I never met Rory in person. I spoke to him regularly on the phone, indeed sometimes I even spoke to his lovely Mum on the phone. However a phone friendship with Rory was richer than most of the in-person friendships I’ve ever had. And we would talk for hours when phoning between Wales and Hungary was not cheap.
Rory was endlessly entertaining on the phone. Incredibly funny commentaries about what was going on in the world, on television, with his friend TG, in Celtic Manor Hotel, with his DIY efforts, with the production of ChuckleVision or Scoop, on MHP Chat or social media, what the Doctor Who Restoration Team were up to or in the strange word of Kaleidoscope. When you rang him he always gave you the impression he’d been waiting by the telephone all day just to speak to you—and he made everyone I knew who phoned him feel that way.
And then there was the magical quality of his voice; I’ve always felt that revenge for the Welsh knot was that every Welshman I have ever met can speak English better than the English. Rory’s voice had a kind of bubbling warm joy in it and why radio never snapped him up I will never know. Unless it was his fondness for Reg Tilsley.
My wife would listen with disbelief at the banality of what we were talking about—the differences in colour fading between slides that were kept in the dark or in the light, the amount of dust and dirt to put on simulated old film or the correct amount of judder for the second hand of a station clock. She soon coined the Hungarian phrase “hülye szemét” to describe it, which translates to “stupid rubbish”. This was a term Rory adored.
“Just had a load of stupid rubbish turn up from Kaleidoscope” meant that he had just received a crate of incredibly rare and interesting presentation material on Phillips 1500 cassettes with things that were probably thought lost for decades. But Rory was always very aware of how daft our whole hobby was and whilst he was very serious about the quality of his work, he always realised that ultimately it was pretty trivial in the great scheme of things and was very suspicious of anyone who took it all too seriously.
We “met” first on the email mailing list MHP Chat. An email mailing list was actually a good way for us to communicate as Rory was a night owl and I was a morning person who was almost certainly asleep by 8pm. We had a lot in common as Rory watched an awful lot of HTV Cymru Wales growing up and I watched an awful lot of HTV West. Both regions came out of the presentation department of Pontcanna and therefore a lot of our television memories were similar.
We bonded over an HTV interval slide—the rhombus slide. After I had described it on MHP Chat, he was absolutely thrilled: “You do realise that we are the only two people in the entire world who remember that!”. And that was how our friendship really began. We started discussing Alan Taylor, 11am schools intervals and the HTV station clock.
It was about this time Rory came out with two websites that blew every other website out of the water. He managed to create sites that looked a million dollars on very tiny bandwidth and were also incredibly witty. Rory could do everything well be it HTML, graphic design, video editing, photography. There was nothing he couldn’t turn his hand to.
His first site was the incredible Harlech House of Graphics or HHG. As a result of this Ray Bradley who was the Chief Engineer of TWW and then Harlech became a regular correspondent of Rory’s for several years and he found out all sorts of things about the transition from TWW to Harlech that never made the history books.
The thing we both liked the most were HTV’s “cardboard ads”; cheap regional advertisements that consisted of the continuity announcer reading the ad copy over a 35mm slide.
Rory’s second site, his “red-hot PAWN site”, was dedicated to Paint Along With Nancy. Michael Kominsky, Nancy’s son, eventually got in contact with Rory about the PAWN site which Rory found rather embarrassing as he had been a little rude about some of Nancy’s efforts on the site. Luckily, Michael was as charming as his Mum.
Rory had noticed the work I had been doing on Andrew Wiseman’s 625 Television Room and thought that he could help me out. I had been, up until I met Rory, existing on screen captures of RealVideo files—often 320 x 240 pixels or lower—and trying to recreate material from that. Thanks to Rory, it was the first time I had decent, full resolution screenshots to work from. He later introduced me to DivX which meant I had full motion video of idents on my computer to work with.
Entirely due to his kindness, the quality of my work improved exponentially; after all rubbish in, rubbish out is the golden rule of recreations. Both Rory’s websites and my work on 625 came to the attention of Chris Bowden-Smith of Transdiffusion. Chris had asked Rory to recreate ITV daily start-ups for a potential VHS release using the sound recordings that Transdiffusion had collected in their archives.
Although the project was going well, Rory came up against a wall in that some of the material that was required simply didn’t exist in any form anywhere; he felt like he was being asked to make bricks without straw. The other problem he had was that some of the extant material was of terrible, terrible quality (think multi-generation VHS) and so didn’t look very convincing.
To get around this, Chris and Rory decided to ask me to join in and recreate some of these missing items. There was a bit of resistance from some people involved in the project about recreating things from scratch that we already had.
The reason why there were sceptics was that I worked in Macromedia Flash, so the animations I produced looked very much as if they had been created in Macromedia Flash. This meant Rory had to use enormous ingenuity to take what I had done and make it look as if it was a piece of film or a model shot with a vidicon camera.
This was a process that Rory described as “distressing” which is a term I loved. He delighted in adding fingermarks, fading, scratches, folds, creases and dirt. It was this that really sold what we did as being real.
I remember sending my Flash animations off to Rory and then every week or so a padded envelope would arrive containing a VHS cassette which blew my socks off. I couldn’t believe some of the things on this tape had originated from my animations; Rory’s work was incredible.
I think the thing about us working with each other was that I was happy to try things from verbal descriptions a dozen times until he was happy, and he was happy to rework things endlessly if I wasn’t completely happy. We trusted each other’s judgement enough to know that if one of us suggested redoing something it was worth redoing and the end result would be better than what it had been before.
Sometimes our work on the Transdiffusion Start-ups would get a bit intense. We would both be working flat out and then battling against the comments from the rest of the team on our work. So, to blow off steam, we often used to do fake items, such as the colour BBC Schools pie chart. This was initially posted as the real thing, which was a delight for Rory.
Then there were the Play for Today titles, with Nancy or Trumptonshire.
The time Rory and I spend on the two (and a half!) Transdiffusion DVDs were some of my favourite times working on anything. The work was pretty intense and often laborious but seeing the results after Rory had worked his magic was absolutely joyful.
Often, work would stop for a week because Rory was doing something like putting up a new ceiling. He was incredibly practical and it seemed like there was nothing he couldn’t do.
Somehow, and gradually, we seemed to get a reputation for recreating old television. We did Alchemists of Sound, London Weekend’s last day, projects for Kaleidoscope, things for the BFI, a Tomorrow People DVD (Beyond Tomorrow), The Native Hue of Resolution for the BFI and several others.
I remember us doing some stuff for BBC Cymru Wales; this was a lovely job as I got to know Al, Matt and Stephen for the first time. I sent my finished files off to Rory to edit and finish up. He said “I am going to have to apologise to you, as I think I’ve done something terrible. You know all that jitter there was on the keyed captions and models? Well, I took all the jitter off thinking it was a fault and then suddenly realised after I had sent it off that you’d put it there intentionally. It looked bloody good as well…” I just laughed my head off. Only Rory would have been clever enough to work out how to take the twitter off that I’d put on!
What often happens when you work closely in partnership with someone who has different skills to you is they pick up your skills and you pick up theirs, but in this case the learning was one way. I had masses to learn from Rory but I know he could have done what I was doing easily if he needed to.
I learnt how to make my vector images look like slides or film or video, and gained a really deep understanding of what I was doing. And then I applied that thinking to keyed captions and managed to finally got them looking how I wanted them to. Over these years, I think what I learnt from Rory was how to really look at things.
Every time Rory sent me a work in progress it came with other cassettes or CDs or DVDs of things he just had to share with me. I have a cupboard heaving with VHS cassettes, audio CDs and DVDs that Rory sent to me regularly; it got to the point where I felt utterly embarrassed by his generosity.
It soon got to the point that I deliberately didn’t mention things I enjoyed watching because even a passing mention of something would result in a padded envelope turning up about four days later stuffed with DVDs of whatever it was.
Rory also took a huge interest in my daughters Jenny and Mary. They referred to him as Rory-bácsi (Uncle Rory in Hungarian). He sent me a DVD of some of his ChuckleVision episodes, which I watched with my daughters. They loved it so much he kept sending ChuckleVision DVDs for them every time he sent me presentation material. And we still watch them now.
He knew my daughter Mary was keen on art and sent endless editions of Vision On, Take Hart and Paint Along With Nancy for her. Mary is now an accomplished painter and sculptor based in Budapest, but we watch at least one of these Paint Along With Nancy editions every time she visits and she maintains “Nancy’s so much more versatile than Bob Ross”.
Another huge hit was when Rory sent us The Homemade Car and the ATV Life Is a Beautiful Book startup film, both of which Mary had to watch every night for about two years before she went to bed.
Rory’s generosity was coupled with a disgust at meanness. He called people who were mean “crumbs” and it was probably the harshest thing he would ever say about anyone.
He used to laugh at material he got from one collector who used to endlessly recycle VHS tapes until there was very little in the way of ferrous oxide left on them. I was regularly ripped off by people I worked for during the times I was freelancing, and he always got more angry about it than I did. He really, truly cared about his friends.
And Rory had a lot of friends; he introduced me to some lovely people. For instance Mikey Bennett of the South West England Vintage Television Museum. We created loads of test cards for Mikey and it was lovely to see them being shown on old sets.
When Rory heard that Mikey had been ill, he was extremely concerned and was thinking what he could do to cheer Mikey up.
Rory also had a huge amount of time for Robin Carmody and his efforts at cross-referencing and cataloguing broadcasting history. And it was at Rory’s suggestion I became friends with Greg Taylor, who is someone who had a massive effect on my life.
I remember after we’d known each other a couple of years someone called “Simon Luxton” turned up with some recreations that looked like Rory’s style and I asked if it was him. It wasn’t, but Rory was rather amused and said “Yes, I can understand why you think that, what with On the Buses Luxton is a surname I might very well choose if I was after a pseudonym.” Simon Luxton turned out to be very real, and became a good friend of both Rory and me.
During most of the time we were working together, Rory was writing for the much-loved BBC Children’s situation comedy series ChuckleVision. Sometimes he used to send me his scripts to read before he sent them off to the BBC, and I always enjoyed that. It was so nice to read them and then later see them on screen. Although Rory loved writing for Paul, Barry and Brian, his favourite was Jimmy and this was his favourite episode:
He did the honour of giving me a mention in an episode1 of ChuckleVision, which really made me proud. I used to tell Rory that his writing reminded me most of Eric Sykes. There were situations that started normally enough but then got stranger and stranger but so gradually that everything seemed to happen completely naturally.
Another regular collaboration Rory had was also ongoing whilst we were working together; he always seemed to be working on the latest project of the Welsh-language poet TG Williams, whose bardic name was Cefnfab.
I loved hearing about Rory’s adventures with Cefnfab, and I am sure they are having a great time together now.
I remember once as a thank you to Rory I did an HTV Wales junction for his birthday. It drew together a lot of the things we talked about and I think he enjoyed it
The reason Rory and I stopped working together is because I went through a few years of really doing nothing television related at all. I had had an absolutely awful experience with Big Centre Television. After that, I couldn’t face doing anything for quite some time. Before this happened, we regularly collaborated on animations for each years’ Kaleidoscope events, but after the Big Centre experience anything to do with Kaleidoscope would make me feel rather murderous.
Before Rory died I had got my mojo back and we had talked about working with each other again on some Transdiffusion start-ups. Unfortunately that was not to be. My last chat with Rory was while he was in hospital; I sent him a link to a video interview with Fred Harris (who we both adore) and he sent me back a message saying how much he’d enjoyed it.
And that was that. And when Rory died, my daughters, my wife and my parents were all as upset as I was.
One of my greatest regrets is that I didn’t complete the Reg the Hedge public information film while Rory was alive. This was a fake public information film that we cooked up together about the dangers of not tidying up the garden.
I will do that one day. Rory drew the animatics, storyboarded it and recorded the voice-over. I just have to do the animation and music and that will be something I’ll have to do before I pop my own clogs.
The most important thing I learnt from Rory was to take my hobbies, and life, less seriously. Do your very best by all means, but have fun and never treat it as life and death or particularly important. I became a lot less earnest and unbearable as a result.
I know that one of the greatest thrills in his life was meeting his heroes; in particular I know that meeting Terry Jones and Galton and Simpson were particularly thrilling for him. But in truth, Rory was every bit as great, as funny, as talented and as loved. And everyone misses him.
- The episode was Series 16, Episode 7 Bedlam and Breakfast. I had been double booked with a Mr. Butterworth! ↩︎
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