Fifty-eight years ago a man
called Michael Bond bought a
small bear, writes Karen Jankel.
He named the bear Paddington
after the London railway
station. Almost six decades
later Paddington is about to
make his film debut.
The man who made that
impulse purchase all those years
ago is my father and, at the time,
he was a television cameraman at
the BBC. He was also an aspiring
writer and seeing the bear on his mantelpiece sparked an idea and
he began to write. He didn’t set out to write anything specific, but
after only ten days, he realised he’d completed a book–A Bear
Called Paddington was published by William Collins in 1958.
Paddington™ and Paddington Bear™ ©Paddington and Company
Limited/Studiocanal S.A. 2014
His first book did so well
that Bond continued to write
about his bear from Darkest
Peru and by 1965, with six
Paddington titles under his
belt and several translations,
he felt confident enough to
give up his job with the BBC.
By 1975 Paddington had his
own television series. Animation
hadn’t reached the sophisticated
levels of today, but the relatively
simple technique developed by
The fact that he didn’t consciously write for children is almost
certainly one of the reasons that his books are so successful. The
stories have a level of sophistication that makes them appeal to
a wide age range. Children enjoy the scrapes that Paddington gets
into, while parents can take pleasure from the witty dialogue.
the inspired animator Ivor Wood worked perfectly for
Paddington. The five-minute episodes, produced by FilmFair,
combined the three dimensional Paddington puppet with drawn
two dimensional backgrounds and other characters. However,
while the concept might have been simple, the execution certainly
wasn’t and the labour-intensive process of creating 25 frames
for every second of animation meant that the episodes were
costly to make. Thus the first Paddington merchandise deals
were struck in order to finance the making of the series.
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