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Bob Godfrey MBE circa 2000
Bob arrived at the "mop top" look many decades after the Beatles, but somehow made it his very own.

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About Daze of 84.....

The picture above is one of a set of drawings concerning animation I did in the 1970s while working at Bob Godfrey Films (London). The drawings disappeared ages ago then resurfaced last year (2006) when they were posted to me by Paul Madden Esquire, to whom I give thanks. Also I damn his boots for losing them in the first place and denying all knowledge of them. I am pretty sure they were intended for use in a book that was to be about the making of Bob Godfrey's film "Great" but frankly it was a very long time ago, the book never happened and I only did these dozen or so drawings. So now, as well as leaving them to collect dust in a drawer, I am putting them here on the Internet to join all the other countless billion bits of utterly worthless digitally stored rubbish.
I'm also taking the opportunity to write down some of my memories of those days. Sadly, most of my contemporaries are dead so we can no longer sit around moaning about the old days; shovelling this material on to this website is just marginally better than talking to myself.

The title "Daze of 84" refers to the address of Bob Godfrey Films in those days - 84 Wardour Street, London. This was the centre of Soho, a considerably grubbier locale than now. On warm days, it was quite customary for the male members of Godfrey's studio to go up on to the flat roof clutching both sandwiches and binoculars - the latter being used to peer into the changing room of a strip club across the way. Filth was so much more innocent in those times.
Jeff Goldner March 2007

                                                  The author's current likeness is shown below.

 Mr. Sunshine

Picture
This picture was taken sometime in the 70s. For reasons I was never able to fathom, Bob always depicted me as a man deep in gloom. His cruel yet strangely accurate caricature of me was displayed prominently in order to provide amusement to my dim-witted workmates.

Note the droll black cloud hovering over my head


A few doors away in Wardour Street, Bob had his own preview theatre, imaginitively named "Bob's Place". Here a weary projectionist called Ron would screen 16mm or 35mm prints of the work of aspiring animators. Read and weep, modern-day spoilt kid wannabe animators - we had to use ruinously expensive use-once film for our pathetic student films since the only videotape available was even more expensive than film and computers were all tied up for sending men to the moon.
Sadly, the soft comfy seats and the darkness of the screening room always sent Bob into an immediate and deep sleep.

The cartoon above was inspired by one particular young unfortunate whose style of drawing was of the boringly common naive kind (ie., like me, couldn't really draw). I saw Bob's eyes flicker open briefly during a touching scene where the main character, supposedly a bat, was hopping around on the ground for some reason. Bob then went back to sleep, only to awaken when the lights came on. The young film-maker asked Bob what he thought, putting our man in a dilemma; having only seen the bat on the ground, Bob assured the neophyte "I liked the bit with the dog".
In Bob's defence, the bat did look nothing like a bat, so it was a fair comment.

This is so accurate that it hurts, but errs in just one tiny detail: the animator is seen smiling.   
                                                                                                                                         
                                                                 

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