The Schoolgirl who inspired a Tube Mouse

It was recently reported that white actors would no longer voice characters of colour in the Simpsons, I was reminded about casting decisions we had to make over thirty years ago and the ten-year-old school girl who pointed us in the right direction.

It had seemed like a long road, with many obstacles along the way, but in 1988, Tube Mice, the first series created by Sara and myself was broadcast on CITV. Possibly through young enthusiasm or arrogance, we found ourselves in a position where we thought we could make a difference. We had been brought up with The Black and White Minstrel Show and the stereotypical characters free with each jar of Robinsons marmalade. More positive role models were Uhura in Star Trek  and Lieutenant Green in Captain Scarlet. Both these characters, however, were very much secondary to the core team of heroes, where the ultimate authority was with a white middle-aged male. In Captain Scarlet, he was even named Colonel White (and, of course, the villain was Captain Black).

Visually, at Honeycomb Animation, it was second nature to include diversity within the shows we made. It was, in part, due to cutting our teeth on the BBC educational show, 'You and Me'. While making a cut-out animated version of the picture book, Nini at the Carnival for the programme, author, Errol Lloyd had visited our studio in Smithfield to help the animators with the carnival dancing movements. So when it came to designing the characters for Tube Mice, we made sure that there were mice of colour as well as regular greyish ones.

Of course, we didn't get it all right, our mouse MP was a Financial Times reading pale grey and could now be seen as the sort of old fashioned Tory that the current regime has culled. At the initial planning stages, all four of our main characters were the same light grey tone, but we had a female mouse ticket collector called Fatima in a nice shade of brown.

We were wrapping up the production of a BBC show called Mop and Smith when we were developing Tube Mice. A group of schoolchildren visited our studio and we proudly showed them our mouse designs.

'Is that a black mouse?' The ten-year-old girl of colour was unsure about this. 'Is she important or just the ticket collector?'

We realised that we had fallen into the Uhura/Lieutenant Green trap.

Thanks to the schoolgirl, changes had to be made, and we were in a privileged position to do so. Fatima was dropped to be replaced as ticket collector by Derby, a middle-aged white mouse and we would make our lead character, Bubble, a black mouse and find an actor of colour to voice her. Stand up comic, Shelia Hyde, was given the role, with Rupert Farley taking on her sidekick, Squeak. ITV got their stunt voices when we cast George Cole and Dennis Waterman as the 'bad' mice, Vernon and Toaster, but Bubble remained leader of our group of rodents.

Maybe we still didn't try hard enough to build on this early series but there were valid reasons why most of the shows that Honeycomb Animation produced after Tube Mice ended up using white male comic actors as narrators. First of all, we made many pilots and not many made it through the gruelling commissioning system. Single voice, narrated shows were more cost effective, but often needed to have a star name attached to get noticed, not so much by the core children's audience, but by the commissioners, the parents and the press. We had tried but failed to secure one high profile actor of colour and failed to gain a commission for a pilot that had used the services of another.

Tube Mice went on to be shown all over the world. That ten-year-old schoolgirl, with her disapproving look, will now be in her forties now, and she may never have realised the small part she played in its success.
 

Bubble, from the booklet accompanying the Virgin Video release of the series.

Early storyboard of Tube Mice, with Fatima.

Fatima's replacement, Derby, asleep on the job.

CMC. Doctor Who writer discovers a new word.

Phil Ford, executive producer and co-creator of Wizards vs Aliens was speaking at last week's Children's Media Conference in a session entitled, 'Transmedia - Where Do I Start? The writer was intrigued by a word he had not heard before. 

Mind Candy's COO, Divinia Knowles, explained that Moshi Monsters would always be bigger than just the digital side, describing the property as ‘Toy-etic.’

‘Toy-etic, that’s a new word for me,’ said wordsmith, Phil Ford, who has also written  for Doctor Who and Captain Scarlet. The panel then considered if merchandising was part of transmedia – Phil stating that the great thing about toys is that children can make up their own stories with them.

The full story on Transmedia and why Phil Ford belives the Doctor Who online games are cannon can be found on the CMC Blog

Further along the bookshelf: Thunderbirds & Dr. Who

I've always collected series of books. As a child, I bought the books by John Theydon, based on Gerry Anderson's TV series Stingray, Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet. The first Doctor Who book was published by the same company and sat on my bookshelf next to the Gerry Anderson titles.  I  had discovered Doctor Who a year or so before the book was published, on the morning my seven year old self had heard about the death, the previous day, of JFK. I was listening to Uncle Mac’s Children’s Favourites when the news bulletin announced his death, my younger brother had asked me who Kennedy was.

“Oh,” I had said, “It must be the president’s brother,” thinking that it was impossible for the President of America to have died, and brothers were fair game. How could I have realised that the equally violent death of Kennedy’s brother Robert, was yet to come.

That was the morning of 23^rd of November 1963. The day several million people in Britain first met Doctor Who.

I was very aware of this new series, mainly because of the picture in the Radio Times of what looked like an old man with a spinning wheel. The image had reminded me of a cross between The Old Curiosity Shop, which had been on TV fairly recently, and a wicked witch, waiting for a Princess to prick her finger and fall asleep.

I now know this well used photograph is of the Doctor in his junkyard, with a bicycle wheel in the foreground.

Later that day, I remember talking to my friend Graham; apparently he had watched Doctor Who before; or Mr Who as he kept calling it. He told me how brilliant it was. I was as excited as he was about the way he was selling me this new series, though it sounded more slapstick than the picture in the Radio Times suggested. Graham had seen it at the cinema and told me it was funny, because Mr Who couldn’t see without his glasses. 

I would have seen the first episode that evening if it were not for one tiny problem.

The telly had gone.

My father had hired a television on two occasions, which had coincided with his long summer holidays from the University in Aberystwyth, and the cricket season. He would spend the summer listening to John Arlot on the radio, simultaneously watching the television broadcast with the sound off. I had summers of Watch with Mother, Noggin The Nog, and the Sunday classic serial. But as the evenings drew in and the rest of the country started watching more television, my father went back to work and the telly returned to the shop. I would have to wait several weeks before I would join the Doctor, mid way through his first visit to Skaro.

I did ask Graham if the first episode of Doctor Who was as good as he had hoped it was going to be.. “It was rubbish! It wasn’t the thing I saw in the cinema at all. I got it mixed up with another programme”,   

 . . not Dr Who, not even Mr Who, but . …   “Mr Magoo!!” 

 Please feel free to leave comments about your earliest memories of Doctor Who.