"We did not participate on that, we didn’t want to. It’s true, that in year 1989 there was a revolution, it’s true, that even in that redaction were people gathering and waiting what’s going to happen. Children TV couldn’t participate in those events. I thing, it’s allright because affecting of children by that wouldn’t be appropriate and healthy. Why should children suffer from that? But on the other hand it’s true that (and none if it is cause by being “chicken” or the fact that we didn’t want to) we’ve been telling to each other that these are the things, which would somehow affected the creation for the children. And these are the things that don’t belong there, by my opinion. And after all we didn’t want to act like “heroes”, we didn’t want to. We didn’t want to look down on somebody, that we did this and that. But as I say, it wasn’t caused by feeling like a chicken, it was because our basic relation with those children."
“…and on that occasion we came up with one good idea. We thought that we will found (as they seemed like) the socialistic work brigade. We established a small group, which included puppeteers, production manager, continuity girl, cameraman, and we will live together (as they imagined) that we will go together to the cinema like some kind of a group in which members understand each other and which believes in that, what was happening in this state. We will go to the expositions and the other stuff together. So we met few times and we passed by it. They wanted from us to start write a chronicle. So we authorized one of our colleagues by that, but he never started. We always excused, that we don’t have it yet or we don’t have it refilled. Then we presented it to them by some of our performances and it got so far that they ”honoured” us by giving us silver medals of socialistic work brigade.”
“…and those beginnings were extremely interesting, all the things about puppetry had to be discovered. We knew that on the first place, the primordial thing, will always be those puppets and we are secondary. So naturally, in that time we were lying under the table or cowering behind some decoration. We had to adapt those decorative features, which were there to hide us. I came to absolutely new kind of job, because in our country nobody knew yet what’s going on. Although the television started about 1935, there was nothing like puppetry in TV. In fact we were slowly finding it out, because we had to realize that the practical work is something quite different….”
Mgr Jaoslav Vidlař (10th January 1935) comes from puppeteers family, puppets became his hobby, work and life. He met puppets for the first time in his home town, Olomouc, where his carrier of puppeteer started and where he started obtaining experiences. After that he moved to Prague and started to study DAMU, field of puppetry. He finished the studies succesfully and started lecturing there for a long time. The meeting with docent Zdeněk Raifanda determined his future. Thanks to him he received a job in recently founded Czechoslovakian television in newsroom for kindergardens where he worked for whole entire professional life up to now. He stoods behind establishment of all the puppet characters and he participated in filming all the puppet broadcasts. His most known characters are bear Emánek, tinker Brčko but also Krkonošské pohádky (Fairy tales from Giant Mountains), Včelí medvíci, Broučci, Jů a Hele from Studio kamarád, František a Fanynka from show Kouzelná školka and lots of other characters. All the political events that occured during his live left him nearly intact and without any intervention to his perosnal life. He always payed attantion to his child audience and sacrificed as much as he could to them. Nowadays Mr. Vidlař is retaired and he leads puppetry school in Mladá Boleslav and he still works with Česká televize.
