There are moments in The Wind in the Willows, TVC's feature-length animated adaptation of Kenneth Grahame's Edwardian children's book, in which the romance with the land, that very English phenomenon, is intense and magical. After Mole and Rat rescue Portly, the young otter who has wandered too far downstream, they all return home by boat. When dawn breaks the landscape is suffused with a "silvery, climbing phosphorescence" as the mists lift and another day on the river begins. To capture this--the essence, of Grahame's book--requires a special mindset, a certain kind of understanding, a carefully guided team ...

Wind in the Willows. Courtesy of TVC London.

John Coates, Managing Director of TVC, occupies the office right at the top of his central London studio, surrounded by the paraphernalia of nearly 40 years in the business--awards and certificates, photographs of many friends and colleagues; proud, happy moments arranged carefully round the walls of the small, friendly space. John, approaching 70, joined TVC in 1957. He's a quiet, round, bearded man with a faraway look in his eyes that in an instant turns into a twinkle. An oldfashioned English gentleman, semidisplaced in the closing years of the 20th century, who speaks nostalgically of the sixties when all the pretty TVC paint and trace girls wore miniskirts and shopped for trendy clothes on Carnaby Street during their lunch hour. A Kiplingesque character who peppers his talk with capital letters, referring to himself and his long time associates as The Old Gang or, more affectionately, as TOG. He lives in Kent with Christine, his "Lady Love," and rides whenever he can. I catch the excitement when he reminisces about his first experience of riding to hounds.

A Wet Tory
The English tradition, to which John certainly belongs, comes out of the 19th century through the mad Ruskin, the last great English critic, ardent supporter of Turner, passionate opponent of Modernism. It moves through the decorative idealism of William Morris, takes in the eccentricities of Lewis Carrol, permeates the compositions of Elgar and Delius, encompasses both the malice and the sublimity of Kipling's prose, reappears in the deeply romantic films of Powell and Pressburger, the common sense writings of Oxford philosopher John Austin and in the politics of preThatcherite Toryism. The reader will be able to add other names to this list.

John Coates belongs here. He can't, for instance, locate himself within the radicallychanged political environment of the last two decades. "I'm a very wet Tory. Well, I'm a socialist really." A natural Tory who now cannot identify with the new politics of conviction; whose idealism today seems quaint and illfitting within the Dorothy Parker range of British politics.

Nevertheless, sidelined or not, John Coates has given TVC a new lease on life and a different personality since George Dunning died in 1979. As the psychedelia of the sixties ebbed away, exemplified in the unfinished fragment from The Tempest which George left behind, John's own interests asserted themselves. In the three years before the appearance of The Snowman, he turned around TVC from a commercialsled to an entertainmentled company which has subsequently produced a string of successful TV Specials including Granpa and Father Christmas; a feature film, When the Wind Blows, and a 6 x half hour series based on the Beatrix Potter books; he is currently working on an adaptation of the Posy Simmons book Fred the Cat with director Joanna Quinn and with director Jimmy Murukami on an adaptation of John Burningham's Oi! Get Off My Train. TVC's last production will be an adaptation of another Raymond Briggs book, The Bear, for which John has already written the end credits stating that this is TVC's last film.