Hart Beat

HART BEAT
Made by: BBC
Shown on: BBC1
Years shown: 1984-93

There aren’t too many real English gentlemen left, but Tony Hart is one of them, complete with his pressed shirts and cravats. None of that bohemian lifestyle for this most polite and decorous of artists. Hart had previously presented Vision On (originally aimed at a deaf audience) and Take Hart, but Hart Beat was his project for the eighties, and this time around he had ‘helpers’, art school graduates, including the frightfully posh Margot (whom he once referred to as Mongo, or so my friend and I believed.) Tony Hart is a genius, no doubt about it; he would set about painting something, which for eighty per cent of the time looked like a bunch of casually and haphazardly drawn lines and swishes. But when he finished, it would be a perfect simulation of a New York skyline at night. Brilliant. The only problem was that however much encouragement he gave, and despite his insistence that anyone could recreate it, children could never hope to produce anything even in the same stratosphere.

One of the staples of Hart Beat was the gallery, pictures which bore the name and age of the child who had sent it in (“Sorry, we can’t return your pictures”) My brother and I, too lazy and unimaginative to send something in ourselves, found it great fun to criticise the achievements before us, along the lines of, “Crap…okay for a six year old…all right…crap…what is that supposed to be?…crap…good, I suppose….that’s made out of old leaves…crap…” Tony, however, was far more exuberant and less derogatory.

But the part that everyone was waiting for was Morph, created by Peter Lord (of Aardman Animation, home also of Nick Park.) Morph was a little man made of brown plasticine, who, as his name suggests, could metamorphose into anything he liked. He was joined, later on, by his ‘cousin’ Chas, made of white plasticine this time; Chas was the gruff, more cynical of the pair, and always tried to put one over on naïve Morph. Poor Tony Hart was also being upstaged by these pieces of modelling material.

One very vivid memory I have of Hart Beat was a show about optical illusions in art and, using the magic of television, Tony threw down a circle of black sugar paper, and then jumped into it, as though it were a hole in the floor. This terrified me, but I wanted to know whether it was really possible, and it took me days to pluck up the courage to put the piece of black paper I found in the cupboard on the floor, and step onto it. I should never again criticise the work of the BBC effects team.

SQUARE EYES RATING: 7/10