He explains that he started drawing cartoons while getting his engineering degree at Cambridge, to vent his creative spirit which went untapped in class and was frustrated by student living. An early children's book and a cartoon strip gave reason to his art. The cartoon strip "The Rudiments of Wisdom" began in the student paper (Stop Press?) and after a lull, graduated to reprints in a Sunday Paper (?) and a 14 year run. The strip's subject began by compiling absurd "facts" from the 'Ripley's Believe it or not' genre of publishing. Growing skeptical with these sources, he moved to more serious and varied research, the part of the job he quite liked.
He was fired from his strip (partly a blessing) and then prompted by a new agent to take some segments (entitled 'Why things go Wrong') he had done for a science program (?) around to various tv people...
"It was a bit of a lucky fluke that it ever got accepted. I think what happened, I've been told this by various people, was that my proposal landed on the Channel Four comptrollers desk shortly after his wife died and he was struggling to use his washing machine and thought, 'Ahh this is what people need'"
'The Secret Life of Machines' series (a 5 year chunk of his life) was partly an expression of societal feeling of being out of control because we don't understand common machines. He comments on the last series (concentrating on the office) and the intangiblity of office bound production (i.e. defining what productivity is, the difficulty of quantifying it).
He goes into the general method of constructing the shows. Doing a series of magazine type segments, and varying the style of each,
"I do quite a lot of animation, using my own drawings, just sort of cardboard cutouts, very primitive. Then we use quite a lot of archive film, I'm quite addicted now to watching old bits of archive film. People like General Electric and their old washing machines, some of it is very camp, kitsch. The other element that's sort of grown is finding some simple demonstration that we can do with parts of a machine, taking them to bits or making things from scratch."
He goes on to explain the fax machine sequence.
"I work out what the pictures are going to be and then write the words, the minium number of words to explain the picture(...)"
When he was doing the strip, he had enough free time to put together some of his coin op's. The first one was made for an artist friend having an exhibition in North London. He made a machine called the 'Birth of Venus' (a poster of Raquel Welch emerging and slowly sinking from a tank of dark water). Satisfaction came when he realized how much money the machine had earned (it wasn't much then, but now he has a fleet of machines in Covent Garden with a 50% take, "enough to live off") and more machines were on the way. Long since stopped caring about the world of fine art ("too precious, minority interest"), he maintains his interest in popular arts, and self professedly "vulgar" tastes.
When designing a machine, the complexities mount trying to anticipate problems and people- proofing them,
"The one I was making just before I came away was a joke automatic frisking machine (...) I thought particularly the tourists coming from the plane and security at London airport they might just for their own peace of mind get themselves frisked, so these sort of rubber gloves come out and pat them all down the sides. Anyway, with this machine they were hanging off it, and leaning on it and standing on it, I had irrationally left a shelf sort of half way up so I had to go back and make an additional piece to make it into a ramp and remove the thing at the top (...) where they were hanging on it, so I hope I've ironed out the teething problems."
He explains more of the tv making process,
"They're very much a homemade approach, they take ages to make because I do so much of it myself, I do my own research, I collaborate with somebody to make the models, somebody else to do the animation, somebody to do the editing. There's me and Liz the producer, and we work right from start to finish, with other pople coming in at various stages. In some ways it's painfully slow, it takes nearly 2 years to make 6 half hour shows. TV tends to be made much quicker than that, the fun of it for me is the research (...) I'd hate to do it quicker."
"They're very popular in England, they go out at primetime 8:30 in the evenings, and they get large audiences, I think there's a danger in them just going on, getting formulaic, I think I need a change..."
Finally he speculates on doing a series on materials.
ENDIT.