From The Sunday TimesFebruary 18, 2007
Call my fluff
There is such a thing as a comedy blink. It’s obvious when you think about it, and it’s all about timing. Oliver Hardy turns towards the camera with a deadpan expression, holds for a beat, then blinks. Time it right and it’s comedy gold. Time it wrong and it’s just a fat man blinking. So imagine that, instead of a seasoned comic, you have a little Plasticine sheep. It’s facing the camera with a deadpan look, and you have to stick on the Plasticine eyelids at exactly the right moment to make the blink funny.
In Shaun the Sheep, there’s an awful lot of comedy blinking. The series is silent, so eyelids have to do plenty of talking. It’s the latest production from Aardman, the claymation crew behind Wallace & Gromit ― though a glance at the puppets’ features should prove that. Indeed, fans of the animator Nick Park will be familiar with the show’s lead: Shaun was the little lamb that got away in his 1996 Oscar-winning short A Close Shave.
Shaun is technically the first full spin-off from an Aardman animation short or feature.
And spin-offs have a chequered career in television history. Frasier did well coming out of Cheers; Joey did disastrously coming out of Friends. As a rule of thumb, the less significant the character in the original, the more likely they are to succeed. The omens for Shaun are thus reasonably good ― he was on screen for a tiny part of A Close Shave. Even so, Park took some persuading to franchise Shaun out.
“We were talking to the BBC about a children’s show,” says the producer Julie Lockhart, “and we were aware of how popular Shaun had been. Nick is always wary of exploiting his characters, but he gave the go-ahead for another team to work on Shaun, and supervised the whole project.”
When Lockhart talks about Shaun’s success, she is, in theory, discussing a nebulous concept. Artistic appeal is traditionally hard to quantify. In the case of Shaun, however, it was simple. The fluffy charmer was the single most successful piece of merchandise A Close Shave produced. His children’s backpacks and hot-water bottles are still flying off the shelves more than 10 years later.
As a result, the show ― and its inevitable merchandising revenue ― comes at a useful time for Aardman. Having signed a deal for up to five pictures with DreamWorks in 1999, and after publicly celebrating the success of Chicken Run, the two companies announced the end of their partnership on January 30, after months of speculation in the American press. Aardman’s last two features, Curse of the Were-Rabbit and Flushed Away, both lost money, with Flushed Away costing DreamWorks £73m to make, but recouping just £25m at the box office.
Although the official statements on the split were full of mutual admiration, DreamWorks had planned its two-movies-per-year schedule until 2010 without an Aardman
feature in sight, and the Brits were finding demands to make their very English sense of humour more US-friendly creatively stifling. “We always knew America would be a hard ― we’re a very English company,” says Aardman’s Arthur Sheriff. “We embrace the international market, and we are talking to other distributors, but part of our strength is that sense of humour, and we want to continue with it.”
Certainly, Shaun the Sheep seems about as British as you can get. It’s set in rolling countryside, near the fields of a charming grey-stone farm, and the plots usually revolve around Shaun, the smart sheep in a dangerously stupid flock, attempting to lead his errant band through the complications of the modern world. In one episode, he organises himself, two comrades and a scarecrow’s clothing into a tottering fake human to purchase takeaway pizzas for the gang. In another, the dimwitted farmer chucks out his old record-player, allowing the animals ― after some suitably incompetent experimenting ― to set up a nightclub in the barn. The farm’s snidely grinning pigs act as a counterpoint to Shaun’s schemes ― gatecrashing the club to breakdance, for instance ― while there are plenty of Gary Larson-style gags about the farmer failing to spot tomfoolery. The supporting cast includes the farm dog, Bitzer, a fat sheep called Shirley, who eats anything that moves, and a tiny baby lamb called Timmy, who seems to have stolen Shaun’s “cutest character in show” award.
Unlike your traditional ship-’em-out-by-the-bucketload kid’s TV show, Shaun has been in production for almost two years. As you walk round Aardman’s vast warehouse on the outskirts of Bristol, the reasons for this enormously lengthy schedule become apparent. Film and television studios are, sadly, among the least glamorous places on earth. Most of the time, nothing much happens; when it does, it’s usually to do with the wiring. Compared to a claymation studio, however, traditional studios are hives of furious activity.
Characters in Shaun the Sheep move 25 times per second, which means resetting the scene 1,500 times for every minute of footage. For a seven-minute short like each episode of Shaun, therefore, that’s almost 10,500 scenes. Although Aardman’s immense warehouse space is subdivided into tens of mini studios, they produce roughly six seconds of Shaun footage daily. If you share the impatient attitude of your rather excitable correspondent, you’d be forgiven for squawking: “In the name of God, man, can’t you pick up the pace a little?” On the contrary, they would gently inform you: this is Aardman working at breakneck pace. For a full-length feature like Chicken Run, they feel pretty damned pleased if they produce a single second per day. It’s a wonder nobody breaks into a long, wailing scream and takes a mallet to the stars.
Patience, however, is financially rewarding. As Shaun and his co-stars are entirely silent ― with the exception of Vic Reeves singing the title song and actors providing baas ― the show is already approaching Mr Bean-style export status. It’s been sold to 72 countries before the first episode has aired. Aardman has even made the shop signs illegible, to ensure foreign buyers are happy. In this country, the BBC is launching the series on March 5 on CBBC, which makes a neat circle: Aardman began life making Morph animations for the 1970s children’s shows Vision On and Take Hart, but has never before made a full-scale kids’ series.
“We started out slightly worried about how to script the humour,” confesses Lockhart. “In the end, we just went with stuff that made us laugh. You have to trust your own instincts, rather than try to second-guess children.
“You find that slapstick always works ― although this is for kids at primary school, and they want very different things at different ages. Eight-year-olds, for instance, are always asking to see arms getting chopped off, and loads of blood. We, though, have to exclude any violence for fear of imitative behaviour. The BBC won’t play some Tom and Jerry cartoons for just that reason, and the only change they asked us to make was to have a character using a chainsaw wear protective gloves and a hat.”
The focus group is, of course, a terrible, terrible thing in television. It stifles creativity and forces script ideas through narrow holes. Nonetheless, it seemed appropriate to run Shaun past one composed of 3- to 10-year-olds. If this sample is anything to go by, girls and boys will be split down the middle on the show. While the pigs and the dog appeal to the gentlemen (although, as Lockhart says, they’d like a little more bloodshed), the ladies prefer Timmy.
Indeed, the show’s first British review comes from Rosa, aged six: “I liked Shaun when he saw the bull and got a red cloth, and the bull wanted to run at him, but ran past and missed him. But Timmy is my favourite. He’s so cute, and he was funny on the tightrope.” Sounds as if Timmy is ready for a spin-off of his own.
