Tony Hart, the tortured genius

But he did find it terribly hard to turn down requests. Before his agent and closest friend Roc Renals took over the handling of his personal appearances my father’s commitments had been so many that they were beginning to make him ill through overwork.

He was unable to say no and would find himself working every weekend, opening shops and galleries, giving speeches and drawing for charities which, with television work, meant months could go by without a day off.

So he found a delightful lady psychotherapist living locally who kept horses and who treated patients at her home. He would spend a session once a week learning through role play how to refuse demands that were being made of him.

“Will you judge the school’s sports day?” she would ask and my father would smile politely and say: “No”.

“Very good, Tony.” “Will you help us turn the cricket pavilion into an art studio?” “No.”

And so it would go on until one day my father arrived for his session to find his therapist looking pale with an arm in plaster.

Very concerned he asked what she had done and she explained she had broken her arm in a fall. To his dismay her eyes filled with tears as she told him that because of it she had been unable to go down to the paddock to see her horses: could Tony help her?

“Of course I will!” exclaimed my father, leaping out of his chair. The tears vanished as she berated him: “Wrong    answer, Tony! You’re supposed to say no!”

The therapy worked to a degree but my father felt uncomfortable about disappointing people who wanted him to do something, even though his schedule was already jam-packed.

My father’s relationship with the producer of Vision On – the Sixties art show and forerunner to Take Hart that had made him globally famous – had been a particularly difficult one.

Although Patrick Dowling was constantly breaking new ground he would push pa – looking for a new angle, a new edge on what he was doing and would ask him at the last minute to change what had been rehearsed. Sometimes the energy would drain from Tony and he would sink into a trough of despair.

But generally pa could be described as having a charmed existence – he was successful in his work, happy at home and blessed with Jean, a wonderful wife to whom he was married for 50 years until her death in 2003, and he rarely seemed to come into contact with the darker side of life. Which is not to say that there were not temptations along the way.

Later in his career, while he was making The Art Box Bunch programmes and after my marriage had collapsed after 21 years, I sat in the garden telling my mother and father all about how I had managed to get myself tangled up in an unhealthy obsessive relationship with somebody else. They let me talk and made no judgmental remarks.

After a while my mother went inside to make some coffee and my father quietly confessed to an affair he had had long ago and which had lasted two years. He told me it had been exciting and wonderful for the first six months but then the relationship had limped on for another 18 while he tried to find a kind way to end it.

Eventually the lady in question brought it all to a close herself, much to his relief. My mother reappeared with the coffee and set the tray down on the table remarking: “We went through a bad patch didn’t we, for about two years?” Pa and I exchanged a glance and never spoke of it again.

Then there was Betsy Ford, a woman who produced a TV programme for deaf children in the studios at the University of California. My father was due to appear on her programme and together with his agent Roc they speculated on how she would look – a bit overweight and middle-aged, they reckoned.

When the receptionist at their hotel in San Francisco rang to say their visitor had arrived, pa went down alone to the lobby.

He saw a very attractive young woman in her mid- 20s with long dark hair standing by the desk. She turned to look at him and he mouthed to her across the lobby: “You?” She nodded and smiled.

Betsy, Tony and Roc spent several days making the programme and seeing the sights and when the time came to leave Betsy drove them to the airport and kissed my father goodbye.

“That,” said my father many, many years later, “was quite a kiss.”

It was also the beginning of a long association and friendship. Roc says Betsy idolised my father and that the feeling was mutual. Pa himself said of Betsy that if there was another woman in the world other than my mother with whom he could have been happy it was Betsy.

Planning meetings for Take Hart were held in the art studio at pa’s cottage in Guildford – so much better than the offices at Television Centre since everything he needed to demonstrate his ideas to producer Christopher Pilkington was at hand.

The day’s schedule would be work in the morning, then lunch – convivial and gently boozy – followed by more work which would segue into a drink or two.

Trotting out to my pa’s studio with tea or a message I encountered many weird and wonderful things that a child wouldn’t generally come across at their father’s place of work: green sponge forests; a series of circular patterns created by a cone full of salt swinging on a long string above a sheet of black paper; blown eggs in different colours with little faces.

Sometimes I would go and sit quietly at the table in his studio content just to draw for a few hours in companionable silence on the back of one of his scripts.

My father drew his inspiration from the most unlikely sources. We were once eating spaghetti at home when he dragged a looped strand of spaghetti through the sauce on his plate and with a muttered “excuse me” went out to his studio. My mother and I raised our eyebrows at each other and carried on with our lunch.

By the end of the afternoon the experiment had evolved into a fabulous textured wave-like design which my father had created by dipping pieces of string into coloured paint and laying them in coils and curves on a piece of card before dragging them out.

It is quite likely that the plate never found its way back to the kitchen – it was a constant source of annoyance to my mother that all sorts of promising kitchen utensils – forks (good for printing a grass effect), a potato masher (for spraying paint through), egg whisks (bubbling up paint to print from) – would vanish into the studio.

Many of my father’s ideas came about by accident. He once spilt black powder paint on to the Formica table and tried to get it off with a scrubbing brush, realising that he was making the most marvellous toothcomb textures.

In the final years before pa died in January 2009 at 83 he was no longer able to draw or make a speech as he’d had two strokes but it didn’t matter – he was still the star guest at functions arranged by Roc. All pa needed to do was smile, say hello and people came and thanked him for the generations he had inspired, entertained and encouraged to have a go at making pictures.

● Abridged by Jane Warren from Tony Hart: Portrait Of My Dad, by Carolyn Ross (Blake Publishing, £18.99). To order send a cheque or PO payable to Express Bookshop to: Tony Hart Offer, PO Box 200, Falmouth TR11 4WJ, call 0871 988 8367 or buy at www.expressbookshop. com UK delivery free. Calls cost 10p per minute. Also available at £4.99 from ebook retailers.