Jonathan Hills
Drew the creatures that became television’s popular Teletubbies
JONATHAN HILLS, who has died aged 66, was a distinguished artist, film-maker and illustrator. In the early days of digital effects Hills cut an unusual figure. A kind, sensitive man with the demeanour of an antiquarian bookseller, throughout his life he carried a sketchbook, pencil and sharpener in his bag. Yet he was a pioneer in the use of computerised images for film and television and the original draughtsman of the figures in the BBC’S Teletubbies.
Jonathan Graham Hills was born on March 9 1954 in Croydon to Sir Graham Hills, a professor of chemistry and later principal of Strathclyde University, and his wife, Brenda, née Stubbington, a photographer.
From Barton Peveril Grammar School, Eastleigh, he won a Hampshire Bursary to Winchester College, where he was encouraged to pursue his interest in art by his housemaster, Richard Bass, and the head of Art, Grahame Drew, of whose travel scholarship fund he later became a trustee. He retained close contacts with the school all his life.
He went on to study Anglo Saxon, Norse and Celtic at Queens’ College, Cambridge, where he developed an interest in theatre and toured with a drama of shadow puppets which he had designed.
After Cambridge he entered the British School in Rome, immersing himself in Italian opera and in the school’s community of artists and scholars.
On his return from Rome, he was introduced to the “Python” Graham Chapman, whose A Liar’s Autobiography he was commissioned to illustrate. In this he showed his gifts as a caricaturist, portraying Chapman and other members of the Monty Python team in a comic but sympathetic light.
Many book illustrations followed, among them Gareth Owen’s Song of the City, and Pob’s Stories (1986) by Anne Wood – as a television producer in the 1990s, she commissioned Hills to design the creatures that became the Teletubbies.
In 1986 Hills co-founded the visual effects company Framestore. While working on commercials and pop videos, he was given the opportunity to direct, with Paul Kafno, Una Stravaganza Dei Medici,a film for Thames Television which made use of special effects to recreate the Florentine “intermedi” of 1589, conceived for the marriage of Ferdinando de Medici and Princess Christine of Lorraine. Hills used engravings of the original spectacle as a virtual backdrop to the action. It won a Prix Italia.
Hills went on to direct many musical pieces, worked on a BBC film of Michael Tippett’s opera New Year, and when Michael Tilson Thomas conducted On the Town at the Barbican, he designed films to play behind the musicians on huge screens. He also created an exquisite animation for Puccini’s Madame Butterfly for Opera Imaginaire.
Hills added magic to television dramas as a special effects director. An episode of Poirot required the famous “Blue Train” to travel to Nice. For this he found the last existing carriage, rebuilt it digitally, placed it in the Gare du Nord and had viewers believe the train was up and running.
Other commissions for television included Foyle’s War, Inspector Morse and Endeavour, and he “placed” the head of the actor Adrien Brody on the body of a real matador in the film A Matador’s Mistress (2008). Shortly before his death he completed a television series for pre-school children.
A gifted portrait and landscape painter, Hills exhibited at the Royal Academy, the National Portrait Gallery and the Royal Society of Portrait Painters. He was a devoted member of the London Sketch Club – a gentleman’s club to which he introduced a ladies’ drawing class – and of the Chelsea Arts Club, on whose committee he served until his death.
A devoted family man, he is survived by his wife Lucy Makin and their two daughters.
Jonathan Hills, born March 9 1954, died July 24 2020