UK TV view­ers of a cer­tain age may remem­ber Channel 4’s FourMations anim­ated tv sea­sons. Usually con­signed to late night slots or act­ing as tele­visual poly­filla when there were five minute gaps between epis­odes of Countdown and Fifteen-to-One — it usu­ally con­sisted of a wide pleth­ora of the latest anim­ated shorts from across the globe.

It was via these that I first exper­i­enced as wide ran­ging series of films start­ing from Aardman’s Creature Comforts, to Jan Svankmajer’s ter­ri­fy­ing (to a young­ling Archer, at least) Alice. After Fourmations came to a close, Channel 4 tried a few other anim­a­tion ini­ti­at­ives, includ­ing Mesh (spe­cific­ally for com­puter gen­er­ated graph­ics) and my per­sonal favour­ite — Dope Sheet — a late night show­case of the latest anim­ated shorts.

Unfortunately, this all seemed to come to an end in 1999. Although C4 con­tin­ued to encour­age and help develop the British anim­a­tion scene, the TV cov­er­age dimin­ished. Some people might argue that this coin­cid­ent­ally took place at the same time that Channel 4 inves­ted heav­ily in Big Brother-all-night cov­er­age, but then some people will look for any reason to slam Big Brother. Myself included.

Obviously, British anim­a­tion as a whole hasn’t suffered, there is still a massive scene out there — but now Channel 4 are get­ting involved again, and settting up the 4mations.tv — a YouTube style site where people can view, review and upload their own films. Look at it as a more focussed YouTube chan­nel with cash prizes. My little play about on the site so far has come up with some little gems already, and I’m look­ing for­ward to see­ing what else there is to offer.