Jon henley: the story behind that talking hands advert

Lovely, that new Learning and Skills Council TV commercial for adult numeracy courses. You know, the one that's all done with hands: small girl in class too shy to put up her hand and

tell sir he's lost her; crusty, droopy-moustached teacher droning through the eight-times table; little old lady in rollers, explaining that this was the point when she (like so many of

us) gave up on maths. But how did they do it? They started, says Dymphna McGee, the council's marketing manager, with the idea that we use our hands to count, and to make silly faces

(remember those gawping mouths you made in the playground with your curled forefinger and thumb?) Also, the motto of the agency's Skills for Life campaign is: "Our future.

It's in our hands." So hands-as-faces it was. Next, they asked four directors to produce a test commercial. Mike Stephenson won. "It could have looked like an animation job,

but I felt it had to be real hands," Stephenson says. "I also felt it had to be honest: no cheating, no computer-generated stuff, no post-production. Just one continuous shot. Like

a kind of Sesame Street for adults." Stephenson found Mak Wilson, a "brilliant" puppeteer who had worked for years with Jim Henson's Creature Shop, the creators of

Sesame Street. Wilson found four other master puppeteers, and within a day the basic shape was there. "The little girl and the teacher were quite straightforward," says Stephenson.

"The older lady - Beryl, as she became known - took longer because we needed props: some worked, some didn't. Lipstick looked terrible. In the end, one of the girls came up with

pink rollers." The commercial was shot in one take, against a black background and with the five puppeteers dressed in black, and wearing black hoods. "The toughest bits were the

transitions between the characters," says Wilson. "They had to be seamless. And getting five people to work as one. Sarah, who did the mouths, had her back to the camera and her

arms raised the whole time. I was leaning over the top of her to do the the eyes and someone else was coming up between my arms to do the hair. It was pretty hard work." Worth it,

though: rarely is advertising as simple and as engaging as this.