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WOW! Signed Pigeon Street prints - genuine
and official, check it out! click!
Pigeon Street desktop wallpapers! Click to download
.zip file (approx 1.2MB)
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part creator of Pigeon Street, Bod and the Flumps!! You submitted
the questions.... here are his answers! (December 2005)
I'd like to think so. It's not in my hands
because the BBC hold the rights. I've prompted them several times
but with such a big organisation it's often difficult to target
the right person. I'm in discussions with them at the moment....lets
hope something comes of it. Maybe someone out there should organise
a lobby! There is an online petition - sign
here!
I can't quite remember who came up with the
idea but I imagine it was the writer Mike Cole. I know we angsted
for a while over whether we could use a word like "Juggernaut"
for under fives! I wanted to keep her fairly feminine rather than
make her blokey, so I gave her big hair and lipstick, (it was the
80's!). Then Benni Lees wrote music that had a sort of country and
Western truck driver twang. So I suppose the end result was, as
usual, a combination of several people's inputs.
I know of a number of instances where women have said they were
directly influenced by Clara in their choice of career. I wonder
if Hugo effected Jamie Oliver?
There were no formal educational advisors
on the series. There was no "Hidden Curriculum". In those
days Education and Entertainment were kept pretty much apart and
handled by two different departments at the BBC. There was less
overlap than there is today, no one had yet coined the word "Edutainment"!
Having said that though, we were all aware we talking to under fives
and being parents ourselves we were conscious and careful of what
messages we were sending to the audience. Mike Cole in particular
had had a long experience of making BBC programmes that contained
some educational content like "Playschool". In some ways,
everything is education when you are under five!
Like all programmes, Pigeon Street reached
the end of it's natural transmission life. Though it was repeated
for a lot longer than many children's series.
I doubt that Pigeon Street would work as well for today's audience,
without making some changes to it. Even as relatively recently as
the 80's, TV was generally more slowly paced than it is now. There
was a more limited choice of alternative TV channels and every TV
didn't have a remote control! So audiences were easier to hold on
to. Today's MTV generation would probably be hitting their remote
controls looking for something faster than Pigeon Street.
In the 70's and 80's I think children's TV was consciously slower
in an attempt to allow children to keep up with the plot etc. Children
are now more used to rapidly changing images, though sometimes that
can simply be used to mesmerise rather than inform.
Also on a practical level, working to limited BBC budgets meant
that by holding each shot for a few frames longer less actual animation
was required and so the budget stretched further!
Thanks Chris. I'm not really sure I know
the full answer to the end credit question! David Yates owned the
company and he initially set up the project with the BBC. So he
was in fact the "Producer". I was actually "Director/Designer"
though at the start of the series David had a sort of Directorial
role too. It was often a BBC TV convention at the time to merge
the two roles for their in house programmes. We were an outside
company but for some reason I don't think we had a "Director"
credit. I only became a "company director" of David Yates
Ltd after Pigeon Street was finished, so I think it was also a hierarchical
thing!
Clara does a lot of travelling around but I'm sure she never turned
up in Rosie and Jim! She wouldn't dare do that because her contract
wouldn't allow it! The background characters were left to me to
invent so I suppose I might have unconsciously reverted to my natural
default drawing style which is more or less the one I used for Pigeon
Street.
Ah, that's like one of those, "what's
your favourite colour" questions! It depends on my mood etc.
I liked Clara's individuality. But I had a soft spot for Bob cos
he was based in some ways on me and Reg who was based on my Dad.
I also liked drawing William and Mr Baskerville best. Though if
I met Baskerville in real life, I probably wouldn't have liked him
too much! Sorry to be vague on this one but I'm hopeless at filling
in those tick the box questionaires too.
I had to consider this question recently when I decided to sell
some of the original artwork from the series. Which character would
be most likely to sell etc. I think there were about 25 characters
in the series and making up 25 pictures at the outset was out of
the question, since all the artwork is in many cut-out pieces. Having
asked around, Clara cropped up repeatedly as a favourite, so she
appears in 2 of the six, (so far) set ups.
You can see the pictures online at www.lollipopanimation.com,
you can even buy them! There will also shortly be limited addition,
signed Giclee prints available too - click
here
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Many thanks to Alan for his great answers, and
his time and patience! |
