Patrick Dowling (Producer) recently provided a more concise potted history of 'Vision On' and talked about its evolution, ultimate demise, and his own personal involvement with 'Vision On':

"Declic was the French co-production title, also Suisse Romande. Susanne is the daughter of a writer called Les Lilley who I met somewhere. He told me she talked to her pet tortoise, so between us we concocted conversations she might have had and I took a photographer down to his place, (SE London I seem to remember.) We took a mass of shots of the two of them so I could edit a few for each story. It came at a time when I thought we could get away with having a few words to read but strictly not too many. The tricky thing was getting some point to it without going on & on. Same problem with the 'Burbles' who lived in the grandfather clock which I also wrote. Another cog in the works was Tony Beresford-Smith, (who sadly died back in the seventies.) He joined us as a film editor but went on to contribute the Montage sequence on whatever theme was current for the programme, which he shot with his own camera. I thought it was a very valuable segment. Who else? Well, mustn't forget Penny Nuttall-Smith, a lovely lady. She had an old Arri or something which she set up behind the sofa in her living-room and made those amazing animations of bits and pieces, painstakingly moving them frame by frame. She gave me no end of trouble fitting music to what she had shot because she had no ear for music at all, bless her. And then Peter Harwood who I kidnapped from radio to make sound effects for all of the film items - a major job I may say and made all the difference, particularly to David's stuff which of course to a large extent he shot silent. I'd made a number of similar things in the early days with Julian Chagrin & George Ogilvie or with Oliver Postgate. I think they must have been for "For Deaf Children" Ursula Eason's programme which was the precursor to VO. She hadn't been happy with FDC because it was necessarily so slow with all the words and signing.

The deaf were not quick readers so it all became interminable. Three of us had a go at the new VO, Diana Potter, Leonard Chase & me doing eight or nine episodes each. When it came to series two I sold the idea to Ursula of completely dispensing with speech - not a single word. And thats how it all started. In those days you were allowd to run with an idea, fall over, make mistakes, whatever. Not any more though, not these days! Tony never spoke at all - I quite ruthlesly shut him up! and I allowed Pat to do just one little bit of speech and signing to maintain the identification with the deaf. Apart from that, it was for all children, including any who might be hard of hearing and I started collecting a stable of short film makers to which we were able to add editing and sound dubbing as required.

I eventually brought the thing to an end because we were simply running out of ideas. Tony could have gone on forever of course, and I let him do just that in "Take Hart" but the strain of relying solely on sight and still keeping it new and fresh just became too much. So I stopped I think before we started sliding downhill."

Patrick Dowling

Clive is know for many programmes including 'Jigsaw', 'Lucky Numbers', 'Puzzle Trail', 'Beat the Teacher', 'We are The Champions', 'Phoenix & The Carpet', 'The Deceivers', 'Eureka', 'Abracadabra' and 'Turnabout'. He got his first Directors role with Vision On in 1971 and has happy memories of it:

"Six years of extraordinary imaginative humorous visual programming. As you know it reached cult status, amongst a normal hearing children's and adult audience, as well as a 'hard-of-hearing' audience (for which it was designed) not only in this country but throughout the world. It was sold to all the syndicated stations across the USA, we had co-productions with Canada, USA, Sweden, Germany, France and notably Switzerland, where we made many guest appearances and made a film special in their studios and at the ski resort of Verbier. In fact ‘Vision On' by 1977 had been sold to practically every country in the world, the list, unfortunately not the money, was endless.

I believe that “For the Deaf” became “Vision On” in 1964 but used to be a rather tame fifteen minute magazine programme. In 1970 it was made into a half hour slot and Patrick introduced many of the quick fire ideas and the format which it became famous for. I directed programme 4 of the 1971 series as a new TV director, having come from camera crews, vision-mixing and floor managing since I joined the BBC in 1958. I was supposed to alternate directing the studio with other directors and Patrick Dowling himself. But from that programme 4 on, Patrick decided I should be the sole director and I went on to direct every single episode from then until the very last one.

There were sixteen themed episodes in each of the six series that I directed, and later produced, when Patrick started up "The Adventure Game", which amounted to 93 programmes in total, along with the foreign versions, specials and the Swiss film special. I personally do not seem to have any copies of any Vision Ons, but certainly they must exist in BBC archives, only from the fact that the foreign versions were made for sale and sold, and had to be kept as masters.

On that very first series that I directed, "Vision On" won the British Academy Award for Best Specialised Series, beating Dr Bronowski's amazing "The Ascent of Man" in so doing. An un-precedented accolade for a children's programme to beat the Features Department Flagship Series. It also won the Children's Harlequin award the same year.

In addition "Vision On" won the Prix Jeunesse in 1972, (a worldwide award for Children's TV) for one episode 12, called "Black & White", which I directed. It also won various other international awards including, the Chris Ohio Award in Canada, The Prix Danube for later series, and was accompanied for an American ABC sale with a brochure that cost more to produce than the series had had to make.

In my tenure with Vision On, we introduced new animators, especially those from recent Czech immigrants such as Mirek and Peter Lang, Susan Kodicek and others, as well as very late on, the first line-drawing by British university students Peter Lord and David Sproxton of Aardman fame. I well remember on the back of one short line-drawing film animation of Aardman, a Neanderthal superhero, there was a stop-frame animation of a lump of plasticene that turned into a cat and then ate itself and disappeared. Surreal, well executed and funny. I asked for more. Morph was the result, who as everyone knows then appeared regularly on Take Hart and other Tony programmes after Vision On, and their whole development, Creature Comforts and Nick Park's films have brought them greater and greater success. From small beginnings!

The cottage industry of animators and short film suppliers were the bread and butter of Vision On's surreal, serendipity visual humour. Everything had to be entertaining, funny or just off the wall, loosely connected to each programme's theme, but essentially without the use of the spoken word or sound to tell the story or make the comedy. Mute films of dancing beads by Penny Nuttall-Smith, artistic explorations of drains or waves by Tony Beresford-Cooke, the infamous prof by David Cleveland, using stop-frame filming techniques and rostrum work which produced marvelously funny innovative and impossible flying and movement sequences; as well as commissioned and bought-in animations from all over the world, were, however, all accompanied by excellent music and sound effects, which supplemented the visual humour for all viewers.

Tony Hart's own giant pictures. First of all drawn with white-lining machines on tarmac (usually filmed at Bound's Green Fire Station from the dizzy heights of the escape tower), then with massive sand drawings filmed from cliffs in the Isle of White or cherry-pickers in Weston Super Mare, drawn with rakes or motorbikes pulling ploughshares and also 1 mile wide immense drawings rolled out across the hills of Devil's Dyke in Surrey with roller towels. All added to the mesmera of new surreal television experiences.

Tony's amazing ability to project himself above his mammoth drawings on the ground, to actually see in his mind's eye the change of perspective from a high oblique camera angle, when drawing a perfect circle or an elephant, was awe-inspiring.

Wilfrid Makepeace Lunn came in to the studio with his Heath-Robinson devices and pyrotechnic sculptures and inventions to add his eccenticism and frighten as all with bangs, and clanks and flames and whirlabouts, to the whole pot-pourri of visual delights.

The 'woofumpuss' first made its amazing wizzy appearance in 1974. I had taken the idea from a Charlie Caroli stage slapstick routine. All it was was a pink feather boa attached to a long nylon thread, laced through eyeholes all round the studio set. For no apparent reason the 'woofumpuss' would suddenly dart and zip around Tony, Pat and Sylvester causing mayhem. It was during Vision On that Colour Separation Overlay came along and I was able to use blue screen for the first time as a fantasy tool, setting the performers in unlikely places, creating new TV magic, in some mad, seemingly physically impossible sketches, including the first multiple pass examples of doubling, tripling and quadrupling up of characters in the studio. A famous sketch had Pat Keysell and Sylvester McCoy (his first regular TV appearances), dancing an eightsome reel as all eight dancers in the set.

I also filmed a "Ballet of Fork-Lift Trucks" for "Vision On" sometime before Jim Franklin did the bulldozer/earth mover dance in "The Goodies".

Then there were Tony's own paintings and drawings, collages of seeds or beans, bits of toilet paper, sand, rocks, gliteer and paint splashes which came to immediate life so quickly as recognizable animals, landscapes, portraits, industrial scenes, etc.. But it was all ephemeral art, the final pictures were only ever seen for maybe six seconds at the most on the television, then they were lost, Tony never kept them nor did anyone else, sometimes literally, as we drove tractors through them, set fire to them, tore them up, soaked them away or swept them up off the floor. Destroying the instant works of art as soon as they were made, either on or off screen, was greeted with much anger by some viewers, although they would never have had the opportunity to see them again. They were only made for experiencing on TV on the instant. Their impact was simply in the making and presentation on screen of the final picture for five or six seconds.

Finally, and this is what most viewers remember in “Vision On”, either with pride or frustration, there was The Gallery, which each week displayed the fifteen or so best paintings sent in by young viewers. From an average of 5000 pictures, drawings and paintings submitted each week, sometimes many more, a selection team with Tony would choose maybe 50, that gave a wide range of subject, style, materials and age, from which we would choose fifteen to twenty to study and fit in to the two minute piece of famous music.

Vision On was recorded in BBC Bristol main studio (see photo above) for the whole six years I worked on it. One programme was recorded each fortnight, therefore the main recording run of each series took thirty-two weeks to complete. Prior to the recording run each year we had had the whole contributor's and production team work out our themes together, and then script writing, pre-filming, booking, rehearsals and kid's painting selection added a further ten weeks to the production schedule. Post-production, although electronic editing on tape was in its infancy, plus making foreign versions (If you remember certain items had subtitles, such as Humphrey and Susanne and the famous Burbles who lived in the grandfather clock, so these had to be translated into French, German, Swedish and Arabic etc and new versions made for sale)took another four weeks or so.

All in all the series took, bar a fortnight's holiday, the whole calendar year to make. No sooner had we finished and delivered one series and were watching it go out on the air, than we were starting the next. An ‘all year' job. We were all very sorry when Patrick decided to end the series, as the team had been so close for so long. Patrick went on to produce "The Adventure Game" and "Why Don't You...Switch off your Television and do something less boring instead”. Tony of course went on to make the ever popular Heartbeat and Take Hart. I continued with the anarchic and surreal content of my letter game "Jigsaw", which incidentally won the very first full BAFTA for a children's programme and a Harlequin Award (seen held by Pat Keysell in photo on right), and then "Lucky Numbers", "Puzzle Trail" and "Beat the Teacher", "We are The Champions", "Phoenix & The Carpet", and after leaving the BBC "The Deceivers", "Eureka", "Abracadabra", "Turnabout" and many other TV programmes which I have created right up to the present day

"Vision On" was the starting block for many very talented people and I am proud to have worked for so long on the series, and especially with Tony Hart, one of the greatest TV talents of them all."

Clive Doig