THE ALL NEW BRADSHAWS, SETTING THE SCENE...
I love good radio. In my humble opinion (since when did I have a humble opinion?) good radio draws you in and makes you comfy, makes your crappy job a bit easier and your happy job even more fun, shortens your long day or your long drive or your long wait. And good radio comes with pictures that you can see without a plasma TV or a webcam, pictures you can watch with your eyes closed or, as long as there isn't a steering wheel in your hands, with the road in front of you. Now unless you've been lying to me for all these years (and I much prefer to take you at your word!) the Bradshaws stories seem to have ticked a few of those boxes. Thank you for letting little Billy, Alf and Audrey into your busy lives. Thank you to all the radio stations for playing the stories over the years and continuing to play them. And thank you life for my triple schizophrenia (and that doesn't include me). But it's a YouTube world and so it's time to make some good television too.
 When I started to perform the sketches live on stage, twenty-odd years ago, I realised then that putting the Bradshaws on television would be a problem. Why? Because with radio we listeners are allowed to make the pictures up ourselves. We hear a voice and we see a tall thin bloke or a big fat round one or a small striped one with big ears, depending on our own backgrounds and influences. So when I stand up in front of you in a theatre or the local Dyers and Polishers Social Club and 'do' the voices I depend on you to suspend belief and visualise Alf, Audrey and little Billy on stage with me - and you do. But over the years the greater the The Bradshaws cult became, the greater the expectations became too (maybe it was just my expectations?), and I've found myself using lots of devices to add to the visual experience, such as projecting cartoon images on a screen, or putting big scenery up and employing actors (Deborah Torr & Rick Hudson - bless 'em) to mime on stage while I hide side-stage with a microphone 'doing' the voices. And of course using my unique Billy Bradshaw animatronic puppet to steal the show and threaten me with an inferiority complex. (The use of the actors along with the Billy Bradshaw and Michael Morris animatronics was the basis of the 1994 Granada Television series "The Bradshaws" - I must try to find a copy of the video on eBay!)
Anyway I decided animation is the way to achieve the quirkiness I've dreamed of for television. So the Two Up Toons team was formed consisting of myself, Paul Wilde and Dave Worthington. We had a simple understanding: we would all put our various skills together to see if we could come up with something saleable for television. If we succeeded we would all get paid. If not we'd have an interesting time together learning, and we did. The TUTs worked hard to develop a cut-out style using Flash that was in keeping with the nostalgia theme in the original Bradshaws radio stories. We did a little animation of Billy Bradshaw's Easy Peasy Song featuring a Road Safety message and I had stack of DVDs pressed - which I've since given away to schools and other kiddy groups (in fact I still have a few copies left, so all you have to do is ask!).
But television (or rather the movers and shakers and decision-makers in television) laughed but didn't go for the style. So it was time to move on and a lot has happened since.
In this brave new blogging world you might just find it interesting to read some extracts as scribbled in my journal: Go and have a gawp!: www.thebradshaws.biz
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