Conversation Pieces was a five-part series of claymation shorts commissioned in the early 80s by Jeremy Isaacs of the newly-birthed Channel 4 and directed and animated by Peter Lord and David Sproxton of Aardman Animations (still the only staff members of Aardman at the time). These were ordered upon the strength of two very similar shorts which Lord and Sproxton had created for BBC Bristol in 1978, Confessions of a Foyer Girl and Down and Out, which used audio recordings of real-life conversations as the basis for experimental animation, and enabled Lord and Sproxton to further develop and expand upon the craft which would later become one of Aardman's most familiar trademarks (once Nick Park, who joined Aardman in the mid-80s, figured out that there was a wealth of humour to be mined if you matched recorded interview dialogue with claymation animals in vox populi fashion). Like so many of the non-Morph films from Aardman's early years, this series tends not to receive the attention it deserves in most contemporary Aardman retrospectives, so I've opted to make it the subject of my next pet project and to review each of the shorts individually. With my look at Sweet Disaster all dusted and complete, I need a new series of underrated animations to champion.
In order to collect conversations for the series, Lord and Sproxton hid microphones around a number of everyday locations, although sourcing usable material proved to be a challenge. In the book Creating Creature Comforts, written by Andy Lane and published by Boxtree in 2003 (p.52), Lord recounts how attempts to record a conversation at a barber shop went awry when a customer caught sight of the microphone and took exception to their underhanded tactics. An ironmonger's shop was tried as another potential location, but nothing of any real interest happened.
On the whole Conversation Pieces, which aired on Channel 4 in 1983, took a very naturalistic approach to the material, with three of the five films, On Probation, Sales Pitch and Late Edition, recreating their respective conversations in contexts and environments that were presumably very similar to how they played out in real life. Much of the charm arose from how richly the animation could capture the reality of each situation, and how the various quirks and mannerisms of the claymation models could convey human emotion and vulnerability in ways that subtly enhanced the poignancy and drama. It's when we get onto the remaining films, Early Bird and Palmy Days, that we see Aardman dipping into slightly wackier territory, with the audio serving more as a springboard for Lord and Sproxton to flex their creative muscles in significantly reinterpreting what they were hearing and creating something altogether stranger. The naturalistic character details remained an integral part of the charm, but these shorts were less about faithfully reconstructing a real-life situation than in reveling in the dissonance that comes from matching the mind-boggling with the mundane (as such, traces of Creature Comforts DNA can be glimpsed therein).
Early Bird, which follows the morning routine of a breakfast DJ at a regional radio station where the various items of broadcasting equipment appear to all have minds of their own, is something of an oddity in the series, as it contains no two-way conversation, merely the intermingling of light radio patter with promos, jingles and news/traffic reports. The disc jockey is the only human figure to appear throughout, and the film crackles along by focusing extensively upon how many weird, witty and wonderful sight gags can be packed into the setting, giving us a humourous imagining of what goes on behind the scenes of an early morning breakfast show. We see the disc jockey incorporating his presentation into a more conventional wake-up routine, his mannerisms conveying a blatant weariness that contrasts brilliantly with the perkiness of his on-air persona. The featured disc jockey is none other than pirate radio veteran Roger Day, who at the time was presenting at Radio West (sitting in, we are told, for John Hayes on this particular morning), the first commercial radio station of Aardman's home town Bristol. Also featured is the late Trevor Fry, who sadly passed away in 2014, and who shows up here in an entirely unexpected guise that takes the wackiness of the short to a whole extra level and provides it with the perfect closing punchline (one which neatly foreshadowed the central gimmick of Creature Comforts).
In the absence of any other human characters, the short revolves broadly around the DJ's interactions with his technical environs, which by turns seem barren and secluded, animated and expressive, and at times downright surreal (one of the stranger, less explicable sight gags involves Day's frog sidekick leaping onto the mounted head of a cat, which immediately glares at it). The grey, ostensibly lifeless walls of Radio West seem far removed from the bucket-and-spade seaside getaway that Day repeatedly references, and yet they glimmer with energy in unexpected places, with Day's incorporation of the studio environs into his breakfast routine flickering between the witty (such as using the microphone grill as a tea strainer) and the totally absurd (cooking breakfast upon the turntable, buttering an audio cassette in place of toast). The breakfast show dialogue is not, in itself, particularly interesting - from the trite observation made by Day on the long list of female names in Peter's 18th birthday dedication to the wishy washy horoscope reading, this is predominantly lightweight listening, with hints of a darker, more tumultuous world occasionally rising to the surface (the news report on coal pit closures) - but Lord and Sproxton enliven it considerably by representing it in a slightly more twisted light. Some wry humour upon the undemanding nature of the dialogue also works its way in - check out the brand of breakfast cereal Day has stashed away in his record library (in another neat touch, the brand name "Aard's" has also here replaced "Kellogg's").
The animation has the rough, unpolished but lovingly crafted look which was characteristic of the early Aardman shorts, with the attention to detail being absolutely splendid all round. The only slight chink occurs when Day pours the aforementioned cereal box and we blatantly switch into live action footage of cornflakes filling up a bowl, which seems discordant with the overall flow of the stop-motion animation - and yet it also fits in perfectly with the sense of half-asleep, pre-caffeine delirium which Early Bird captures so enchantingly.
Availability: Early Bird was selected to represent the Conversation Pieces series, and Lord and Sproxton's work as a whole, on the 1991 Connoisseur Video VHS release Animation on 4: Volume 1. It also appears on the Momentum VHS A Taste of Aardman. The complete Conversation Pieces can be found on the 2000 DVD release Aardman Classics.
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