Читать книгу Tony Hart - A Portrait of My Dad - Carolyn Ross - Страница 13

Kneeling beside a huge sheet of yellow paper on the floor, Tony enlists the help of his accident-prone caretaker, Mr Bennett, to make a picture. He instructs Mr Bennett to put his foot into a tray of black paint, and then directs him in a sequence of footprints. With a hand on Tony’s head to help keep his balance, Mr Bennett wisecracks his way across the paper, carefully placing his inky foot where Tony tells him. Several footprints run in a line, toe to heel, then more are placed side by side, and finally two more form an open V lying on its side.

Mr Bennett steps back to admire his handiwork – and accidentally puts one more print way off to the side of the paper. ‘Don’t worry, Mr Bennett,’ says Tony, ‘I can use that.’ With a brush dipped in black paint, Tony adds a few lines and couple of curves to the lone print, creating a little figure that looks like a knight. He adds a great swirl of red, which emanates from the open V – and the lone figure has become a gallant St George brandishing his lance at a huge, fire-breathing dragon.

For the first time in three years, Tony stepped away from the control of the army, and began to get used to being his own master. Although he loved being in India, it was glorious to be back home in his own bed, with his own childhood things around him, and to revel in the fuss and attention lavished on him by his mother.

Thrilled to have their boy home, Tony’s parents telephoned Clayesmore where brother Michael was now at school. Thinking that Tony would only be home on leave for a short while, they asked the school if Michael might be allowed home during term time to see him. This was duly granted, and the 17-year-old Michael travelled back to Maidstone.

During the previous school holidays, Michael had acquired a girlfriend, Pat, and he was desperate to show her off to Tony. ‘Wear your uniform!’ he instructed his brother. Pat was certainly impressed by this handsome young officer. So much so, in fact, that when Michael went back to school, Pat switched her allegiance from the younger brother to the elder.

So Tony’s leave passed pleasantly with his new girlfriend, but before his leave was up he was contacted by the London regimental office and was surprised and disappointed to be told that he would not be returning to India. By this time, Partition had come fully into force and most of the British troops had withdrawn. Violence flared as Muslims were moved from India into Pakistan, and Hindus went in the opposite direction.

But Tony saw none of this; he was at home in Maidstone with his new girlfriend, and a prized possession: his Norton motorcycle. The Norton motorcycle was Tony’s pride and joy. He perfected the knack of riding it up the front garden path, hitting the side gate with just enough force so that it swung open and allowed him to ride through, bounced against the wall and swung back with just enough momentum to close behind him and drop the latch. One evening, after a particularly happy time with Pat, he was riding home when he passed a sailor in uniform hitching a lift. Tony stopped. ‘Where are you going?’ he asked. ‘Could you take me to the Dover road?’ asked the sailor. Full of goodwill and in love with Pat and the rest of the world, my father cried, ‘I’ll take you to Dover! Jump on!’ and proceeded to ride at breakneck speed all the way to the port. White-faced but grateful, the sailor shook his hand at Dover and tottered weakly away towards the safety of his ship.

There were all manner of opportunities for returning soldiers at that time. South Africa had a scheme to attract ex-soldiers into training as farmers, with a view to settling them there to farm the land. Fairy Gopsill had considered this himself, but his family had suggested that he might consider a career as a regular soldier. Within a month of returning home, Fairy received a signal from his regiment recommending that very thing, so he went back to pursue a career in the military. For my father, however, there was no prospect of returning to India, but there were opportunities for higher education. He enrolled at the Maidstone College of Art where he was to spend the next three years – and joined the Country Players, Maidstone’s amateur dramatic society.

While he was at college, Tony spent a lot of time drawing from life. He went regularly to Maidstone Crown Court and drew what he saw there. One day, he watched the judge put on his black cap and saw a man receive the death penalty for murder. I asked him what the man’s reaction was. ‘Nothing,’ replied my father. ‘He was completely expressionless.’ He was invited on one occasion to go down to the mortuary to draw a young woman who had drowned. ‘She looks perfectly all right,’ he was told, ‘as if she was asleep.’ But he couldn’t bring himself to go.

It was at Maidstone that he perfected his craft. He had always been able to draw, and his art teacher at Clayesmore had improved his skill, but here he learned about other artists, the great masters, graphics and different ways of putting together pictures. The students were encouraged to draw nude models from life, who would pose for them for hours on end. They came in all shapes and sizes – old, young, ugly, attractive, thin and fat. One evening, a group of art students including my father attended a very smart party in London, and a woman in a stunning dress caught Tony’s eye. On closer inspection, she turned out to be one of the models – and he had to admit that she looked a lot better with her clothes on.

Tony spent some time in the Department of Architecture, producing diagrammatic drawings of semi-detached houses, before spending the last two years of college in graphic design. While still at college, he was asked to produce a sign for the Maidstone County Show, and to design logos for farmers to put on their sacks. The students were also encouraged to teach art classes of their own, and my father found himself teaching children in a public school, patients in a mental hospital and – his personal favourite – the inmates of a prison.

Pat had by this time become my father’s fiancée, but one day she appeared on the doorstep at Hastings Road to give him the news that she had met somebody else. Tony was dreadfully upset, and even more so when he found out that the man she wanted to marry was not only the son of the Lord Lieutenant of Kent, but also 41 years old. I did ask him what his brother had to say about all this, but Michael was away with the Lancashire Fusiliers at the time and so couldn’t say anything.

With Pat out of his life, my father appeared with the Country Players one June as Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Clad in nothing but a tiny pair of shorts embroidered with sycamore leaves, he delighted in playing Oberon’s mischievous servant. The play was performed out of doors in the natural setting of Oakwood Park, and immediately behind the stage area, the ground dropped steeply away. When instructed to find the little flower, the juice of which would cause a comedy of errors, Tony’s Puck replied, ‘I go, I go,’ then petulantly as Oberon turned away, ‘Look how I go! Swifter than arrow from the Tartar’s bow!’ whereupon he ran upstage, leapt high into the air and disappeared from sight, dropping some 15 feet straight down onto mattresses below. Tony’s mother, my grandmother, must have thought a great deal of this performance, because she kept those little embroidered shorts and showed them to me many years later.

With college finished, and no ill will between them despite what had happened with Pat, Tony and Michael went to live in London, where they shared what my father described as a pretty grim basement flat in Kensington. Michael had been accepted as a drama student at the Webber Douglas School of Singing and Dramatic Art, and Tony was setting out as a struggling freelance artist.

One of his early jobs in 1950 was as a window display designer for Peter Robinson, a London department store in Leicester Square. There he met Yvonne Talbot who also worked in display, and together they would plan the window designs for the various departments. Yvonne told me that my father always arrived in the morning with a spring in his step and a smile on his face, always good humoured, ready and eager to get to the drawing board. She remembers him being very proud of his time with the Gurkha Rifles and that he often drew on his experiences in India, incorporating them into his designs. Yvonne particularly remembers one of his windows, which they named ‘King Solomon’s Mines’ and which incorporated those brilliant colours so evocative of India, attracting a lot of attention.

The store regularly held inter-departmental competitions for the best-dressed window, and Tony teamed himself up with a window dresser from the lingerie department. They put their heads together and came up with a brilliant idea. Their window took the form of a cell in a monastery, with a cartoon monk holding up his hands in shock and horror, for flying around the room, looking for all the world like a flock of bats, were multitudes of black lacy knickers and brassieres. Naturally, their window won.

An artist’s life had a few perks. Around this time Tony was commissioned to paint a mural on the wall of a restaurant, Abbotts in Kensington. The mural was of a cartoon abbot, and many years later my father recreated him on the wall of his old film shed at the cottage in Surrey. Instead of being paid a fee for the job, he was given supper and told to come and have a meal whenever he wanted to. Although he was not quite starving in a garret, Tony could get pretty hungry in his basement and he took up this invitation of a meal on more than one occasion.

One evening in 1952, his brother Michael invited Tony to a party held by one of his friends from the Webber Douglas, and it was here that my father met a BBC television producer. As luck would have it, the producer was looking for someone who could draw cartoon illustrations for his programme Saturday Special. ‘Can you draw quickly?’ he asked. Seizing a napkin, Tony rapidly drew a fish blowing bubbles and without further ado the job was his.

The programme, which was an entertaining and informative show for children featuring stories, puppetry and comic sketches, was broadcast live every week from the BBC’s Lime Grove studios in Shepherd’s Bush. Working alongside several aspiring young entertainers including Peter Butterworth, Harry Corbett and Sooty, my father found himself making models and producing drawings to illustrate the stories for the programme. On one occasion, Tony had not finished the last illustration before it was required, so he finished drawing it live on air. The producer liked this, and so from then on each one was drawn live on camera – with just my father’s hand in shot. But one day he leaned in too close, and his head appeared as well. Fortunately, the producer liked this too, and Tony Hart the TV artist was born.

Originally built by the Gaumont Film Company in 1915, Lime Grove Studios was a rabbit warren of studios and corridors, and in the 1950s home to such early television programmes as Tonight, What’s My Line and Dixon of Dock Green. For the younger viewer, Lime Grove was the birthplace of many children’s programmes, including the puppets of Andy Pandy, Bill and Ben, Whirligig and The Woodentops. Lime Grove was a residential road with, looking somewhat out of place, a large television studio building in the middle of it. Passing through a corridor between two of the studios on one of the upper levels heading towards the design department, it was bizarre but captivating to find the designer’s offices located in what had obviously been the bedrooms of the terraced houses behind, and which had been knocked through to form part of the studios themselves – winding staircases, fireplaces, dormer windows and all. There was very much a family atmosphere at Lime Grove in those early days, and everyone knew everybody else. Nobody quite knew what they were supposed to be doing in those early, pioneering days of television – mostly they were making it up as they went along, and there always seemed to be time to stop for a chat. One swelteringly hot summer’s day one of the children’s production teams, seeking a cooler working environment, moved their office furniture outside on to a balcony which had recently been surfaced with tarmac. After a few hours, the team was dismayed to find that in the heat, their metal chairs had gradually sunk into the soft tarmac and stuck fast.

The programmes made at Lime Grove shared studios; Saturday Special shared their studio with Tonight, a live current affairs programme broadcast on weekday evenings and presented by Cliff Michelmore. An item in one Saturday Special programme involved several cut-out objects which were sticky on the reverse, enabling my father to stick them onto a mounted board which made up part of the set and move them around if necessary. One of these was an umbrella which, unnoticed at the end of the programme, got knocked off its board. During the scene change while the studio was being made ready for Cliff’s programme and the Tonight set was being put up, one of the scene-shifters picked up the umbrella and slapped it carelessly on to the set behind Cliff’s chair, which that week included a picture of a Chinese mandarin. Completely unaware of this addition to their set, the Tonight programme broadcast its usual mixture of current affairs, arts, sciences and topical matters while behind Cliff the audience was puzzled to see an image of a Chinese mandarin with an umbrella sticking out of his ear. Although the first appearance of Tony’s cut-out umbrella was accidental, it became a standing joke and went on to make several subsequent appearances on charts, on maps and even on Cliff’s desk – assuming mascot status with the Tonight team. Years later when entertaining an audience, Tony would often produce a drawing to illustrate this tale.

Generally, after broadcasting their programmes, the production teams would frequent the pub on the corner of Lime Grove; the Saturday Special team was no exception. Tony had often noticed an attractive young woman in there, also from the BBC, drinking with the Whirligig production team. He had been briefly introduced to her once before and knew her name was Jean. On this particular evening, having finished broadcasting Saturday Special – a memorable occasion that included an item with a llama which had upset the floor manager by peeing all over the studio – Tony went to the pub and saw the young woman having a drink with two men. One was a producer whom he knew slightly, and the other was the owner of La Lanterne, a Soho restaurant. He spoke with them briefly, and then left them to push his way through the smoky throng to join two up-and-coming young actors he knew standing at the bar – Harry Secombe and Eric Sykes – but all the while covertly watching the group of three. After a while, the two men went to get their coats, but the young woman was looking uncertain. My father went over to her and asked if she was all right. She told him that her producer had said to her that she ought to go and have dinner with the Soho restaurant owner. ‘Do you want to go?’ asked Tony. ‘No, I don’t,’ she replied. ‘Then,’ said my father firmly, ‘you are not having dinner with him, you are having dinner with me.’ A year later they were married.

My parent’s wedding in 1953 was not entirely conventional. The congregation was small, just immediate friends and family, as was the reception party that followed in their Richmond flat. I remember my father telling me that the organ in the church was broken, so Jean walked up the aisle to a piano accompaniment wearing, in a total departure from convention, a dramatic dark red taffeta dress with a huge collar and plunging neckline. Tony was sure that as they knelt before the altar, the vicar had a spectacular view down the front of my mother’s dress. There was no official photographer, so press pictures are the only record of this happy event.

At the party afterwards, my parents’ television background was reflected in more than one of the congratulatory telegrams that were read out to the assembled guests.

A friend of theirs, scriptwriter Peter Ling, sent this message: ‘Fade in FX wedding bells. Sorry I had to track out, but best wishes on your two shot. Mix to years of future happiness. Cue grams Wedding March. Love Peter Ling.’

Humphrey Lestocq, the presenter of Whirligig, sent a pithier message: ‘Here’s hoping for a nice long run and successful first night. HL.’

Tony and Jean loved their little flat on the Courtlands estate in Richmond. Although they struggled to make ends meet on my mother’s regular salary as a production secretary, topped up from time to time with my father’s freelance earnings, those early days in their marriage were mostly happy ones. My father admitted to me many years later, however, that he hated it when my mother went away filming as she frequently did when working on the BBC’s detective drama Maigret. She was a good-looking girl, and he was convinced that she would run into somebody else better looking and wealthier than him. This unfounded paranoia came to a head one evening when my mother returned home very late one rainy night having been away for several days. It was so late that the trains had stopped running and one of the members of the film unit had been unable to get home, so my mother had suggested that he spend the night on the sofa at their flat. When my father, who had been waiting up, saw that she had brought a man home with her, he became instantly so blinded with jealous rage that without waiting for any explanation he threw the unfortunate chap straight out into the rain and darkness. My mother was not impressed, and relations were a little frosty for a short while. On recounting this tale, Pa ruefully admitted that his behaviour was not only inexcusable but downright rude – a trait he abhorred in anybody.

My father’s bedroom studio in their Richmond flat was a busy place in those early days of television. In Town Tonight was a topical magazine programme broadcast live by the BBC on Saturday nights in the 1950s, featuring interviews with well-known stars and celebrities of the day. As each interviewee was introduced, viewers at home were fascinated by a whirling image that appeared on the screen, featuring cartoons which had been drawn by my father. The list of guests would be telephoned through to him on the Thursday afternoon before transmission, and Pa would immediately set to work on drawing if not a caricature of the guest, then something appropriate, on a disc of card; sometimes he had to race around to find a photograph to work from. Come transmission, the disc was rotated on a turntable and filmed through a special camera lens, giving a moving kaleidoscope effect. Invariably though, there would be a last-minute guest, and the drawing to introduce them would have to be done in the studio. On one occasion, the last-minute guest was Jean Kent, a British film actress. The production team had acquired a photograph of her and thinking this would do, had stuck it on to the disc, but during rehearsal the glossy print was reflecting too much light and flaring badly. So with minutes to go before transmission, the glamorous film star sat for my Pa while he rapidly made a drawing of her – using as always black pen and white pencil on grey card, which worked best for black-and-white television – and fixed it to the disc just in time for the start of the programme. On another occasion, a Russian singer was due to appear, but for some reason the Soviet Embassy decided to pull him out of the programme just 20 minutes before transmission. As an instant replacement, the production team dragged in a Texan cowboy with his guitar from the nearest variety theatre, but of course my father had already prepared the disc featuring a Russian figure and the Red Star – which would have made no sense for introducing the Texan. Swiftly he amended his design by turning the Red Star into a Texan Star, added a guitar to the Russian figure and put a lasso into its hand – and slid it onto the turntable with seconds to spare.

On rare occasions, my mother found herself getting involved with my father’s work in those early days. He had been asked to come up with a filmed title sequence for a story entitled ‘1600 Feet Under the Sea’, and had decided that a stretch of dark water draining away to reveal letters spelling out the title underneath would be effective. Computer graphic imaging was nonexistent in those days, and special effects were also pretty rudimentary, so he achieved his concept by sticking the letters making up the title on the bottom of a black photographic dish in which he had made a small hole. With the camera fixed directly above the dish, and my mother’s finger blocking the hole, he filled the dish with black inky water, and then, with my mother removing her finger on cue, filmed the water draining away to reveal the title. Brilliant!

During this time, my father met a man who was to become a close friend for the rest of his life – indeed, his wife Joan in due course became my godmother. His name was Ron Massara, and he was the banqueting manager at the Hyde Park Hotel in Knightsbridge. A struggling artist like my father did not patronise the Hyde Park as a rule, but he and my mother were often taken there as guests by a cousin of the then Prime Minister, Anthony Eden. He was an elderly gentleman who had taken a shine to the young couple, and they to him, but he had one very odd custom. They would meet at his flat for a drink before going on to the Hyde Park, and he would insist on cleaning out their noses with water pumped from a syringe. My father said it was marvellous, cleaned everything out and left you feeling fresh and revitalized. My mother on the other hand told me that it was most peculiar but didn’t suppose it did any harm. The ritual complete, the party of three would make their way through Knightsbridge to the Hyde Park.

They had been introduced to Massara (as he was always known) on previous visits, but on this occasion the friend they were with had had a little more to drink than usual before dinner and wasn’t holding it well. He informed their waiter who had come to take their order that he wanted scrambled eggs and spaghetti. The waiter politely told him that they would not serve scrambled eggs with spaghetti and the older man became excitable and began to shout. From the other side of the restaurant, Massara saw this heated exchange and swiftly came across to calm the situation. Having mollified the titled gentleman by suggesting an acceptable alternative to scrambled eggs and spaghetti, he turned his attention to my father. On discovering he was a TV artist, he asked if he could design a logo to be used on the menu for a convention of doctors, due shortly to hold their event at the hotel. On the back of a menu card, Tony quickly sketched a little cartoon character with a black bag and a stethoscope, which met with Massara’s instant approval.

Over the years, my father went on to design many menu cards for Massara but was never paid with money. Instead, he and my mother – and later me as well – would be treated to dinner and a suite for the night at the Hyde Park, and be sent away with a case of wine or champagne. My mother always said that because of this, they developed a taste for fine wine early on that far exceeded their income.

My father very much enjoyed fine food and wine, but he equally enjoyed the simpler things. He had told me about salt beef sandwiches, and how the best ones could only be found in specific sandwich bars in London. I was keen to try one of these, and pressed the matter on our next visit to the Hyde Park. My father said, ‘All right, but for heaven’s sake don’t tell Massara or he’ll be offended.’ We arrived at the hotel mid-afternoon, and when Massara asked if we wanted afternoon tea to be sent up to our suite, my father replied, ‘No, we’ll save ourselves for dinner.’ Once we were sure Massara was safely back in his little office, we sneaked down the back stairs and furtively made our way out through a side door – probably drawing far more attention to ourselves than if we had simply walked out through the main foyer. We rapidly disappeared into the back streets of Knightsbridge and found a sandwich bar where we sat up on high stools at the counter and ate the most delicious hot salt beef sandwiches made with wonderfully soft white bread. This was every bit as enjoyable as, and contrasted spectacularly with, our dinner later that evening in the Grill Room at the Hyde Park, with a four-piece band playing soft music, glasses and china sparkling in the candlelight, and the immaculate waiters tending to the needs of the diners under the watchful eye of the tall and elegant Massara.

In 1974 on his retirement, a party was held in Massara’s honour, and my father produced a series of cartoons for him chronicling his career as a hotelier. One of these illustrated an event that occurred shortly after the Second World War when Massara was trying to make something of the Hyde Park Hotel, which at that time was a huge, rambling, run-down Victorian building complete with rats. Apparently unaware of the state of the hotel, a titled couple decided to hold their silver wedding party there, and their glittering guest list included King George VI and Queen Elizabeth. Realising that this royal visit could put the Hyde Park back on the map, Massara went to enormous lengths to make up for the poor state of the hotel and put on a party fit for a king. As the hotel china was cracked, he borrowed some Doulton china from a department store for the night; Joan, his wife, hand-sewed the serviettes – since post-war, items of this kind were in short supply; he covered the holes in the threadbare carpets with rugs borrowed from Harvey Nichols, the department store across the road; he managed to source impossible items such as white toilet paper; he hired a band to play during the meal; and he borrowed top waiters from other London hotels and restaurants. His efforts were well rewarded – the party went so well that when dinner was over and the band was still playing, the King asked if the carpets could be rolled up so that the assembled company could dance. Although anxious that the state of the carpets would be revealed, Massara of course agreed to the request and found himself directing operations while the delighted King abandoned protocol and lent a hand with rolling up the carpets. Nearly three decades later at Massara’s retirement party, one of several cartoons drawn by my father illustrates this particular story – which in turn illustrates his own attention to detail and lightness of touch as we see, on a coat-stand behind the royal couple rolling up the carpets, the King’s dinner jacket and, hanging beside it, a crown.

It was after an evening at the Hyde Park that my father had the second experience of his lifetime in which a few hours were lost to him. Unlike the events in India where shock and the reaction to a situation had caused him to drink excessively, nothing untoward had happened in the Grill Room that night; he’d been having a lovely time. Bottle after convivial bottle arrived and was consumed with enormous enjoyment in warm and genial company as the evening went on and on. But Pa does not remember leaving the Hyde Park, and, appallingly, he certainly doesn’t remember driving home to Esher – which he must have done since at the time my mother couldn’t drive. He does, however, remember the dreadful hangover he had the next morning, and the cure for it which he later recommended to me – a fizzing concoction of water with a couple of aspirin dissolved in it for the head, an Alka-Seltzer for the stomach, and a spoonful of glucose for a boost of energy.

As a freelance artist, work for my father at this time came in fits and starts, but with my mother working as well, they were just about able to make ends meet whenever Pa was having a quiet patch. In the late 1950s, my mother would go to work looking very smart in a short coat, high heels and gloves, but when she went away filming, she opted for rather more comfortable slacks with flat shoes and a raincoat. One afternoon having just returned from a few days away filming, the telephone rang. It was the local police station to say that our dog, a wire-haired terrier that rejoiced in the name of Baggy, had been found wandering by someone who had brought her into the police station. Would my mother come down and pick her up? It was pouring with rain, and the coat my mother had been wearing was completely sodden, so she picked up a grubby old mackintosh that she wore on wet days in the garden and which had a large rip in the sleeve and one or two buttons missing.

By the time she got to the police station, she was a sorry sight in her scruffy coat with her hair plastered down over her face and water pouring out of her shoes. My mother approached the tired-looking sergeant behind the desk, but before she could state her business there was a resounding crash from somewhere at the back of the police station. The sergeant heaved a sigh and followed the source of the crash saying wearily, ‘And what have you done now?’ The object of his attention was, of course, our dog, who had been having a wonderful time chasing around the police station and sticking her nose into everything that didn’t concern her. My mother announced that she had come to collect the animal, and with another heavy sigh, the sergeant scooped Baggy up in his arms and put her on the desk saying, ‘That’ll be a shilling.’ Then he looked closely at my wreck of a mother and asked doubtfully, ‘Have you got a shilling?’ Fortunately she had, having stuffed her purse into her pocket on the way out, and Baggy, having been thus bailed, returned home after her illicit wanderings. As it was one of their better financial periods, my father was amused when my mother, recounting the story, told him that the desk sergeant had thought she might be destitute.

As a freelance artist, it was always a worry wondering where the next job was coming from, but from Saturday Special, Tony went straight on to join the Playbox team. Hosted by Eamonn Andrews, Playbox was a family show with a quiz element featuring two teams of young contestants, and also included the talents of Cliff Michelmore, Rolf Harris and Johnny Morris who, as the Hot Chestnut Man, told stories and voiced the characters that appeared in his tales – a precursor to his talking animals in Animal Magic. Tony’s contribution was, of course, to draw captions as clues to the questions for the young teams. For each programme, he would only have a rough idea of what line the questions were going to take – songs or proverbs or sayings, and so he would be drawing the caption clues off the cuff. Not being a great pop fan, the music clues could sometimes puzzle him, but at the end of every programme the children would always rush for the drawings to take them home.

Eamonn was to become a close friend. I remember going to Eamonn’s house as a very little girl with my parents, and the house was full of partying grown-ups. Total tedium was relieved by a young Hayley Mills, who sat on the hearthrug with me and played cat’s cradle. It was at Eamonn’s house that Tony got to meet a longtime hero of his, the writer and broadcaster Patrick Campbell. Eamonn knew my father was keen to meet Patrick, and when he arrived, he gestured over the noisy throng, pointing right then left, then straight up. Puzzled, Tony walked through the corridor to the right, then left into the drawing room and looked up to find himself gazing at the extremely tall Patrick Campbell who towered over the group of people he was entertaining by a head. Happily, my father needed no introduction as Patrick recognized him immediately – which is just as well since his well-known and much played upon stammer would have made it impossible for him to greet my father by his name!

The Playbox series ran for five years, and my father’s next programme was Ask Your Dad, another children’s quiz show featuring two teams of children, each team having a ‘dad’ to whom they could appeal for help if they were unable to answer the questions posed by the chairman. My father not only designed the title card for the series, but was also one of the ‘dads’ doing his best to assist his young team – he was invaluable on questions of general knowledge, but of little help when the question was about pop music. The other dad, who was worth his weight in gold for any question on sport, was the well-known cricketing commentator who was to become a good friend of my father’s, Brian Johnston.

By this time, along with his television work, Tony was drawing a cartoon strip for the TV Comic, a children’s magazine. Drawn from his experiences in India, the two main characters were Tipu, a little Indian boy, and Packi, a white elephant – his name derived from the word ‘pachyderm’, being a thick-skinned quadruped, or elephant. Packi and Tipu enjoyed many adventures together; the storyline for the children was captioned below each illustration, and the speech bubbles within the drawing could sometimes contain a rather more sophisticated humour. In one adventure where they were making their way through dense jungle, Packi and Tipu encountered an Englishman in a safari suit armed with a butterfly net. Tipu’s speech bubble announced, ‘Dr Attenbrolly, I presume?’ These four words are a lovely example of my father’s ability to incorporate cultural references into his art, in a witty and charming way. Not only does this echo the immortal words uttered by journalist Henry Stanley on finding Dr Livingstone in a remote African village in 1871, it also acknowledges the up-and-coming young naturalist David Attenborough. Packi and Tipu graduated from comics to television, and in 1960, the drawings for ‘Packi and Tipu and the Windmill’ were among the very first to appear as a captioned story on television. Drawn in black and white on grey paper some of these illustrations were very wide, allowing the camera to pan across the picture, giving some movement to the images.

Since his days at art college, my father had from time to time been asked to design logos. In 1958, he was asked by the BBC to design a logo for a new children’s programme that was to be called Blue Peter. More than fifty years later that programme is still running today and still uses his design: the iconic Blue Peter ship. He was asked what sort of fee he wanted for this, and wondered if a penny for every time it was shown would be a good idea. ‘Don’t think that’ll amount to very much,’ he was told. ‘What about £100?’ A hundred pounds in the late fifties was a perfectly acceptable fee, and there was no way of knowing how successful the programme was going to be. But, with hindsight, a penny a time wouldn’t have been a bad deal at all!

So by leaving the British army in India, the young officer stepped away from the protective shield of the military, and allowed his creative gene to thrive for the next three years within the conclaves of Maidstone Art College – and within another three had taken massive strides towards becoming a household name.

In India, he used his artistic talent but little – drawing principally for his friends to make them laugh. When I met his Commanding Officer many years later, I asked this man if he had known about my father’s drawing skills. ‘Not really,’ he replied with a smile, ‘we kept him much too busy for any of that.’ And although my father never returned to India – something that he thought at one time in later life he might like to do but was afraid that he might find it too much changed – he drew upon the colours and images and styles that he had seen there throughout his career.

College sharpened and honed his talent and this, combined with his exceptional skill, a wonderful ease of personality and an enormous enthusiasm for everything he undertook, endeared him to everyone he met. And my father’s involvement with amateur dramatics should not be dismissed lightly, as this gave him invaluable experience of performing in front of an audience.

Here then was a precocious bubble of talent with an infectious charm and enthusiasm and, growing at the same time, was a new and fast-developing visual medium of broadcasting – television. It was perhaps inevitable that the two should collide in an explosion of picture-making. But more than this, it was the combination of the two that went on to form the benchmark for the children’s art programmes that appear on our screens to this day.