Norman Anthony Hart was born at Maidstone in Kent on 15 October 1925. His father was a local government official whose own artistic leanings had been discouraged by his parents and his mother was an amateur singer. Their mutual devotion to the arts meant that they adopted a liberal attitude to their children’s careers. ‘My father always said to me don’t work in an office’, Hart once recalled. ‘So not working in an office became very important to me.’ He was educated at All Saints, Margaret Street, a London choir school with Dickensian attitudes to discipline and then at Clayesmore in Dorset, the 17 year-old Hart applied to be an air gunner with the RAF. An eye defect prevented him being assigned flying duties, however, so he followed in his father’s footsteps and joined the Indian Army, training for a commission with the Gurkha Rifles. Hart spent his four years in India nurturing the idea of becoming a professional painter and spent much of his off-duty periods at an art school in Madras. Following Indian independence in 1947, Hart took up a place at the Maidstone College of Art, from which he graduated in 1950. He moved to London and worked as a window dresser at a store on Oxford Street, before turning his hand to freelance graphics work in cinema, television and newspapers. He was happy to paint murals on restaurant walls in return for meals. A chance meeting with a television producer at a party in 1952 resulted in a BBC interview which took place over lunch. At the end of the meal, Hart was asked to demonstrate his draughtsmanship by drawing a picture of a fish on a napkin. His sketch secured him the job. He initially worked on an early Eammon Andrews show, before becoming graphics artist on the Tonight programme. Soon after, he became resident artist on the children’s show Saturday Special, before moving to Playbox, which ran until 1959. Throughout that time, Hart also worked on the Blue Peter programme, the first of which was broadcast in October 1958. In the weekly transmissions he told and illustrated stories, invariably about a little white elephant called ‘Packi’. His loose involvement with Blue Peter continued into the 1960s with the creation of the galleon which became the programme’s logo. Hart asked for a penny for every time his design was used. His request was turned down and he was paid a flat fee of £100. Stints throughout this early 1960s on Ask Your Dad, Disney Wonderland and Stories in Pictures followed, and led to Hart’s first appearance on the long-running puppet show Titch and Quackers, in which he operated the latter. Then, in 1964, came his breakthrough programme, Vision On. Originally a programme commissioned for for the deaf, it represented a milestone in children’s television and gave a platform to Hart’s natural vivacity. Whether drawing a huge profile on an empty beach with the wheel-tracks of a motorcycle or making a 180 foot picture of a tractor on a Sussex hillside using 144 roller towels, the quirky and often surreal programme stretched the boundaries of every child’s imagination. Using paints, clay, textiles, foodstuffs or a cast-off object of almost any description, Hart had the magical ability to produce competent, entertaining pieces of work at impressive speed and in an unpatronising fashion. A gentle and inspiring man, his desire to encourage by example and by humour meant work of all standards appeared on the wall of ‘The Gallery’ – from children as young as four to that of older teenagers. At one point, it was generating 6,000 submissions a week. The series also gave birth to ‘Morph’, a six inch plasticine stop-motion character created by Lord and Sproxton. He lived in the pencil box on Hart’s desk. As the name suggests, he was capable of extraordinary and amusing feats of metamorphosis. In addition, despite speaking a wholly unintelligible language, Morph always made perfect sense to his foil, Hart. Vision On ran for twelve years and by the time it ended in 1977, was being screened around the world. Hart’s trademark cravat and genial manner won him international acclaim. The following year, he was given his first solo vehicle, Take Hart. It too was an instant success. Hart introduced successive generations of children to the delights of drawing – as well as to the myriad creative possibilities afforded by old egg boxes, empty cereal packets and milk bottle tops. Recognition from his peers came in the form of two BAFTA awards for his television work. Throughout the 1990s Hart never forgot his motto ‘Show them don’t tell them’ and continued to present other programmes, the most recent of which included Morph TV and Smart Hart. He retired in 2001, having appeared on TV art programmes for nearly 50 years. In an article in The Times in September 2008, Hart described how after his wife Jean died in 2003, he suffered a series of strokes that left him unable to use his hands. ‘Not being able to draw is the greatest cross that I have to bear,’ he wrote, ‘for it has been my lifetime passion’. After a number of years of failing health, he died on 18 January 2009 at the age of 83. Colonel William Shuttlewood, Director of the Gurkha Welfare Trust, said Hart regularly donated pictures which were auctioned and had raised ‘substantial’ amounts of money for the charity. He said: ‘I am sorry he has gone. He was a lovely chap and was very keen to make sure we were supported properly.’