Art For Arse's Sake

It would be fair to say that the UK animation industry and I more or less came to the decision that we best not work together.

I had been in and out of the business since 1987 and quite frankly, by the time we called it a day I had pretty much had it. If the studio had had a water tower on the roof I would have been up there with a bolt action rifle blasting their gurning melon heads apart with glee.

There were some good people in the industry but they tended to be tiny islands of intelligence and personality in a vast ocean of ass-clown pencil-monkeys, screaming squirrels and major league arseholes. Into this final category fell most of the clients, naturally.

One in particular, a producer for the production company we did the last major job for, was such a useless, clueless, skanky brass, so in love with the fact that she was in "the media", that the only way she could have been elevated to such a position of responsibility was either the people she replaced were even more useless, or she worked her way up on her knees. (I suspected both, and kept looking for the telltale bump on the back of her skull from years of repeatedly knocking her head against the underside of all the desks).

Around their desks animators tend to have little cartoon sketches, joke postcards, and other mildly amusing tat. On the wall above my work station I had pinned up a page from a trade magazine. Dominating the page was this one photograph:



Clomping into the studio's digital department, already at full-tilt "blah, blah, blah!", wearing the sort of clothes that ideally suited someone ten years younger and three sizes smaller, she took one look at it and, eager to display her full range of ignorance, asked me why I had a picture of Salman Rushdie on the wall.

Words failed me. Which meant that for once I pleased the studio producer, who was accompanying the bloated Soho cum sponge around the departments, no end. Instead of using the tools at hand – a Wacom tablet stylus, as opposed to to going out and hiring an industrial sander and blowtorch – to see how long and how loud I could have made her scream, I muttered, "I think you might find that it's not Salman Rushdie" and returned to my work.

If I had known then that within a year I would be sitting through her embarrassingly lame thanks-to-the-troops speech at the low-rent wrap party, I probably would have turned off the computer and tried to swallow my own tongue. Or repeatedly punch her in the face.