“It’s Prof. Again”

One of my favourite TV shows as a kid was Vision On. The only problem with liking Vision On so much was that I just wasn’t its target audience.

Its target audience was children who were deaf.

Relying principally on its pictures then, much of this weekly half-hour featured increasingly surreal things happening, often with little or no soundtrack. As this was in the days before video, I used to audio-tape the programme off our black-and-white 405-line TV, and then listen to the cassette back, trying to re-imagine what the pictures had been.

To anyone who’s never seen the show, it’s very hard to convey what it was like. However thanks to the miracle of YouTube, now I can just show you:


Looking back, in some ways it was the anti-Sesame Street.

In a typical show, Tony Hart would spend several minutes painting a life-size dinosaur on the ground, only for it to then roar and walk off.

A girl would chat to her tortoise whilst taking it walkies in a series of still photographs.

Mr Sylveste would wait for a train, with a crowded platform of people all played by him.

And then… there was… The Prof.


Every week the Prof, in his lab coat, would get persecuted by inanimate objects on a farm. Or be run over by himself pretending to be a train. Or go swimming in a grassy field, only to get sucked down a gigantic plughole.

(I have to wonder if deaf kids had nightmares afterwards)

He was brilliant, even if the laws of physics did hate him.

When I was four, we lived above a shop. One day I looked through the window down onto the main road below, saw a delivery-van pull-up, and was elated to see a man in a long white coat get out.

The Prof!

I watched that guy, fascinated, for his entire delivery. I was a little disappointed that his clipboard and boxes didn’t growl at him and chase him off down the street, but at the same time I was able to make the distinction between the real world, and that jerky sinister place where he lived on television. When he eventually drove off – at normal speed - I didn’t quite know why things were different in his world, but I knew that they were, and that those things just didn’t happen here.

Fast-forward 20 years and I was working at the BBC programme library, marvelling once again at his old exploits on the show. I learnt this visionary genius’ real name – David Cleveland – and that his masterpieces had not in fact been made by the BBC, but simply by him and his friends in their spare time. They’d given-up God knows how much of their lives to film much of this stuff one frame at a time, just to make him get chased across a field by a wardrobe or something. One time, Cleveland had sat, freezing cold, in a deckchair for a whole four hours, while his mates filmed the tide suddenly coming-in around him at super-speed.

They say that you should never meet your heroes, because they will disappoint you. The irony is that, while I indeed have never met him, in my twenties I rediscovered David Cleveland, because he was now a leading expert on film preservation – in particular with the ever scarcer film-gauge that I was shooting on. Now I found myself pouring over terribly serious articles by him on how to store archive film for the future.

And, in a circular sort of way, I was reading these articles because I wanted to preserve the movies that I had now made, that had doubtless in some way been inspired by his ones.

David Cleveland retired a couple of years ago, and around the same time I actually did write to him. Not a fan letter, or a scientific one – but to order a home-made DVD of some of his films from 30 years ago. I’d seen them advertised on http://its-prof-again.co.uk. When it arrived, there was a little standard letter with it, simply signed “The Prof.”

Tonight I sat down and once again enjoyed his barmy sense of reality, taking in his specially-filmed sequences from other programmes, many of which I had no recollection of.

And, at age 35, I felt thoroughly, thoroughly inspired by him once more.


Clips here.