Vision On aired on The BBC from 1964 to 1976. It was one of the few TV shows made specifically for deaf children, but had accompanying sounds and music for anyone in the audience who wasn't deaf.
The show's main presenters were an actress named Pat Keysell, who also taught deaf children; Tony Hart, an artist who encouraged children to submit their own paintings to the BBC to appear in the show's "The Gallery" segments, and Sylvester McCoy (credited here as Sylveste McCoy) and Ben Benison, who both played as mime performers. Besides the segments featuring these presenters, the show featured other segments, such as Humphrey the Tortoise, a man in a white lab coat known as the Prof, and an animated miner called The Digger.
Co-creator Patrick Dowling eventually found it harder and harder to sustain a flow of new ideas to use in the show, so he cancelled it in 1976, while the show's popularity was still at its height. Dowling and Hart later made art programmes called Take Hart and Hartbeat, the former of which kept Vision On's "The Gallery" segments.
Tropes in use:
- Agony of the Feet: The Prof blows up a balloon that somehow hits his foot like a heavy object.
- The Cameo: Daleks were given a short segment in one of the episodes
. - Gadgeteer Genius: Wilf Lunn, one of the show's other presenters, was depicted as an eccentric inventor.
- Leitmotif: Each segment had a specific song used for it that likely count as these. To give a few examples:
- The Burbles' segments used a fairly leisurely-sounding but somewhat cartoony tune called "Goofy".
- Humphrey the Tortoise's segments used a slow ocarina tune called "Happy Ocarina".
- Long Runner: Ran for 12 years.
- Medium Blending: Different techniques were used for each of the segments. Some were live-action, some were 2-D animation, some were Stop Motion...
- Mime and Music-Only Cartoon: Well, minus the "cartoon" part for the live-action segments. It did have spoken dialogue, but it was mostly restricted to short statements; since the programme's target audience was deaf children, characters usually communicated via sign language, mime, etc.
- Talking Animal: Humphrey the Tortoise speaks in speech bubbles.
- The Voice: The Burbles, who also speak in speech bubbles, are a visual variant. Said speech bubbles are the only indication of their presence in a room, as they were never given physical appearances.
