Words and Pictures '84: Owl vs Winter

There was always something about the Vicky Ireland era of Words and Pictures that's stuck me as a little eerie and haunted - and by that, I'm not just alluding to the fact that an episode about animal skeletons (that I assume to be legitimate) was featured in the post-apocalyptic portion of the notorious 1984 nuclear drama Threads. Really, it's more that the Ireland era made up some of my earliest experiences in watching television, back when any moving image that seemed unfamiliar and uncanny was guaranteed to set me on edge, and it's inevitable that the bulk of my memories of the series are built from hazy, half-remembered details, not all of which have managed to resurface on YouTube or my family's private collection of 1980s tape recordings. One of the reasons why the track "And The Cuckoo Comes" by The Advisory Circle resonates with me so is because the educational (or not) monologue recited throughout feels strongly reminiscent of the kind of teaching Ireland would have imparted on Words and Pictures (no doubt set to some kind of appealing cutout animation sequence), but distorted and warped out of shape in a manner that seems to perfectly mirror my own lingering apprehension in taking this particular trip down memory lane. To my preschooler brain, there seemed to be something inherently, if inexplicably sinister about the world of Words and Pictures, an intuitive misgiving that The Advisory Circle seemed to understand only too well.

Words and Pictures was first launched by BBC Schools in 1970 to promote literacy skills in young children, a sister series to the highly successful Look and Read that started three years prior. When Ireland came on in 1982, she was only the fourth person to take up presenting duties, but she had the longest reign of any presenter in the series' history, finally going her separate way in 1989. The premise of this era had it that Ireland was your friendly local librarian, always on hand to greet the visiting children and to read them stories. Assisting Ireland was Charlie, a two-dimensional cartoon creature who apparently lived in the library and was voiced by Charles O'Rourke (to modern eyes, Charlie looks a ridiculously crude creation, but I'm sure that for a BBC budget in 1982 he was the very height of sophistication). By the time I was actually watching the series in school, the format had shifted to be about Stuart Bradley and his sidekick Nutmeg the cat (a puppet creation with disproportionately large eyes) - their era seemed comparatively brighter and more colourful, removed from that musty library aura in which Ireland and Charlie were so at home, and I have overall fewer alarming memories attached to it - which isn't to say that there were none at all. They did, after all, base an episode around Tony Ross's Oscar Got The Blame, a perkily grotesque variation on the set-up explored in Shirley Jackson's "Charles".

When I think about moments from the Ireland era that spooked me as a child, right at the top of my list would be the episode based around the theme of giants, which had a sequence with a bunch of kids playing around a giant's breakfast table - inevitably, the giant returned, and my memory might be deceiving me here, but I don't think those kids got out alive. Somewhere lower down would be a stop motion animation sequence about an owl who couldn't sleep because he was terrified of the strange shapes that appeared in his bed every time he tried to settle down in it, a scenario which resulted in the owl launching all-out warfare upon the shapes and destroying his bed in the process. Less traumatic but still pretty harrowing to watch was another animated sequence in which the same owl, ever the master of good judgement, let the winter into his house and watched helplessly as it transformed his abode into a frozen wasteland. (I also have memories of an utterly fiendish feature set around a clip depicting a community of people spontaneously combusting and these kids having to decide which instrument provided the best musical accompaniment for the moment, but I am not 100% certain that this was from Words and Pictures or some other contemporary educational series. They went with the drums, so you know.) Although I've never gotten anywhere close to reacquainting myself with the horrors of what actually went on that giant's kitchen, I have since identified the two owl animations as adaptations of stories from the collection Owl at Home by American author Arnold Lobel, better known for his series of books about the characters Frog and Toad, a number of which were also adapted for Words and Pictures. The Frog and Toad animations, incidentally, never bothered me. They always seemed as gentle and genial as the premise of a frog and a toad palling around together and enjoying a variety of stoic pleasures would suggest. By contrast, there was something intrinsically less secure about Owl's world, which I don't think I ever put my finger on as a child, but nowadays quite blatantly leaps out as being rooted in the fact Owl leads such an intensely isolated existence. If the Frog and Toad stories were miniature meditations on the delights of friendship, then the Owl stories might be considered the flip side, in that they dealt extensively with the theme of solitude. For all intents and purposes, Owl is the only being who exists in his little universe, yet as the blurb on the back of Lobel's book notes, he isn't always alone. Owl at Home contains five stories in total (although a search on BBC Genome would appear to indicate that "The Guest" and "Strange Bumps" were the only two adapted for Words and Pictures), two of which are about the connections he forges with the world around him, and the companionship he senses, whether it be treacherous ("The Guest") or benign ("Owl and The Moon") in the most overlooked of places. Alternatively, Owl might be at odds with himself, whether knowingly ("Upstairs and Downstairs") or unknowingly ("Strange Bumps"). The middle story, "Tear-Water Tea", is an anomaly in that there is no real conflict to speak of, but it does illustrate that Owl has as fine a knack for discerning the sorrow in the everyday as he does the joy and fascination.

Alas, the "Strange Bumps" episode is presently not available on YouTube, and while I'm pretty sure we had a VHS recording of its somewhere, the tape has been squirrelled away and by now has probably descended into the depths of Moldsville, so I haven't had the opportunity to test how well that childhood unease holds up to adult scrutiny. But "The Guest" has proved less elusive. The episode in question is officially titled "Owl at Home", and first aired on 8th February 1984. According to BBC Genome, it was repeated four times throughout the latter half of the 1980s. The episode is built around the general theme of winter, opening with Ireland arriving at the library in the snow, and following up with stock footage of frosty landscapes set to the winter portion of Antonio Vivaldi's "The Four Seasons". The centrepiece, however, is a delightful stop motion animation sequence from Alan Platt recreating the events of "The Guest" (note that while the end-credits contain a general animation credit for Bura and Hardwick, the "puppet sequence" specifically is credited to Platt). Here, Owl's peaceful winter evening by the fireside is interrupted by the sounds of a loud banging at his door, which Owl initially assumes to be an unexpected caller. After repeatedly answering the door to find nobody there, he (correctly) deduces that the knocking is the result of the wind blowing up against his door, but from that leaps to the fanciful conclusion that the winter is knocking on his door because it wants to come in, and that the correct course of action would be to welcome it with open arms. When Winter proves to be woefully short on etiquette, extinguishing Owl's fire and freezing his bowl of pea soup, Owl banishes it back outside, restoring order inside his home and resuming his peaceful solitude.

Reading Lobel's stories, it would be easy enough to assume that the intended irony is that Owl, despite being a bird traditionally used as a shorthand for wisdom, isn't particularly bright. A little too easy and, I would argue, also erroneous. It's more that Owl has the innocence and naivety of a young child, and an active imagination that becomes magnified up against the silence and the voidness of his isolation, which he knows not to be a voidness at all, but a world brimming with wonder and possibilities when viewed with the right perception. Which might all be a roundabout way of saying that Owl's solitary existence has made an absolute kook out of him, but Lobel finds a quiet fulfilment in that kookiness, particularly in the final story. Owl's curiosity and enthusiasm for living are certainly no less valid than that of Frog and Toad, and his reclusive lifestyle is upheld as no more devoid of meaning. There is as much contentment to be found in gazing at the moon as in walking with a companion; in fact, in "Owl and The Moon", they become the same experience.

What really stands out to me about the Words and Pictures adaptation of "The Guest" is that it is actually a compelling little animation in its own right. Platt's stop motion techniques have a charming expressiveness; there is an appealing daintiness to Owl's movements, while the use of doll house furniture as props provide an apt reflection of the character's innocence and vulnerability, so that when the Winter engulfs them it becomes a direct attack on Owl's ingenuous psyche. An equally major driving force behind the tone and of character the piece is the music, a synth-driven arrangement with a piercing, gliding quality that is entirely convincing as the leitmotif of an invasive winter flurry, and which is attributed in the credits to Paddy Kingsland. It's the music, I think, that causes the story to play out somewhat differently to how it plays on the printed page; although the illustrations of the Lobel's book make clear the intensity of the scenario, visibly depicting the Winter as an overpowering force that knocks Owl sideways against the wall and soon has him struggling to keep his head above the snow, it comes across as a more intrinsically humorous situation, what with Owl's very genteel attempts at instructing his visitor to behave. Kingsland's score, meanwhile, brings out the danger of Owl's predicament, beginning the instant he hears that unexpected knocking against his door, so that we have the sense of an intrusive presence slowly closing in on his ostensibly secure fireside tranquillity, and climaxing with a confrontation that favours tension over humor, as Owl fights to reclaim his territory from being completely devoured by Winter's destructive tendencies. The most prominent source of comedy comes in Owl's voice, supplied by Ireland herself, since she gives him a distinctly officious quality that seems amusingly at odds with his character's childlike naivety, but this too seems hauntingly futile in the face of Winter's onslaught. The sequence is accompanied by one of the trademarks of Words and Pictures recitals - intermittent snatches of text appear beneath the animation, to encourage children to apply their literary prowess while processing the narrative, and in this case the repeated textual emphasis that "No one was there" merely underscores the precariousness of Owl's lonely existence, and the dark unknown of the world beyond the fragile safety of his house. Crucially, the opening shot depicts the winter night in calming blue hues, but as the disturbance begins and Owl finds himself gazing outward, expecting to be greeted by someone and finding only a chilly nothingness, the world outside his door becomes enveloped by a blackness, an abyss that is constantly threatening to enter in and destroy Owl's idyll from the inside. The struggle between Owl and Winter for control of the house becomes a battle ground between innocence and corruption, between existence and oblivion, implicit qualities of Lobel's story that Platt and Kingsland bring more to the foreground.

The "Owl at Home" story is followed by another animated sequence, this one created using cut-out animation techniques, and arranged to a song, "The Midnight Owl" by Ian Humphris, featuring another, non-anthropomorphic owl, but mainly focussed on a trio of musketeers trampling through the snow to the sounds of grey wolves howling and brown bears growling, keeping up the overall sense of precariousness that pervades the episode. It ends with an exterior shot of the library as the snow persists in falling, allowing the credits to roll to the unintelligible shrieks of children playing, but most predominantly to the ambience of the restless winter wind. It seems appropriate that it should have the final word.

My main takeaway from revisiting "Owl at Home" is that I really need to acquaint myself further with the works of both Platt and Kingsland. Kingsland's other credentials included compositions for the BBC Radiophonic Workshop that were featured in such celebrated science fiction series as The Changes and Doctor Who, and numerous additions to the KPM music library. Platt went on to work on the Channel 4 educational series Fourways Farm, for which he received a Peabody Award. His last project, before retirement, was a 30-minute adaptation of Richard Wagner's opera series Der Ring des Nibelungen - which, from the outset, looks astounding.