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.

How to Name a Company

I owe a lot to The Little Oxford Dictionary, fourth edition published in 1969.

Thirty years ago this month, my wife and I set up the animation company that was to go on and produce series such as Tube Mice, Wolves Witches and Giants, Binka, Funky Valley and Grizzly Tales.

We about to sign a contract to make a film for The Geological Museum for a sum well in excess of the figure we had just paid for our first house. All we needed now was a name for our new company.

We sat in our kitchen with a college friend, and went through scores of names. It was so nearly Frame-by-Frame, but that didn’t seem to feel right for us.

I had worked at Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel’s Cucumber Studios in the early eighties. They had chosen their company name by numbers. One of them had chosen a page number of a dictionary at random, the other chosen a figure between one and fifty, to represent which word on that page should be chosen. Cucumber was the result.

We decided to repeat the experiment. The first result was unusable. So dull that it was immediately forgotten. We tried again.

Page 256.

25^th word on the page.

Result = Honeycomb.

That sounded a possibility to us, but then we read the definition,“structure of hexagonal cells”. Animation was made with cells. That was a good enough link for us. 

I've often wondered if our random choice has helped or hindered the company.

In an alternative universe where the first word on page 409 was chosen, would Pomegranate Animation be a billion pound enterprise listed on the stock-market or would it have been just one more name in that long list of nineteen eighties business failures.

Honeycomb has served us well for thirty years, we could of so easily selected Shoddy, the 22nd word on page 503. Where would we have been then?