The BBC’s weekly wonder wasn’t just a much-loved entertainment show, it also launched countless careers and gave us Pat Keysell and Tony Hart and Aardman and Sylvester McCoy…
Vision On was always a gem in the children’s TV schedules – and now it’s a diamond, 60 years old on 6th March. Between 1964 and 1976 it entertained children – and let’s face it, their parents – with a quickfire and visually exhilarating mixture of comedy, creative ideas, multi-format animations, mime and viewers’ artworks.
It was also (full disclosure) this writer’s favourite show as a youngster. For my short-trousered self, Tuesdays were the highlight of the week. In school break times, my best friend and I would draw pictures related to, and inspired by Vision On, in excited anticipation of that day’s new episode. In later years other friends and I would try to mimic the show’s high-speed comedy hero, The Prof (more of whom later), and his gag-packed comedy adventures, in our own Super-8 films.
No two episodes were the same, and each one was lapped up by its eager audience, but it wasn’t just viewers who appreciated the series’ genius. It sold all around the world, from Australia to America, and from France (where it was called Déclic) to Israel (where its title translated as “Magic Magic”). It won the Prix Jeunesse International award in 1972, as well as BAFTAs for children’s programmes in 1971 and for specialised series in 1974.
Joan Bakewell, writing in Radio Times in 1976, said the programme was proof that “grown-ups don’t need to be confined to an adult ghetto. I find Vision On one of the most upbeat, original and refreshing things I ever see on television.”
“It was a wonderful programme to work on,” says Vision On cornerstone Clive Doig, who adds, “We were a very happy team.” A friend of Radio Times, and supplier of the magazine’s Trackword puzzle since 1980, Clive worked on 96 episodes of Vision On plus some specials, mostly as a director but on the final series as producer.
“Back then quite a lot of people didn’t know how television was made,” says Clive, 83. “At the time a chap I was speaking to over the fence at the bottom of my garden, said, ‘I love that programme, I watch it every week.’ I said, ‘Actually I direct that’ and he said, ‘What do you do for the rest of the week?’ He thought I only worked for half an hour a week!”
Clive is steeped in classic British television. He joined the BBC straight from school in 1958, operated a camera on Hancock’s Half Hour and was a vision mixer (an “instant editor” cutting between the different cameras) on the first series of Doctor Who and Dad’s Army, and also The Likely Lads. He joined Vision On when he was on attachment to children’s programmes.
Devised in 1964 by BBC producers Ursula Eason and Patrick Dowling, Vision On evolved from a series called For the Deaf, which had run for 12 years from 1952. “The resident director did his back in so Patrick asked if I would like to direct the fourth episode of that series,” explains Clive. “I said yes I would, and he then said you can direct the lot. I directed every one since then.
“That first series that I worked on in 1971 won a BAFTA, and then in 1974 for the best specialised series, beating Dr Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man, which was quite extraordinary!”
Though originally intended for the hard of hearing, it was also, as Clive puts it “for everybody else because it was so visual”. As Radio Times described the programme on day one, it was a series “where pictures speak louder than words”.
Input came from far and wide. “We had a little cottage industry of regular contributors: animation artists, film directors who made little visually interesting films, many stop-motion film contributors…
“One film source was a couple of students and their names were David Sproxton and Peter Lord. Patrick and I saw their output, a line-drawing animation of a kind of Superman who did all sorts of surreal things like moving a manhole and then, having moved the manhole, he just falls down it.
“We said, ‘Yes, please be regular contributors.’ When I was watching one of their rushes of this Superman, at the end of it they’d tagged on another little bit of film. It was stop-motion of a cube of plasticine that turns into a cat, which then ate its own tail and disappeared. So I really loved that. They did a few more and one was a character that became Morph… And of course the superhero was called Aardman. They were super, super-brilliant.”
Aardman Animations, as they became, would be the world-conquering producers of Wallace and Gromit, Shaun the Sheep and many other hits.
Other fixtures of Vision On included comic-strip-style mini-stories involving captioned conversations between Humphrey the Tortoise and a little girl called Susanne; or between The Burbles, invisible creatures who lived in a grandfather clock; the animated unearthings of The Digger on a construction site; and a cartoon cuckoo who was always losing the numbers from its clock.
For the hearing demographic of the audience, all of these were enlivened by clever use of signature tunes. “Gillian Rose was in charge of music,” says Clive. “She was one of the PAs and she chose most of the music for all the little bits of film we had, so we had a music PA, we had a props PA, we had all sorts…”
And so to the core team of Vision On…
Pat Keysell had made her TV debut on For Deaf Children. Having trained in mime at the Central School of Speech and Drama, she introduced that art form to the show. And she resigned as a production assistant in the BBC drama department so that she could go freelance to present Vision On, for which she used sign language as well as speech to bridge the gap between hearing and non-hearing viewers.
If Vision On had catchphrases, Keysell delivered them both: “Now, it’s time for The Gallery” before the popular two-minute exhibition of viewers’ art, and “I’m sorry we can’t return any of your pictures but we give a prize for all those we show” after it.
“Wonderful Pat Keysell! Pat was terrific as the front presenter,” says Clive. “When I was first assigned to Vision On, she had been there for many years. I think she really enjoyed breaking away from a rather plodding, stultified programme [For the Deaf] into a madcap programme of surreal ideas and visual comedy.
“She was basically – maybe in a motherly sort of way – taking the viewing children on a journey of visual delight. Her manner and presence, with the slight madness of the rest, was reassuring to the viewers. She was a delight to work with, never upset or having thespian needs of favour or grandeur.”
#OnThisDay 1972: Tony Hart, Pat Keysell and the ‘Vision On’ team celebrated their 100th episode.
— BBC Archive (@BBCArchive) March 7, 2021
The programme was made for deaf and hearing children, and featured art, mime, music and animations. pic.twitter.com/V3B9k28CTG
Keysell assisted with the show’s mime sequences, first with Ben Benison and when he left, future Doctor Who star Sylvester McCoy – billed in those days as Sylveste McCoy. “Ben was a great mime artist and he decided to leave the show because he felt television wasn’t big enough for it – he was a stage mime and therefore television kind of constricted his movements. It was a reasonable request.
“Patrick said we’ve got to fill his place, do you know of anybody? And I’d just been to see Ken Campbell’s Roadshow outside the Tower of London where a young man was playing around and his name was Sylvester McCoy. And I brought him into the show.
“If you left the camera on Sylvester he carried on acting and playing whatever it was. Some people would get to the end of what they had to do and that was it and they’d turn away. Leave the camera on Sylvester and he’d go on for hours [laughs], so it was quite difficult to edit him down!”
McCoy at first played a character called Epep, or Pepe, in a backwards world that Keysell discovered through the studio mirror. Clive recalls, “To ensure Epep looked perfectly normal walking and acting backwards, we had to shoot it backwards – turning the film camera upside down, and then reversing the double sprocketed film – so Pat had to perform all her scenes actually backwards. Even opening and closing a gate was a tremendous acting task, and she was quite brilliant. What I required her to do was so difficult, but she never complained!”
Of course, critical to the success and longevity of Vision On and its spin-offs Take Hart and Hartbeat was the brilliant artist and educator Tony Hart, who died in 2009. “Everybody absolutely adored Tony,” says Clive, “and they should have had a memorial programme to him from all the artists and directors and architects and designers who were influenced by his type of art. And his type of art was amazing in the fact that he could take any little objects and turn them into great paintings.
“We also used airfields, as well as beaches in Weston-super-Mare, Sandown and others, and the fire-station at Bounds Green [north London], shooting from cherry-pickers, cliffs and towers for his amazing huge drawings with white-lining machines. All he needed was the corners of the frame. We put little pegs in for the corners of the frame that the camera was taking from its tower or from its cherry picker or from the top of a cliff. He drew absolutely amazing drawings just from visualising what the angle was.
“For some of his beach pictures he rode a motorbike with a rake on the back – the camera positioned on a cliff – and he drew a full-scale mermaid. The sea came in and washed it away, which was wonderful because that was his principle: his art was in the making and the finished article was only shown for five seconds on TV and then what happened to it? It was destroyed. It was kind of destructive art, as it were, although they were all so beautiful.
“He was absolutely superb to work with. Anything you asked him to do, he would do.” That included the programme’s logo. By mirroring the title, Hart came up with a creature called Grog – neither grasshopper nor frog, but perhaps a cross between the two! “A lot of people didn’t realise that it was actually the name of the show, reversed.”
Completing the cast of regular players was the late Wilf Lunn, who engineered astonishing Heath Robinson contraptions that went through many motions merely to, say, open a door or ring a bell. Clive, who is speaking at Lunn’s memorial in Huddersfield next month, says, “I wouldn’t call him mad but he was an eccentric, amazing inventor.
“His models were just extraordinary as well as the machines he did especially for Vision On and later for Jigsaw and also for my programme Eureka. His studio was the most amazing collection of bric-a-brac and wonderful designs…
“There were extraordinary events. At the end of the long [sequence of] machinery, balls whirling around, there was always an explosion or a balloon popping. Sylvester was watching one time and Wilf had warned the bang would be large. The cameramen were OK with their cans on but Sylvester put some cotton wool into his ears.
“The bang went off, we finished the recording and Sylvester took the cotton wool out of his ears and put it back in the box. Wilf said, ‘Where did you get that?’ and he said, ‘From that box.’ And Sylvester had put guncotton in his ears!” One spark from the machine and his ears really would have been burning! “That’s not a story that safety officers would like to hear!”
Humour was a big ingredient in Vision On and keeping the gag rate high on a weekly basis was David Cleveland in the gurning, lab-coated guise of The Prof. Week after week his mini masterpieces of surreal comedy were a major highlight and employed all kinds of trick photography.
Film-maker turned film archivist Cleveland, now 81, says a minute on screen could equate to a whole day’s filming. Take a look at this clip and you’ll appreciate why:
“Our films were really cartoons but with a real person in real surroundings,” he tells Radio Times. “They were all done in spare time and at weekends. The Prof stories were thought up at meetings in my house amongst much laughter between me and Tony Amies, and later with David Wyatt when he joined in 1971. Then we would go away and work on whatever we had to prepare.
“Tony was the wizard behind many of the special camera effects and writing gags, and David Wyatt joined us to help make the films as we had to make so many to fulfill the annual contract. They took a lot of time!”
Seeing his first Prof sketch on Vision On in early 1968 gave Cleveland the confidence to ask out Christine Smith, an employee from the BBC Film Library in Ealing. They married in 1969 – she made many of the props for The Prof – and are still living in Manningtree, Essex, just a mile from where his films were shot.
“We took it very seriously and wanted to get the best we could with the limitations we had. But yes, we laughed when I fell over, or an explosion did not go off properly. Only last week I met a person who said he laughed out loud when I knocked the world sideways with a big hammer and fell out of the screen – he had seen it on the internet. I loved doing them.
“I think I was inspired when quite young, watching all those silent film comedians which I had in my film collection at the time – Chaplin, Keaton, Larry Semon – and fantastic Hollywood cartoons as well.”
Cleveland is proud of his involvement in Vision On, or “brilliant programmes” as he calls them. “They were so watchable and not dependent on the spoken word – just visual fun. I wish there were more programmes like that. I was so lucky to have that chance to make funny films, and stayed with it until Vision On was retired in 1976. Clive Doig took us on to make Cid Sleuth films for his Jigsaw programme – where David Wyatt and I concentrated more on comedy which I wanted to do.”
It was a joyously creative time for creator and viewer alike. The affection with which Clive Doig talks of the show makes it clear Vision On holds a special place in his heart. “I don’t think it should have finished in 1976, it could have gone on for at least another four or five years.”
Nevertheless, afterwards Clive was able to introduce his fondness for words and puzzles to series including Jigsaw, for which he won a BAFTA in 1981, and to create educational shows such as Beat the Teacher and, with Jeremy Beadle, Eureka.
He remains amused by an incident when Vision On won the Prix Jeunesse in 1972. “I arrived a day late at the festival in Munich. Monica Sims, the BBC’s head of children’s programmes, had written my name as a delegate for the reception. I had long hair, a beard and a cap and I was given a lady’s brooch, which said ‘Fraulein Olive Dong’. I pointed out that I was not of that gender, and a German said, ‘This is your badge, you wear it!’ The way Monica had written my name the ‘C’ looked like an ‘O’ and the ‘i’ of ‘Doig’ looked like an ‘n’.” Olive Dong has been Clive’s pseudonym ever since.
Finally, why does he think Vision On is so fondly remembered by the public, even 60 years later? “I suppose because of its surreal, anarchic visual feel. It was something that children could also copy and do themselves. You know, ‘Let’s take some of Mummy’s lentils and rice and make a picture – and make a mess!’ – because they’ve seen it on TV.
“And of course viewers loved seeing The Gallery, where we had something like 3,000 pictures sent in a week, a whole team would go through them and then we would be sent about 50 to 100.
“Then Patrick, Tony and I would go through that 50 and choose the 12 that we’d show on the programme. And the thing about Tony is that he could always tell if there had been an adult hand in the two-year-old’s painting!”
Vision On, Clive Doig and The Prof are featured in the documentary From Andy Pandy to Zebedee: The Golden Age of Children’s Television. It’s available to watch now on BBC iPlayer.
Looking for something else to watch? Check out our full TV Guide and Streaming Guide, or visit our Entertainment hub for the latest news.
Try Radio Times magazine today and get 10 issues for only £10 – subscribe now. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.