Spacedog Televisor
SWINGING LONDON - an automaton show for the south bank overture weekend
This mini, automatic puppet show in a shed was created on a shoestring for the South Bank Centre, summer 2007. The brief was to come up with something novel inside a garden shed that would celebrate the area and appeal to families.
The puppet show, Swinging London, features London luminaries, past and present, dressed in go-go style. I wanted the puppets to look like a dance group on TV, in the early days of colour television. Reflecting the throw-away nature of celebrity culture, the faces are velcroed on so they can easily be swapped for new ones, according to public demand. Some of the faces are personal favourites (e.g. Kenneth Williams) and a few were chosen by visitors (e.g. Lady Penelope and Charlie Drake). Jarvis Cocker also makes an appearance as he was curating the Meltdown Festival that was taking place at the time.
Swinging London was one of seven sheds that made up this outdoor exhibition, curated by Clare Patey. The shed was put together over just a few weeks and I was grateful to Vivien Angliss, Helen Burtt, Jenny Cotterill, Amanda Hellberg, Emmet Spier and Colin Uttley for their invaluable help in getting it together. Thanks also to Paul and Rachel Attmere for dressing up like the puppets and animating the sheds throughout the opening weekend. The puppets were adapted from 1960s Pelham puppets, scooped up from eBay.
I was inspired to make Swinging London after seeing the very dilapidated 1960s puppet show playing on Teignmouth Pier, Devon. I was really struck by how mesmerising the Teignmouth puppets were - and how convincingly they moved to the music - even though they were doing nothing more than jiggling up and down. The puppets also had a slightly unsettling look, because of their expressionless faces, and this also appealed to me. So this dolly waggling (bad puppetry) is inspired by the 1960s end-of-the-pier classic. The video footage was taken at the end of a busy eight-week run and you can see that the strings have gone saggy and paint has rubbed off the puppets' shoes, onto the stage, helping them to look suitably ragged.