Cartoons and Contraptions: The Wonderful World of W. Heath Robinson

Barry Venning is taking a look at the comic imagination of W. Heath Robinson at The Abbey Theatre on Wednesday 13 January. If that name doesn't ring a bell, the work almost certainly will: Robinson's name became shorthand for absurdly complicated machines designed to solve the simplest of problems, from potato peeling and wart removal to pancake making. The novelist Philip Pullman called him 'the immortal contraptioneer'.

Venning's talk traces those rickety, bizarrely elaborate devices, and goes beyond the drawings. He'll cover Robinson's illustrations for Norman Hunter's Professor Branestawm books, the Bletchley Park code-breaking machine named after him in 1943, and the scale model of a gadget-filled house he built for the 1934 Ideal Home Show — a piece of work that later echoed in the contraptions of Wallace and Gromit's The Wrong Trousers.

Venning himself is an art historian whose interests range from late medieval European art to global contemporary art, and he's also a consultant and associate lecturer for the Open University. The session is part of The Arts Society St Albans' regular programme, so it's one of their usual mid-week slots rather than a one-off.

It's on Wednesday 13 January, starting at 10:30am with doors open from 10:00am, at The Abbey Theatre in Westminster Lodge, Holywell Hill, St Albans, AL1 2DL. Tickets are £7.50.