Here’s a fun little video I found on Apuk Tube Channel and decided to put it up. I hope it helps to spread some seasonal cheer this Christmas/Hanukkah. It’s of one of the robots created by Danny Huynh singing that old Sinatra classic, ‘My Way’. Huynh tends to create robots and vehicles with a distinctly beaten, grungy look, as if they’d come from a Mad Max style future dystopia. I’ve put up a series of his videos where he’s had these robots and also the Aliens from the SF/Horror franchise singing. This one is no exception with this robot looking distinctly like it’s seen better days, quite in contrast to the dapper Sinatra. There are also videos about the robot’s creation and how it was given a suitable SF vehicle on Huynh’s channel. Enjoy!
Posts Tagged ‘Horror’
Danny Huynh Animatronic Sings ‘My Way’
December 23, 2022Sketch of Children’s TV Presenter Brian Cant
December 2, 2022This is the first of a number of sketches and pieces I’m planning to put up about some of the presenters of the children’s TV programmes I used to watch in the 70s. Cant was the lead presenter on Play Away, a sister programme of the long-running children’s TV favourite, Play School, on which Cant had also appeared, but aimed at slightly older children. Play Away was also more of an ensemble programme with a whole team accompanying Cant. There was somebody Cohen at the piano, and a number of other co-presenters, some of whom I’ve now forgotten. I think one of them was Toni Arthur, who I’ve since learned was a folk musician and the author of a book on seasonal customs for children, the All The Year Round Book. One of the presenters I do remember was Jeremy Irons, who has gone on to become a Hollywood star. I was really surprised in the ’90s when I read that he was playing the lead characters in David Cronenberg’s psychological horror film Dead Ringers. This was about a pair of twin gynaecologists, one of whom goes insane and believes that the women he’s treating are all mutants. The film includes a credit to H.R. Giger, the Swiss artist who designed the Alien in those movies, for designing ‘radical surgical instruments’. It’s as far from Play Away as you can get and is a reminder that the cast of such programmes are actors, who also take adult roles. Somebody must have seen Irons in Play Away and recognised his potential.
Cant was also the narrator for three interlinked children’s series, Chigley, Trumpton and Camberwick Green each set in one of these small fictional towns. These were animated series using small figurines and were similar in style, using the same type of figures and music. Trumpton started off with Cant announcing, ‘Here is the clock, the Trumpton clock. Telling the time, steadily, sensibly, never too quickly, never too slowly, telling the time for Trumpton.’ The various characters also had their own theme songs. One of the characters, whose figure I’ve drawn being looked at by Cant, was Windy Miller. Miller appropriately enough lived in a windmill. His song began, ‘Windy Miller, Windy Miller, sharper than a thorn’. The theme song for the local fire brigade began with a rollcall of their names, ‘Pugh, Pugh, Barney McGrew, Cuthbert, Dibble, Grubb.’ The railway also had its own song with the words, ‘Time flies by when you’re the driver of a train as you ride on the footplate there and back again.’ These shows have developed a cult following. In the 1980s the band Half Man Half Biscuit released a record Trumpton Riots, about what would happen if Trumpton had a riot. According to rumour, it parodied the train song with the words ‘Time flies by when you’re the driver of a train, as you ride on the footplate with a cargo of cocaine’. You can find videos of ‘Trumpton Riots’ on YouTube, including the lyrics. These words don’t seem to appear, but perhaps they’re on another song with a similar theme. Half Man Half Biscuit, as their name suggests, had a peculiar sense of humour. One of their other songs was ‘All I Want For Christmas Is A Dukla Prague Away Kit’. This was just before Communism fell, when there were far fewer people from eastern Europe in Britain, who might genuinely want such a football kit for their collection.
The series’ visual style has also influenced pop video producers. One of the series began, if I recall correctly, with one of the characters spiralling up out of an opened music box. Something similar occurs in the Ting Tings’ video for ‘That’s Not My Name’, where the two leads seem to spiral up into view from something off camera below them. The producers of another pop video for a song with the delightful name ‘Burn The Witch’, deliberately based its style on the three children’s series. He also appeared in a pop video for Orbital’s The Altogether in a sequence which was similar to Play School, the children’s TV programme that preceded Play Away and in which Cant also appeared as a presenter. He also appeared in a number of other programmes and theatrical productions. Wikipedia notes that Cant won a poll as the best-loved voice from children’s TV in 2007, and three years later in 2010 he won a special award at the BAFTAs for his work in children’s television. Accepting it, Cant said: “When I was a child I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child. When I became a man I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child, and they paid me for it.”
For further information, see:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Cant

I found this rendition of the Play Away theme with a still of its cast on Bobby Gathergood’s channel on YouTube.
Sketches of Comedians/Comic Actors Eric Sykes, Frankie Howerd and Hattie Jacques
November 20, 2022Here’s a bit more art of some of Britain’s greatest comic talents, which I hope will brighten your day. Once again, they all come from a certain era. They’re of Frankie Howerd, Eric Sykes, and Hattie Jacques. Howerd used to live in the village of Mark in Somerset, where he was very well respected. He used to turn up and support village fetes. A friend of mine used to live there, and he told me that Howerd used to rehearse in the local church hall. One Sunday at church his voice started coming through the walls during the service, so they were all entertained with cries of ‘Oooh, no! Oh, you mustn’t, no! Titter ye not!’ and so on. In the late ’80s/first years of the 90s he was just coming back as well and was all set to do a new series of Up Pompeii when he died after broadcasting just one episode of the new show.

Eric Sykes – a very talented performer and writer. He had his own long running series on BBC 1, with Hattie Jacques playing his long-suffering sister and Derek Guyler as Korky, the local policeman. Guyler was also multi-talented. Way back in the 1950s he was part of a skiffle band, playing the washboard. Sykes is probably best remembered for the film The Plank, in which he and other great stars of British TV try to carry a plank of wood across town, surviving all manner of accidents and funny incidents. But he wasn’t confined to comedy. One of his last performances was as the butler in the horror film The Others.

Hattie Jacques, drawn in the role she’s probably best remembered for, the matron in the Carry On films. But as well as starring with Eric Sykes as his sister, she also appeared in Hancock’s Half Hour when it was on the radio as his housekeeper. She well deserves a place in any roll call of British funny women.

JOE’s Satirical Parody of the Tory Government as the Zombie’s from ‘Thriller’
November 1, 2022JOE is another YouTube channel that cuts the speeches and pronouncements of politicians and celebrities to make them appear to say stupid things as satire. It was Hallowe’en yesterday, so they’ve created this suitably seasonal musical parody. In this clip, they send up the Tory government by having Jacob Rees-Mogg intone a twisted version of Vincent Price’s spoken words in the 1980s Michael Jackson hit, ‘Thriller’. This shows the Tories rising from the graves as a true Zombie government, who have trashed the economy, jacked up mortgages, devastated people’s pensions. Jeremy Hunt is once again a psycho who will make more cuts to the NHS than Norman Bates. And Liz Truss is Chucky, the killer doll.
Therese Coffey as Gigeresque Horror
October 30, 2022Here’s another picture suitable for Hallowe’en – Therese Coffey portrayed as something from H.R. Giger’s fevered imagination. I was inspired by one of the paintings in the Giger Necronomicon, and Coffey has such vile views and policies that it seemed suitable. She gave an answer to a interview question that was so ‘orrible and disgusting, that the left-wing vlogger Maximilien Robespierre wondered if she was even human. Good question. Certainly there’s nothing humane about her attitude to the poor and sick. Don’t have nightmares!

Sketches and Cartoons of Truss and Cabinet
October 20, 2022One of the things I’ve been doing over the past couple of days is making straight and satirical sketches of our former Prime Minister and her cabinet of horrors. I was going to wait a while until I had worked out a few more ideas for cartoons, but after today’s news of Truss’ resignation, I thought I’d better put them up while they’re still relevant.
And as Truss has finally given in and resigned, I thought this piccie of her being dragged off by the mental health experts would be the most suitable. If you can’t read it, the caption reads, ‘They’re Coming To Take Her Away’.

Then there are these sketches of Truss as the latest incarnation of Pinhead from the Hellraiser 2022 film, and Therese Coffey as two characters from the 1984 version of Dune: Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, a man so fat he needs implanted anti-gravity devices to get around and has a horrible skin disease on his face; and a guild navigator, who are so mutated that they are carted around in large, enclosed vehicles.

Then there are these sketches. One is Coffey again, this time depicted as a Lovecraftian horror, and the other is of Jeremy Hunt. And I intend to send him up later.

And lastly there’s this one of Jacob Rees-Mogg. This is also a preparatory sketch for another cartoon.

Satirical Sketches of Truss, Kwarteng, Coffey and & Kenneth Williams
October 14, 2022Brian’s suggestion that now ex-chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng should be nicknamed ‘Khazi’, after the Khazi of Kalabar, played by Kenneth Williams in Carry on the Kyber gave me a few ideas for more sketches. I sketched Williams as the Khazi, and then drew him as Julius Caesar in Carry On, Cleo, because that’s the movie I mostly remembered the flared nostrils and arched delivery from. I’m afraid neither of the sketches are exactly like Williams, though the sketch of the Khazi is the better of the two. Now that Truss has stabbed Kwarteng in the back, it seems particularly serendipitous that I did the sketch of Caesar, with the bug-eyes staring down at the protruding dagger. So, I’ve done a small sketch of Kwarteng as Caesar. Below that sketch is Coffey as the Butterball cenobite from Hellraiser. And after seeing the photo of Truss with the mad staring eyes and open mouth as if she’d just gone utterly bonkers on the cover of Private Eye, I couldn’t resist sketching her being dragged off to the psychiatric ward. I’d like to work some of these up into proper sketches later. I hope you like them.

The Amazing Art of Stuart Cowley’s ‘Spacewreck’
October 5, 2022More utterly amazing space art from Sci-Fi Art’s channel on YouTube. In this very short video, he flips through Stuart Cowley’s Spacewreck: Ghostships and Derelicts of Space. Cowley took the art for various Science Fiction paperbacks and then wrote stories around them, publishing them as guidebooks to the spacecraft of the future produced by a global trade organisation, the Terran Trade Authority. I bought one of these when I was a schoolkid, Spacecraft 2000-2100, which pretended to be a guide to the spacecraft of the 21st century and with a story about humanity’s contact with two species of aliens from Alpha and Proxima Centauri respectively, and humanity’s and the Alpha Centaurian’s war with the latter. I can remember being absolutely amazed by the astonishingly beautiful art of these imaginary worlds and spaceships. Cowley published a series of such books and didn’t confine himself just to Science Fiction. He also created one from the cover art for a number of Horror novels as The Tourist’s Guide to Transylvania. Another book he produced was the alarmingly named Home Brain Surgery and Other Household Skills. I’ve seen a copy for sale in some secondhand book shops and left it meaning to buy it later. When I came back it had vanished. Which just shows that somehow you have to get something while you can. The artists featured in Spacewreck, according to Sci-Fi Art, include Angus McKie, Tony Roberts, Fred Gambino, Bob Layzell, Colin Hay, Jim Burns, Alan Daniels and the music is by All India Radio. I think some of their music has also been used for a video someone made of the spacecraft from Spacecraft 2000-2100 zooming around in CGI animation.