It's the joy of Rex

Or rather, Grot, as Rex's creator Richard Goleszowski - known as Golly to his friends - explains.

"Do you remember The Fall And Rise Of Reginald Perrin?" asks the softly-spoken animator. "He set up this company that he wanted to fail and he called it Grot because he thought it was a really bad name, and he did absolutely everything wrong - bad ideas, bad products, sold badly - but it worked, and that was kind of the inspiration for Rex. I just thought, what if you do everything wrong, have badly drawn characters and ridiculous scripts? But for some reason it works."

"The whole idea of the series was the antithesis of what I was doing at the time, which was loads of TV commercials which had to be very slick. I wanted Rex to be the opposite. I suppose it was some kind of punk idea."

There certainly is a spirit of anarchy about the way-out adventures of Rex The Runt and his gang, fellow Plasticine canines Bad Bob, Wendy and Vince.

'There wouldn't be any point doing an animared series if the things that they did were just things that you could do in live action, because I could make a much better series in live action for the same amount of money." says Golly. "The idea is to use animation to take them into areas which you can't do anywhere else. They can go to different planets, they can travel inside their own bodies and that's the fun of it really.

"I've always liked surrealism, even as a kid I liked The Goons and Monty Python, even though I didn't know what they were about. When Monty Python started I was about ten years old but I used to stay up to watch it. I never understood the irony or the sarcasm that was used. I just saw the surrealism and loved that. I've always been influenced by that, so that's the way I like to write.

"Rex is a very childlike conception, they all are. I always liked the idea of doing a sitcom that looked childish, and I like the idea of juxtaposing that with a fairly sophisticated script and fairly sophisticated scenarios."

Luckily, Golly found a less sophisticated way than normal to animate the series, cutting some corners in the notoriously laborious processes.

"There was no point trying to make a series as sophisticated as Wallace And Gromit, because there's no way you'd ever be able to afford to make a series like that," he explains. "I developed this technique of working on sheets of glass. As soon as you remove gravity, model animation becomes a lot simpler - if it's on a sheet of glass you can just slide the characters around.

"Each episode took about two to four weeks to shoot, depending on its complexity, with five or six animators working on each episode, which is incredibly quick. That's probably as quick as you can work with Plasticine because it's fiddly. You have to smooth out the thumbprints and get the hairs out. We get through piles of them in the production because they only last a while before they get dirty - by the end there'll be a pile of dead characters in the corner. But there are press moulds to make them, to keep them constant, so you put Plasticine in and roll them out - it's just like making a biscuit really."

But it took almost ten years for Rex to get off the drawing board and onto TV screens.

Golly says: "It took a long time to get off the ground because the concept was always to do an adult animated series, and this was pre-Simpsons so it was quite unusual in those days. That, coupled with the fact that it looked like a children's programme, caused a lot of confusion - and it still does. It did take a while for this to be accepted, but luckily Colin Rose at the BBC Animation Unit had faith in it, and he still does, which I appreciate.

"It was about eight years from conception to the first series being on the air, so it was a long time." But after a long labour he's now proud of his offspring. "This sounds pretentious and a bit silly but they all do feel like part of me now, and they do feel quite real.

"They're all fragments of me I suppose: Bad Bob's the fat bloke who can't stop eating, slightly slack-jawed and lazy, Wendy's my feminine side and Vince is my stupid side!"

Golly was born in Suffolk in 1959, the son of Polish immigrants. "While other kids were playing football outside, I was indoors setting up little scenarios with building blocks and toy soldiers," he recalls. "Most of the animators here have the same kind of background - we all entertained ourselves somehow.

"I had a close friend and we used to love watching the Roadrunner and Bugs Bunny cartoon, particularly the Tex Avery ones. We'd sit for hours and talk about them and re-enact them."

Now Golly's working on films of his own. He directed the award-winning short Robbie The Reindeer and is currently working on Aardman Animation's second full feature film, Tortoise vs Hare.

"It's a different world to Rex," he says. "Rex is a huge amount of fun because we do have the chance to improvise and be silly, but there's a lot more consideration that goes into a feature film. Being given a one-and-a-half-hour script to work is much more difficult than a ten-minute script by a thousand times - it's much more taxing and intellectual and tough and there's a lot more people and a lot more voices involved. It's been a huge jump in my career to make a feature film, I didn't realise that there was such a huge gap between that and doing something like Rex. But I love both. It's better than digging ditches!"

Rex The Runt returns to BBC2 on September 23

First published: September 11, 2001

Published: 22 Mar 2009