A while back I made a post about the hunt for the "British Simpsons", where I looked at the several of the most notable attempts by UK-based creators to make an animated comedy series targeted at adults. But there were quite a few lower-profile examples that I didn't find room to mention, and here they are...
Terry Adlam and Gerry Anderson's Dick Spanner, P.I.
Dick Spanner, P.I. is one of the more successful of the series that I'll be looking at in this post. Created by Terry
Adlam and produced by Gerry Anderson, the series aired as a six-minute segment on
Network 7, a late eighties Channel 4 series targeting teenagers.
Dick Spanner spoofed both film
noir and sci-
fi serials, and much of its humour was derived from how Dick's deadpan narration was illustrated with visual puns straight out of
MAD Magazine.
Freddy Mercury and John Lennon in House of Rock
.Another series that originated as a segment of a longer programme was
House of Rock, a sitcom about deceased musicians such as John Lennon, Freddy Mercury and Kurt Cobain hanging out
together in the afterlife. The series first appeared in 2000, when it took the form of clips shown as part of
4music.
Dick Spanner and
House of Rock were lucky: they have their fans and have both been released on DVD. The rest of this post, I fear, is something of a graveyard of forgotten pilots and one-off miniseries.
Tim Searle's Dominion.
In September 2000 Channel 4 held an
Animation Week, during which Tim
Searle's Dominion aired in a 7:55 slot after the news. This short series of four-minute cartoons about an everyday man who ends up living in a city of aliens had the bad luck to premiere during the same week as
Futurama, a higher-profile and more sophisticated treatment of much the same subject matter; still, animation enthusiasts should have appreciated the in-jokes (the main characters were named Avery,
Freleng, Fleischer,
Quimby and
Svankmajer) and the presence of Hugh Laurie didn't hurt.
Johnny
Casanova the Unstoppable Sex Machine
, round about the strongest of the Animation Week
pilots, can be viewed online here. Also airing during
Animation Week was a set of four sitcom pilots:
Three Brothers Diamond, written by Ricky Grover and Frankie Park and directed by Park and Jamie
Rix;
Captain Sarcastic, written and directed by Peter
Peake;
Chat the Celebrity Cat, directed by Grant Gilchrist; and
Johnny Casanova the Unstoppable Sex Machine, created by Jamie
Rix and co-directed by Andy Wyatt. None were picked up as series and, truth be told, they're a pretty hit-or-miss lot. Although the writing and voice acting generally work, the mostly rather basic animation lets things down; indeed, most of the cartoons in this post give the impression that the crews were still experimenting with what they could pull off on a TV budget and timescale, with mixed results.
Rolf's Animal Hairdressers
, a pilot by Tim Searle, can be seen here.The same year Tim
Searle made
Rolf's Animal Hairdressers as part of
Comedy Lab, a series designed to produce pilots for potential series. According to Clare
Kitson's British Animation: The Channel 4 Factor there were four
animated episodes in Comedy Lab's first series; as far as I can tell the other three were
House of Rock Awards,
Absolutely's Meat and Fireside's
Pop Cultomania. Again, none of these became series - except, of course,
House of Rock, which already was a series - although
Searle went on to use the stripped-down animation process that he developed for
Rolf's to create
2DTV, which needed to be animated quickly because of its topical nature.
Emptyspace's The Cloth
. Never heard of it? Not alone., a six-part spoof of seventies cop shows starring two
hardboiled clergymen, was serialised as part of Channel 4's
Hot Reels Animation Grand Prix 2001. It was written by Rupert Russell and David Armand and animated by
Celyn Brazier and Tom
Perrett and has now been almost completely forgotten. The end credits identify it as "a
Hahabonk production" and attribute its copyright to a company called
Emptyspace, whoever they were...
The Beryl Cook-inspired Bosom Pals.
All of these cartoons were brought to us by Channel 4, but now we come to the BBC, which aired the two-part pub-based sitcom
Bosom Pals in 2004. As usual there was a celebrity voice actor - Dawn French, who was also on the writing team - but more unexpected was the involvement of a celebrity artist, Beryl Cook. Directed by Ginger Gibbons and animated by the Hungarian studio
Varga, the series worked hard to capture Cook's painting style and pulled it off commendably, even bagging the
Annecy award for best TV special.
Bosom Pals harked back to a slightly earlier period in the history of adult cartoon series: back when
The Simpsons was the dominant model any show hoping to emulate it had no formula to follow beyond good writing. After
South Park arrived on the scene, however, far too many creators got the impression that rude jokes and bare-bones animation were all you needed for a successful series. Of course, this ignores the social commentary that
South Park has under all of its swearing, and that the crude animation - giving the impression that the series was made by a demented child - is not just mere cost-cutting but also adds to its off-the-wall feel.
One last thing that needs to be mentioned is the range of animation that has been included in sketch comedies over the years, from Terry Gilliam's contributions to
Monty Python's Flying Circus to more recent sequences for likes of
The Lenny Henry Show and
Frankie Boyle's Tramadol Nights. This is an area that needs to have more written about it, and I hope to cover it in more depth in the future.
Blue Xmas is a music video animated with a stylish (and very eighties) collage technique. It was made in 1988 by Tim Searle, then a West Surrey College of Art and Design student and now better known as the creator of 2DTV and the Have I Got News for You opening. The visual style is alien to his later projects, but his interest in social commentary is evident.
