My unvarnished entry into the world of U.K animation...
In 1981, Great Windmill Street in London’s Soho was a cheek by jowl jumble of XXX cinemas, clip joints and salt beef bars.
The gutters often ran with urine and vomit and it wasn’t unusual for the smell of human faeces to waft into your nostrils, forcing you to walk briskly to your destination, which in my case was a rather nondescript door marked by a fresh turd situated right next to the now long-gone haunt of actors snatching a bite to eat between performances across the road at the famous Windmill Theatre, “Carrolls Salt Beef Bar”.
I had done the rounds of animation studios after graduating from St Martins School of Art, by phoning first rather than knocking on doors in the other customary way in which students would often trawl Soho for work placements.
One such call introduced me to Len Lewis, a tall, handsome and gaunt man of Anglo-Indian heritage who had the demeanour of a Portuguese pirate. I felt an instant connection with Len from his voice but also some affinity in terms of a shared heritage, though I am not Anglo-Indian, but it also helped that I had seen some of the work produced by the small studio he ran out of a second floor office above Carrolls and was instantly hooked in and wanted to know more.
I should explain that in 1981 there were very few Indians or people of colour working in the U.K animation industry when I entered it, though it would be more accurate to describe it as a cottage industry of boutique, creator-run studios, before they turned into studios run by producers acting as agents for in-house freelance directors - ie it wasn’t particularly organised and 90% of animators constituted a floating population of freelancers living a kind of gypsy existence flitting from studio to studio and gig to gig.
After agreeing to meet Len for a face-to-face interview I dutifully dragged by portfolio up 2 flights of stairs to find a door with a pane of frosted “toilet glass” covered by a sheet of paper decorated with cartoons - some scatological in nature.
Len answered and invited me in to a small studio overlooking a snooker club and clip joint on the opposite side of the road, situated right next to some large iron gates that led to, of all places, an infant school.
Len was standing, his tall, well-built frame propped up by an animation desk and his goatee bearded face framed by a halo of curly black locks and smiling a broad toothy smile as soon as I stepped through the door, though I did notice a momentary shift in his demeanour from a troubled look to a smile in the moment between opening the door and stepping in.
As far as I can remember we chatted about everything apart from animation and to do with a shared Indian heritage, Len from Bombay via Nagpur and me the son of first-generation immigrants from the Indian South, specifically Kerala.
Shortly I was introduced to Chris, his studio manager, a short, genial and stocky guy also with curly hair framing the chubby face of a cheeky schoolboy.
Len decided to test my suitability to working in a proper animation studio and tasked me with drawing some characters from a commercial he was working on with the instruction to make them look sad rather than happy as they would appear in the actual commercial for some obscure chocolate bar.
However, both he and Chris decided that I should be baptised by a trawl of the many pubs in the area for a bit of fun at my expense and by the time we got back to the studio for my little “test” I was drunk in a way that I had never been before in my life. Len and Chris then left me to do the test while they disappeared either for some ad agency meeting or more than likely, to continue imbibing alcohol - offering an opportunity to scan the small studio properly.
In one corner was a foam mattress covered in brown fabric doubling as a place for clients to sit during meeting but in fact was somewhere for Len to crash out following heavy drinking sessions - did all studios have such beds ?, I wondered.
The small toilet next to a basic “kitchen”, ie a sink, was decorated with more scatological and funny cartoons and posters from the XXX cinemas either swiped or rescued from skips and cards posted in phone boxes offering “private services” since at that time prostitution was a feature of Soho - in particular was a large B/W publicity photo of “Chesty Morgan” from her role in the soft-core porn film “Deadly Weapons” positioned directly over the sink that made it very hard to both take a leak and wash your hands afterwards without being faced with her enormous cleavage - again this was indicative of Len’s cheeky sense of humour - it didn’t last however as his wife and company secretary demanded it be removed.
So this was my introduction to the animation business as it was in the U.K in 1981 and while it hasn’t changed a great deal in terms of the drinking habits of animators this is now far less as studios evolved into companies owned by media conglomerates outsourcing to Hollywood and the small creator-run boutique studios were gradually crushed into oblivion - being blind drunk at work now would most likely result in losing your job.
Some would say it was more fun back then, less civilised, but for me, working for Len for a relatively short period of one year, it was a mixture of very hard work, long hours and creative highs and lows and the kind of boozing that was completely alien to me - this “talented and serious-minded artist”, as described by a friend and work colleague.
In retrospect it felt as though I had fallen into a den of thieves, though Len was a wonderfully warm-hearted person who also just happened to be a hugely popular character in the London animation scene, with many fellow directors from other studios who would drop by regularly on a Friday evening for the customary riotous pub-crawl, usually preceded by smoking joints in the studio and getting drunk while I would be working away in a corner and trying hard not to be too judgmental.
Len was, in truth, a hippy part-time drummer in a punk band that was almost signed by Virgin Records and who worked barefoot in his studio and kept his stash of cannabis resin in empty film cans dotted around the small studio to avoid detection in case of police raids and I think it must have caused some merriment for the animators and directors who passed through the studio to know that someone like me was working there - someone who had only been into a pub a handful of times in spite of going to art college, didn’t smoke and certainly had been nowhere near a joint and was the antithesis of the cool that Len effortlessly exuded.
Perhaps Len saw me as a balancing element to his rather wayward and relaxed approach to life but after a year of working for him I decided that I couldn’t keep up with the way of working life in his studio and it seemed to me from his coterie of friends that it was the same across the industry.
I left the studio shortly after it had moved to larger premises in D’Arblay Street, and the feeling of disappointment from Len was palpable -it wasn’t personal as I had to explain to him and in the process I let slip the opportunity to be part of a studio where at least 2 of the key staff were people of colour in the rather monochrome landscape of animation in London in the early 1980’s.