David McKee, creator and animator
The BBC asked if I would make something for its Watch With Mother series. They dropped that name later, but for me it was important: it made you conscious the audience wasn’t just children. I showed them the first Mr Benn book I’d written and they requested 13 stories. When they asked how it would be animated, I just said: “I’ll ask somebody.” It was complete innocence.
Too much animation is a mistake when you’re storytelling. It’s often a distraction. So Mr Benn largely relied on simple camera movements – stills, pans and zooms across detailed drawings I made. For things like walking, though, we needed proper movement, but I wasn’t subtle enough. The result looks like something from Monty Python’s Ministry of Silly Walks.
I set it in my street in Putney, London, but changed Festing Road to Festive Road, because Festing sounded too much like festering. The fancy-dress shop Mr Benn visits was based on a dusty junk shop in Plymouth. I went into it once, to ask about something in the window, and the owner really did appear “as if by magic”, as the narrator in the series says. He wasn’t interested in selling anything. I thought: “This must be a front for something.”
I wanted Mr Benn to be Mr Everybody. Bowler hats were more common in the early 1970s. There was a respectability to them, plus Charlie Chaplin and Laurel and Hardy are favourites of mine. Mr Benn went off on adventures according to whatever costume he tried on. I was heavily influenced by fables, because of their apparent simplicity. I like stories with a moral, that have a reason for being there – I don’t like a character to wake up and realise it was all a dream. That’s why I introduced the souvenir that Mr Benn always takes back with him, to say that it really did happen.
I’m a believer in that kind of magic. I was brought up in south Devon. When a horse had ringworm, you didn’t take it to the vet, you went to an old lady who charmed it. The guy across the road from us was bald, he went to her and grew a fantastic head of hair. My mother also had a sort of telepathy. Once the phone rang and she leapt up and said: “Oh my God, it’s my brother Bill.” It was news that he had a burst appendix.
When the series was first screened, my parents didn’t have a TV. They’d go to a furniture shop and watch Mr Benn there. Afterwards, they’d tell staff: “We needed to watch that, because our son made it.”
Ray Brooks, voice of Mr Benn
David was quite particular, he would even make me “pronounce” ellipses. When I wrote my autobiography, I said I’d like a cartoon of me and Mr Benn on the cover, holding pints of beer. There was a terrible pause and he said: “Mr Benn only drinks halves.” But David’s a very nice man. When he sends letters, he rather foolishly draws cartoons on the envelope. People end up selling them on eBay.
I was asked to do other cartoons because of Mr Benn – including Rupert the Bear, which was the worst thing I’ve ever done. I used to have a couple of pints before recording it, to numb my brain for his terrible rhymes. If you see an old Rupert book in a charity shop, you can be sure no kid has touched it. He’s such a stupid little character.
They still love Mr Benn, though. The episodes were repeated twice a year for 21 years and sold shedloads of videos and DVDs. Grandmas come up to me and say their grandchildren are fed up with today’s cartoons, but they love the simplicity of Mr Benn, the fact that he’s very moral, always sorting out people’s problems – including dragons.
A bunch of Welsh rugby supporters once came up to me in a pub and said: “You’re Mr Benn, aren’t you? We’re having a debate: what number house did he live in?” Very strange.
