear masks to converse, but when the man takes his off to talk more informally, he is shouted down to a smaller size himself, a mask is placed on him that changes the shape of his nose to fit. The workplace appears to be making the masks themselves, popping into shape on a conveyor belt in the background, a uniform product everyone must wear, but they become misshapen when the man is shouted down, indicating their defective nature.

After hitting the head of an obnoxious canvasser, he is whisked by a crowd into a pub, meeting a friend with a similarly changed face, blowing of steam with the impression of a chat identifiable just out of earshot in any British pub. Returning home drunk, he is confronted by everyone he has met, either metaphorically or literally, and tries putting on another face and juggling balls to impress everyone, which fails. A hard zoom in to real, scared-looking human eyes through a plasticine mask, an image I find suffocating, looks at the warped existence around him, leading him to walk dejectedly away. 

He sees himself in a mirror and, in a moment of realisation, takes off his mask – he looks almost reborn, better than he looked at the film’s start. The dog jumps through the mirror, now a window to the world outside the maze, looking like the picture printed on the blind – the man follows. Marvelling at his new surroundings, he comes across a doppelganger, which mirrors him until they both eye each other suspiciously, leading them to tear at the other’s faces, making them into the masks we saw before. Time to concrete over paradise to build another maze.

To make the point again, “Ident” is only five minutes long. I have watched it many times, and it is a visual poem, one that gains greater significance the older you become. I’m not about to put on a mask now, having been given an early lesson in the effects of such a mindset.

FLASH, BANG, WALLOP, WHAT A PICTURE [454]

I can see why you might suggest a child uses bleach to make art. Taking a surface of ink, applying drops of a solution of four parts water to one part bleach, or applying it with a brush or matchstick, applies chance, unpredictability and excitement to the making of the artwork.

Of course, this would immediately be followed by advising adult supervision, finding alternative materials, or banning it altogether. Meanwhile, a book made for children in 1970, and published by the BBC, made clear to its young readers that you must be extremely careful when handling bleach, followed by explaining how you do exactly that, putting responsibility alongside creativity.

“Bleach” was the second word in the alphabet used by “Vision On: A Book of Nonsense with Some Sense In It”, a book published in 1970 to accompany the celebrated children’s programme, which ran from 1964 to 1976. It looks and feels like a children’s annual, but is instead a “a sort of alphabet book for anyone who likes painting and drawing”. But “Bleach” is on page 36, its alphabet ordered randomly: “The book has been made this way because it’s mainly about looking at things – and because if you put things in the proper way, people sometimes stop looking at them.”

When I saw a copy of this book in an emporium, listed as “rare”, I bought it straight away. “Vision On”, a fast-moving entertainment show ostensibly made for deaf children, prominently featured art works alongside comedy sketches, mime and animation, all keeping spoken passages and captions to a minimum. It can play like a silent movie, but it will hold your attention.

As the only official “Vision On” tie-in book, “A Book of Nonsense...” takes time to explain each of its subjects, utilising elements from the show: photographs from sporting events are used to explain concepts like foreshortening and motion blurring; David Cleveland’s “Prof” character is presented in a picture story using elements of photo-montage; metal objects are pressed with ink to make pictures from shapes, then made into sculptures; British Sign Language is introduced, in an article by co-presenter Pat Keysell, to explain why it is more enjoyable to use than lip-reading; comic strip conversations are made from photographs of a girl and her tortoise, and drawings of the show’s animated character “Jonah” - David Sproxton & Peter Lord’s “Aardman” and “Morph” came later in the show’s run; concepts like texture and optical illusions are fully explained; and new artistic forms like Chinese brushes in ink, and creating pictures with oil pain on water, are introduced for when you have finished using the bleach.

The key article for this book is “Observation and Art”, from the show’s artist Tony Hart, who created the “Blue Peter” logo and shield, and continued making similar shows for children until his retirement in 2001. Explaining that they “have suggested some unusual ways of making pictures”, it is then explained that the key is not just knowing what to use, but where to use, explaining composition like arranging ornaments on a mantelpiece. Negative space is also explained, and also how chance and nature plays a part in composition: “The patterns formed by frost and ice, the way bark forms on trees. Drop a handful of nails – see the angles they make. Do it with matches, see the difference.” The article ends by confirming that, while the show looks for artistic ability in the viewer-submitted “Gallery” feature, they are not prescriptive: “The whole point being that someone, whatever their age, has been observant. They’ve used their eyes, and their imagination has done the rest.”

While I never tried emulating the artworks made by Hart on his later show “Hartbeat”, or by Neil Buchanan on “Art Attack”, it is clear now that what made great television was meant to start young minds running. Likewise, “A Book of Nonsense” is not didactic or pedagogic, but inspirational – I’ll try ink with a brush first.