UK TV

If you’re old enough and British, you probably remember Morph and Take Hart. If you’re very slightly older you’ll just about remember their precursor, Vision On, a show designed to educate, inform, entertain and hopefully even get children fired up about art – particularly if they were deaf.

Vision On was the brainchild of producer Patrick Dowling, who went on to produce The Adventure Game. It was designed to replace For The Deaf but quickly picked up a wider audience. The aim of the programme was to entertain but also to encourage imagination, with a fast-paced flow of contrasting ideas, both sane and silly.

The presenters were Pat Keysell, an actress who also taught deaf children, and Tony Hart who made pictures in a variety of sizes and media, and encouraging children to submit their own paintings to “The Gallery”, which they did in their thousands. ‘Actor’ Sylvester “Sylveste” McCoy also mucked around in true silent comedy/mime style.

The show aired on BBC1 for 12 years, from 1964 to 1976, and even afterwards, its legacy lived on through other programmes, including Take Hart starring the now-vocal Tony Hart, and Jigsaw, which was developed by one of Vision On‘s later producers, Clive Doig, and featured Sylvester McCoy as well as the silent “Nosey Bonk”; Eureka, another Doig show, also saw Vision On/Jigsaw contributor and mad inventor Wilf Lunn doing his shtick for another generation.

In its mission to fire up kids about art, it worked. It’s a hazard of the job knowing graphic designers and I know a number who were inspired to become designers purely thanks to Vision On and Take Hart. I doubt any of them were inspired by its very weird old title sequence though.