FOR EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY

You've been set an essay question:

'Write an analysis and critical overview of a recent cultural event or exhibition'. (2,500 words max.)

This is a very simple request, and one you can imagine having been posed to students for decades. How old is that question? It could date back to the sixties, maybe even earlier. It may be as old as a hundred years.

Someone in the class will come up with a quirky spin on the subject - write about something SO obvious no one else would have ever come up with it. And their piece will be witty and erudite, a seemingly effortless deconstruction that will be lathered in praise. This will happen, and has happened every year since this question was first set.

With the same regularity have come all the less good responses followed by a handful that arguably don't answer the question. Is a fishing trip a cultural event? If you are with other people, probably. Is writing the essay? If indoors, by yourself, I'd have to say no. Is a description of a television programme? Even if with people, no. What if it's a television broadcast of a big sporting event? Or the Eurovision Song Contest? Or a major breaking news item? If it's just a description, then no. If you are watching it with other people AND they are discussing it AND you are reflecting on their insights AND giving context for your ideas OR you are alone and analysing BOTH the broadcast AND the medium which is relaying it to you then there's a good chance that the answer's yes.

Is my father's death a cultural event? Eventually - death starts off as a little localised point then its meaning spreads out from the centre in a uniform wave.

I have taught and it's hard to mark work about recent death. It's not the grading that's tricky - it's trying to encourage critical distance in the bereaved. They're usually short sighted with grief and poignancy. Sometimes I think of someone answering the essay question, it'll start off as a description of a television programme (broadcast the night before the deadline) then half way through someone in the room will die. That's going to be hell to mark, because chances are it's a fail.

But I'd like to think that all is well with you, your family and friends and that the essay question is just one more assignment in a course that you're fairly enjoying. Moreover, if you've made it to this page, that you have gone to see this show and that there was something that made you want to know more.
So what follows is why I ended up doing this particular series.

Not the textual analytical or psychoanalytical why - you can fabricate any 'because' under the sun using these tools - but the conscious ones, the influences, the precedents, i.e. where it follows on from. This should help with the analytical bit. The critical bit? That's probably best left up to you. And my last bit of handy essay advice: always write your introduction last.

William Wegman - for his many straight to camera video pieces (1970-onwards). In a time when electronic moving image works were often heavily durational and ponderous he was producing work that was short, funny, sculptural and personal.
Funny isn't necessarily a virtue, but demonstrates a belief that entertainment isn't a bad thing per se, that it may be a handy vehicle for some ideas, an intriguing territory to explore. There's a lot of snootiness about seriousness and art practice, and I've noticed that William Wegman's somewhat cursorily skipped over in a lot of video art histories. This is strange as I've found his work much more effecting and evocative than Bill Viola's (who I figure as almost his polar opposite), it's made me think more about process than Dan Graham's, and made me mull over technology heaps more than anything I've seen by Nam June Paik or the Vasulkas.

Jim Trainor - another soft spoken man who puts animals on the screen. His are jiggly lined animations, their visual matter-of-factness contrasting with the anxious voices that play through their heads. Their blight is that they have consciousness and instincts, and a sense of their own incomprehension. They worry and wonder and die.
Animation often seems caught up in its own craft concerns - Jim's never do. They use a very direct felt-tip on paper method, often with minimal or no backgrounds, and looped motion, but somehow never seem crudely done. I don't really quite understand how he manages this. There's something weirdly refined and nuanced going on - if I had the language I'd try and locate it around 'the line', but I don't.

Ben Coonley - for his Trick Pony video sextet. A combination of single screen and performance pieces, Ben's series of exchanges with his (toy) pony combine the affection of William Wegman's dog pieces with the pathos of solitude. The pony figures like an imaginary friend that Ben can care for, and there's a fragility: in his delivery and in the scenarios. After the pony inexplicably flees between episodes 3 and 4 the mood of hopelessness is upped several notches.
Yet again these are pitched as entertainment but come across as having many more concerns: there's play with process, self portrait, performative form and audience address. There are lots of exciting ideas suggested throughout these pieces, and a real perky intelligence. The Badger series owes a lot to the momentum created by them.

The scene in George Kuchar's 'Hold Me While I'm Naked' with the bird. Memories of happier times, before everyone has quit his film, show George spotting a bird perched upon an overhanging branch. He extends his hand towards it and we see it resting on his extended index finger. He goes to give it a little affectionate kiss and it drops to the ground like a stone.
At no stage has the bird looked like anything other than a stuffed model, or a decoration off a cake. But you don't know the rules: is this a fantasy sequence? or just a shoddy prop? a distanciation device? is this meant to imply he's delusional? or is it allegorical? what kind of funny is meant to be figured here? The confusion adds to its humour - it's a personal way of playing things, but that individuality opens things up rather than closes them down. I think about this moment a lot.

Harry Hill - for a couple of reasons: for the invention of Stouffer who, like George Kuchar's bird or Ben's pony, we can see being operated but read as an autonomous character. The 'bad puppetry' isn't employed for reasons of irony, rather it's a strategy of sufficience - it takes the telling far enough.
Second reason is his nostalgic referencing method. His shows are largely a refiguring of 'Crackerjack' - a children's show of his youth - right down to its routines and the musical finale. Similarly Stouffer comes from that time of (often unconvincing) tv ventriloquists. Harry Hill speaks of and through a presumed shared viewing history, a commonality that he then bends and distorts.
Actually there's a third reason: he casts himself in this revisitation as one nominally in charge - he's back but now grown up: this time he's Mr. Harry.

The Sooty show. Tv puppet shows in the UK were (and probably still are) big on moral instruction. But the dilemmas thrown up were always so mild, and so gently broached, that nothing particularly new or helpful was ever imparted. It was more a confirmation of the already obvious.
The Sooty show's guardians and advisers - be it Mr. Matthew or Mr. Harry - figured as kindly, bumbling uncles. They had to be ineffectual in order that high jinks could ensue. These shows were fairly boring, even as a child, but a strange effect of time is that the presenters have now become a lot more visible to me, a lot more of interest. I return in their guise.

Teaching. As in lecturing - standing at the front of a room, before a group of younger folk, and providing instruction. Then realising that things need more explaining and so heading off on some digression in gentle tones and a display of enthusiasm.
It doesn't matter that currently this is to undergraduates, it still feels the same as when I've taught seven year olds. Not the content of what's being said, but the power dynamic, the shape of the room, me standing/them seated. It IS the Sooty show revisited - ideologically at least.
Irrespective of what subject's being covered, teaching has to have an element of entertainment, of emotional engagement. All learning has this otherwise you're just imparting facts, blowing them out into the room like a bubble making machine. I was taught by too many bubble blowers.

The gopher in 'Caddyshack'. This isn't a favourite film, but I realised recently how one image had stuck with me from seeing it years ago and how I'd grown up around it.
In it the groundskeeper of the local golf club (played by Bill Murray in a troublingly cartoon like style - he makes a lot of growly muttering noises) is at war with the gopher that keeps churning up the greens. This escalates to the level of dynamite being packed down its hole with appropriately comical outcomes. It's not a very subtle film - Rodney Dangerfield stars in it, so it's played loud. But the weird thing is that in an age of stock footage, animatronics etc. the method to depict the gopher is to use a fuzzy glove puppet.
I've forgotten most other things but the glove puppet gopher has stayed with me - it just doesn't sit right with rest of the film and yet that's what's so good about it.

Maurizio Cattelan. He's a much further down the line influence - actually so far down that I'd have to call him more of a reassurance. Particularly for his piece BIDIBIDOBIDIBOO which shows a suicided squirrel at a miniature breakfast table. His work's effective as visual one liners, and so reproduces well in magazines and books - I've never seen them 'live' though so I don't know if they carry much more resonance in person. I imagine they do. There they'd have an element of spatial surprise - something that's invisible on the printed page.

My hair. On the way to reaching Mr. Paul age some subtle shifts have happened physically. Many I'm oblivious to as I have no distance on changes that are g-r-a-d-u-a-l over a period of years. But grey hairs I can spot, and the point where it's just the freak one or two that I can easily get rid of has passed.
They don't bother me particularly, but I'm now aware of them as a presence and am getting used to this. They're still very much in the minority and seem to huddle nervously in one particular group running from my right temple to behind my right ear. You have to look really close to see them but they are there. I am banded, like a badger.

A couple of summers ago I went to a school play, a staging of 'Wind in the Willows' with a cast of ten year olds. Apart from the sterling performance by Jennet's nephew as Ratty, and a musical medley that seemed like it would never stop, the standout image was the Badger. It was good make up, for a start - but more intriguing was the ambivalent position that he occupied in the woodland. Like his markings he was a light/dark character. I made it through the longer sections by imagining that the Badger was going to double cross the good ones at any given moment. He didn't, of course, but this set me to thinking more about badgers.

Our cat Olive is fairly vocal. It seems like she's watched humans talking and can see how a good deal of our communication and decision making comes about through the noises that we make. As she gets older she 'talks' more - she looks you in the eye and asks (or states?) things, and then if you reply she'll answer in kind. These dialogues never extend beyond the cute-for-humans stage but do encourage me to initiate conversations with her. It wasn't too big a step from that to talking with glove puppets.

My previous films feature a roll call of small creatures that I've projected my hopes and anxieties upon: the wheely dog (in 'Human Error in the Mechanical Age'), little black cat ('Stay In A Friendly Country'), fly ('Making things meaningful'), ghost worms and the little helper ('Moving Back From The Beyond'), frog ('MTM' again), canary ('Why the Canary Sings No More') etc. It's probably worth noting that I also appear in these films, often interacting with these characters.
For whatever reasons this may be, it's not hard to draw a line extending backwards over ten years and then following it forward again right up to the Badger series and seeing it as kind of inevitable.
That sounds a bit fatalistic, so I'll rephrase that: I think that the Badger series is a natural progression of where I've been headed, that it builds on what I've learnt through practice. Whether it was anything worth learning is up for debate.

A US Chrisitian Scientist puppet show on community access television. This is very hard to describe as it's so strangely bad in so many ways, but the gist of it is a religious group reaching out into the community via local tv, only the (lone) puppeteer has very little control of the mannequins. The whole enterprise is shot on a set with a large blue-screen background.
One of the brethren's obviously got intrigued by the vision mixer and keeps cross-fading, and producing picture-in-picture effects in a chaotically distracting manner so that the image keeps breaking up and folding in on itself. It looks like early video art, but this is definitely not the intention.
The instructional format intrigued me, though, and the chromakey background made me think of ways of constructing a 'realist-synthetic' set for the straight to camera sections in the series.

And finally ... years ago in a pub in Greenwich, back when my hair had no badger traits (it was orange) and I was wearing a peppermint toothpaste coloured crimplene shirt, a man came up to me and said enthusiastically: "You're like me ... you're in the business". I didn't really understand what he meant, but he looked fairly happy and not particularly dangerous.
He had to explain to me what 'business' that was, and it seems that he'd presumed I was a fellow children's entertainer. Obviously I wasn't, and he looked a little disappointed when I explained this. But maybe he saw something in me that I was unaware of - that he was just a bit premature in his greeting but definitely on the right track ...