Wolves Revisited

Wolves Witches and Giants was written by Ed Welch and narrated by Spike Milligan. It ran on ITV between 1995 and 1999 and went on to be shown in around 100 territories and won the Best Children's Entertainment award at the Royal Television Society. Today, the programme is still shown on the CiTV channel in the UK. Since making that series, Sara Bor and I have co-produced and directed eight series of Grizzly Tales for Gruesome Kids based on the books by Jamie Rix.

So how would I tackle the story of Little Red Riding Hood in 2013?

This is how: here's an extract from my short story,  Bad Mr Wolfe.

‘Is there something wrong Mrs Hood?’ I had unloaded the ivy-clad logs into to the lean-to shed and was returning to the pick-up to fish out the invoice.

    ‘It’s Ginger. She took some cake over to Mom’s house this afternoon. She should have been back by now.’

    ‘Have you phoned your Mother?’

    ‘That’s what’s so weird, she’s not picking up. Would you mind dropping in Cubby? It’ll be dark soon, Ginger ought to stay the night with Mom.’

A crow would have taken five minutes to get to her mother’s house, but the metalled track snaked through the woods that encircled the razor-wired grounds of the Loup Hall Asylum.

    It was dark by the time my tyres crunched the gravel outside old Mrs Hood’s cottage. There was something wrong. By now her fire should have been lit and the light in her kitchen should have illuminated the cottage garden.

    A blood-curdling scream filled the night air.

    I rushed to the front door, smashing the lock with the butt of my chainsaw. As I ran down the hall, there were sounds of a struggle coming from the kitchen. I forced opened the door. There in front of me was the shape of Mrs Hood, grappling with the door of the old larder.

You can read rest of the short story HERE or visit http://simonbor.co.uk and go to the Fiction page.

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?

The Grizzly Corner of my Bookshelf

There's a corner of my bookshelf for the books that have formed fragments of my professional life. Some I've illustrated, some are based on TV programmes I've been involved with, and others are the source material for animated shows I've produced.

Grizzly Tales for Gruesome Kids by Jamie Rix has been part of my life for almost two decades. Not only did my wife and I design the cover illustrations for the TV tie-in editions of the first four books, we also co-directed eight series of these award winning cautionary tales for ITV and Nickelodeon.

When our company, Honeycomb Animation, was moving from London to a converted barn in Devon, we took on a consultant to help us with our new project, Wolves Witches & Giants . One of the first meetings Jill had was at the new ITV company, Carlton, which had just replaced Thames.

“I’ve just met the man I want to marry,” she had said after her meeting with Michael Forte.  

On meeting Michael ourselves, Jill’s pin up turned out to be a bit of a comic, mimicking rival children’s commissioners and recounting amusing stories about his days in Saturday morning telly.

He didn’t go for our show, though he was later to inherit it once Carlton had taken over Central, who had subsequently backed us. As we were leaving he said, “look, I like what you guys do. Have a look at this book. Get in touch with the author, and see if you can come up with something.” The book was Grizzly Tales for Gruesome Kids.

After four series of Wolves Witches & Giants, we entered into a development deal with Carlton to find its successor, and seven years after our first encounter of Jamie Rix’s creations, the first series of Grizzly Tales aired on ITV. Now, a subsequent twelve years has passed, and we've completed the eighth, new improved series, this time for Nickelodeon UK, but for me, the Grizzly journey started in Michael Forte’s office in 1993, and the reading of the hardback edition of the first Grizzly collection, which still sits on my bookshelf.

Further Grizzly Tales information can be found at www.grizzlytv.co.uk