Henry Naylor's new show for ITV, Headcases, is a very mixed bag.

The show's promoted as Spitting Image MkII, but it doesn't look like there are any artists on board who can touch the inestimable Peter Fluck and Roger Law, or even the team who worked on 2D TV. The Piers Morgan caricature is at the forefront of the show's publicity material, yet more closely resembles Stephen Fry; attempts at certain political figures like Nicholas Sarkozy and Nick Clegg, and even obvious targets like Tony Blair, are astonishingly poor. And apart from the fact that many of the likenesses are wide of the mark and the scripts are equally in need of the red pen, the real reason the show leaves a weird impression is its neither-fish-nor-fowl execution. The faces have been caricatured in a conventional pencil and paper manner before digital modelling. But the bodies are more often than not animated using cutting edge motion capture techniques. In other words, although the characters LOOK like cartoons, they don't MOVE like cartoons. As recent feature film experiments with the technology have shown (Happy Feet, Beowulf) mo cap works well when portraying the extraordinary and fantastic, but when used to sell the idea of someone just strolling across a room, it somehow draws attention to its artifice and thereby pulls the audience out of the narrative. Watch the spoof of Madonna of the David Cameron press conference in episode one of Headcases and you'll see exactly what I mean.

Aside from Robert Zemekis, the world's leading proponent of mo cap is probably Peter Jackson. Having cut his teeth on Gollum and tweaked the tech on Kong, he's in the midst of filming The Adventures of Tin-Tin entirely on mo cap stages. However, a very great deal of the former two "performances" were completed by animators; enhancing, emphasising, exaggerating and at times entirely ignoring and replacing the physical movements of actor Andy Serkis. Of course, on the third film Serkis will be playing a salty sailor, not a giant ape or Ring-wrecked Hobbit. It remains to be seen whether a cgi Capt. Haddock will require the touch of a true animator's talents in order to succeed and will depend on whether the film's designers will attempt to replicate Hergé's clear-line aesthetic or just use the kind of hollow-eyed zombies that populate The Polar Express.

For a lot more on the importance of funny, exaggerated movement in animation, read John "everything modern is soulless shit" Kricfalusi's hugely absorbing, hyper-opinionated blog.

Several weeks ago, the Toon Weekly site transformed into a members-only forum, meaning the various character design challenges are now held on private threads rather than in public galleries. A shame, in my view, since having passers-by looking at the work kind of forces you to raise your game. Having said that, most participants post their entries on their own sites and blogs and I've been doing the same. This blog has been reserved for writing since I set up t'other shop, but I'm so pleased with what I did for this week's assignment (redesign a classic live-action sitcom cast for animation) that I decided to post it here too:



Yes, before you say it, I know Vyvyan had four stars; the point of the exercise is not a facsimile of the costumes, nor a caricature of the actors for that matter, but an an adaptation of the characters. It's interesting to see what you can eliminate, what you have to keep and what you can tweak whilst still evoking the spirit of the thing. I couldn't decide which member of the Balowski family to include, regrettable since our Alexei was arguably the funniest bloke in the group.

Last night saw the final episode of what in all likelihood will be the last of David Attenborough's "sledgehammer" natural history series. Life in Cold Blood follows on from Life on Earth, The Living Planet, The Trials of Life, Life in the Freezer, The Private Life of Plants, The Life of Birds, The Life of Mammals and Life in the Undergrowth to form what must be the most stunning treatise on natural history ever broadcast, as convincing a call to the cause of conservation and testament to the unique power of television- making the remote and unfamiliar seem intimate and arresting- as one could wish for. Attenborough's voice and mannerisms wavered a little more than I'd seen before in this series. His delivery was always caricatured as hushed, but at times he seemed genuinely breathless. He also seemed to let more of his own opinions and feelings come through in the script. This felt like the end of his documentarian career and the beginning of another as commentator, even polemicist.

The final moments of the programme, as Attenborough sat in the company of "Lonesome George", the only living specimen of Pinta Island Tortoise in existence, were both poignant and weirdly metatextual. The animal is estimated to be of roughly the same age as the broadcaster; both are the last of their kind, and in the midst of their swan song. While Attenborough has suggested that we'll hear more from him on an occasional basis - and most likely on environmental issues- his globetrotting is over. The final shot, of the venerable man silhouetted in Galapagos mist, turning and disappearing amid the giant and ancient reptiles, was superb.

Attenborough's charm lies in his enthusiasm. He predates university courses in film and television and the rise of the career media luvvie. Indeed, he doesn't even have a doctorate in natural sciences. Therefore his enthusiasm is- in the strictest sense- that of the amateur, and it's infectious. He fled publishing to join the BBC back when there was no such thing as a documentary (factual programmes were called "talks", belying nascent tv's status as mere illustrated radio), much less one involving filming natural animal behaviour in parts foreign. His first forays on our screen were in Zoo Quest, a show that involved literally dragging animals out of the wild and back to the studio so the cameramen could get a decent shot at them. Said animals were then handed over to London Zoo.

Can you imagine such a show on television today? Belonging to no indoctrinated school of zoology, biology or any other -ology, Attenbrough's attitude to animals has changed and matured right along with those of the public he's sought to entertain and enlighten. We've always liked looking at them, but that enjoyment has changed from schoolboyish gawking and collecting, to a young man's perception of the natural world as a resource to be exploited, to a middle-aged appreciation of a garden in need of tlc through to this our ultimate and mature understanding of a global ecology brought to the brink by man's meddling and one that man's ingenuity must now put right if we want to continue Life As We Know It (you can have that one on me, Sir Dave). He hasn't needed a wheedling Greenpeace beardy to brow-beat him into toeing the lefty line; he's been around the damn planet often enough to know that something's up. How lucky that we've been able to join him in part, and have him point out all the most exciting sights.

I've touched on this before, but who can replace him? It's impossible to imagine any other voice currently heard on the BBC talking with even a tithe of Attenborough's authority on matters furry, scaled and slimy. Nigel Marven's blown what little credibility he had with his ridiculous cgi dino-wanks. That and he's as much screen presence as a sea cucumber. Alan Titchmarsh? I'd rather not have my natural history dished out by hands that write porn for grannies, thanks. Who else? Bill Oddie? Too nerdy. Michela Strachan? Too sentimental. That posh bird who looks a bit like Katie Melua? No. Simon King, maybe. Or bring back Julian Pettifer!

Britain's love affair with wittering, breathless, sexless, woeful chantreusses continues. After Katie Melua and Sandi Thom, step up Kate Rusby and her cover of The Kinks' The Village Green Preservation Society. This record neatly combines the meandering, dopey lists-as-lyrics of Melua with mind-shatteringly irritating Thom style "nostalgia for a time I didn't actually live in". The thing that gets my goat most is the inclusion of "Donald Duck" along with all the imagery of a WI-ran rural England long since lost. The invocation of a character belonging to one of the most rapacious megacorporations in the world is bad enough, but that they should pick one who is typically seen lathered in a beligerent, incoherent, violent frenzy of misanthropy... Wait. Actually, he's perfect. I can't think of a cartoon character that more closely resembels the Daily Mail-reading yahoos at whom this release is aquarely aimed.

Has anyone else noticed how the plot of pretty much every episode of "adult" Doctor Who spin-off Torchwood is either predicated or at least partly depends upon how stunningly attractive the main characters are, despite the fact they are played by a typically pasty troop of sub-Casualty jobbing actors? For example, in the first show of this second series guest villain James Marsters straight-facedly referred to this bloke as "eye candy". Last night, on BBC 3, Freema Agyeman turned up for a spot of inter-series nod and winkery. A genuinely attractive woman, by the internal logic of the drama all narrative should have ceased as our bunch of bi-curious alien-busters greeted her like a paragon of female sexuality, falling to the floor in paroxysms of orgasmic joy. Meh. Bring on Dave Ross, says I.

Speaking of hit-and-miss BBC 3 drama, did anyone else bother with Phoo Action? Jamie Hewlett's work is poorly served by live action adaptation; just how shitty the ill-fated Tank Girl movie is becomes clear when you consider the last ninety seconds of it, which constitute one of the most thrilling and well-executed pieces of animation seen on cinema screens in the nineties. Shame they had to be preceded by as many minutes of unfunny, lazy film. Based on his Get the Freebies comic strips, Phoo Action came off like a love child of The Banana Splits, the sixties Batman tv show and Kill Bill. On paper, that sounds like tv made for Tel, especially when you factor in the cartoonist author and presence of Spaced's Jessica Hynes (nee Stevenson) on the writers' list. In practice the hour long show was in need of liberal use of the red pen; the observations on celebrity culture and mass media- Hewlett's original target back in the day- were welcome. But it was overloaded with non-sequiters and half-assed jokes. The show looks fantastic, but it's not up to Hewlett's simian-themed best (be it Monkeys or Gorillaz). I note six more episodes have been commissioned sight unseen, all to be filmed in Glasgow. If nothing else, the increased chance of encountering a basketball-headed goblin on Buchanan Street is a reason to be cheerful.

An unexpectedly long absence from the blog, broken by- what else?- irritation.

Advertisers: do you think you could, as a matter of extreme urgency, come up with some words to describe your products other than "fun" and "cool"?

Food, in particular, can be described in many verbose and flowery ways. But outside of a Hal Roach finalé and the nauseating extremities of "sloshing" it cannot be considered fun and is only ever as cool as the refrigerator that houses it.

Yet the Kelloggs company are currently opening one of their tv spots with the statement "We all know how much fun Coco-Pops and milk are." Really? Am I missing something? Coco Pops are a pretty black and white proposition, I think, either delicious or emetic. But they can't enliven your breakfast with a song and dance number, give you a challenging set or two of tennis, dazzle you with anecdotes about life on the road with their jazz quartet, teach you magic tricks or randomly sling fluorescent cuddly toys at passers-by. I think you'd have to have lived in a sensory deprivation tank for a considerable length of time before pushing chocolate flavoured puffed rice into your head could be considered fun.

"Fun" is in danger of losing its linguistic currency through over-use, in the same way that "fine" has slipped from meaning something of the highest quality to anything just this side of okay and "nice" now equates with the very faintest blip on the pleasure-meter rather than something beautifully subtle and precise. Pretty soon, everything short of having one's body rent asunder by wild jackals will be covered by the term "fun".

But worse by far is "cool". Cool is now the copy-writer's description of choice for something that's either stultifyingly uninspiring or ethically troublesome, yet must be portrayed positively if the commercial is to succeed. Case in point, the advert for a how-to-be-jailbait-comic based on tv show Zoe 101 which manages to describe itself and its associated bits and pieces as cool no less than three times in the space of fifteen seconds.

That a bit of slang coined in the fifties is so ubiquitous in contemporary advertising proves the extent to which an industry that prides itself on its ability to measure what they insist on calling the zeitgeist is hopelessly unmoored from reality. A good example of this is the advert for Orville Redenbacher's Microwave Popcorn. In this, a typically buffoonish tv dad (the way men are portrayed as a race of useless twits on British television is a subject Charlie Brooker's explored to hilarious effect, so I won't touch it) tells his moppet children they're having popcorn tonight, but does it amid an impression of W.C. Fields. The male child is sufficiently delighted by this to exclaim "Cool!" The very idea that a child would get excited over such a niggardly treat as unsalted, unbuttered, uncaramel-and-peanutted microwave popcorn is a stretch, but that he'd be amused by a reference to a screen actor who died about fifty-five years before his birth requires a brain bruising suspension of disbelief.

Anyway, what else? I've been busy since the New Year, but in the worst way, doing a hell of a lot of administrative and otherwise non-drawing tasks. Taking care of business, I guess. Still, there's been time to squeeze in a fair bit of caricaturing and a piece for today's paper. And I've had an unbroken run of six weeks so far on the Toon Weekly site (link on the left). Lots happening on the political front too; there's a big cultural summit happening in February, also the month in which consultation on the proposed replacement for Disclosure Certification closes... Long story short, it's an unfair tax on the self-employed. Speaking of tax, I'm also lining up meetings with all the various party political spokespersons to see if we can't hold the SNP to their promised tax break for Scottish artists. Planning on having a week-long presence in the parliament itself later this year too.

Plans for Feb's anniversary (Y & I will have been together for a decade) have been abandoned thanks to the intransigence of her employer. All focus now on the summer trip out West. This weekend is family, family, family though. A brother and sister-and-law we haven't seen properly for almost a year, an uncle recently turned fifty and a grandmother about to turn seventy-five. Should be fun. And cool.

Postscript: Except it won't be quite so much, because despite their much vaunted interconnnectedness on goodhardpunchintheFacebook, the various members of my family certainly love and cherish but don't actually talk to each other. Important information isn't passed on, yet pretend cartoon animals are fed imaginary treats. This is progress!