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chance of benefiting from them. We appreciate your time. Thank you for | :00:00. | :00:00. | |
coming on. Chris Butler there in Cardiff from the University of | :00:00. | :00:07. | |
Oxford. On BBC News now it is time for this week's Meet The Author. | :00:08. | :00:12. | |
Raymond Briggs is the man behind The Snowman, Fungus | :00:13. | :00:14. | |
the Bogeyman, and an especially grumpy version of Father Christmas. | :00:15. | :00:17. | |
Children's classics all, but in works for adults, like | :00:18. | :00:19. | |
When the Wind Blows and Ethel and Ernest, he has done more than anyone | :00:20. | :00:22. | |
to elevate the strip cartoon to the condition of serious literature. | :00:23. | :00:25. | |
For the past few years he has written | :00:26. | :00:27. | |
Now those columns have been collected in Notes From The Sofa. | :00:28. | :00:31. | |
That is a self-portrait on the front, with the words | :00:32. | :00:33. | |
"Oh heck, now they want me to do a drawing for the cover". | :00:34. | :00:36. | |
Which pretty much sums up this book's wry humour | :00:37. | :00:39. | |
Raymond Briggs, this is a book of entertaining columns, | :00:40. | :00:56. | |
aimed at your fellow oldies, about the business of getting old, and it | :00:57. | :00:59. | |
manages to be both kind of grumpy and entertaining at the same time. | :01:00. | :01:02. | |
What are the positives about getting old? | :01:03. | :01:04. | |
You don't care so much about things, if you miss things, or lost | :01:05. | :01:07. | |
something, you think, "What the hell?", | :01:08. | :01:08. | |
You are not trying to get on in your career any more, | :01:09. | :01:29. | |
You just do what the hell you like, and things like this - you could say | :01:30. | :01:35. | |
A world class grump likened you to your own Father Christmas character. | :01:36. | :01:51. | |
How much of you was there in Father Christmas, | :01:52. | :01:53. | |
I think it must be, because it's - I am supposed to be grumpy, | :01:54. | :01:59. | |
everyone tells me I am, and Father Christmas is grumpy. | :02:00. | :02:04. | |
You would have to be with a job like that. | :02:05. | :02:07. | |
Can't imagine a worse job, really, working on your own, really, | :02:08. | :02:09. | |
And being a great big fat chap, getting down chimneys, | :02:10. | :02:15. | |
You tick off all the characteristics of old age - forgetfulness, the fact | :02:16. | :02:31. | |
There is also a lot in here about memories. | :02:32. | :02:47. | |
I wonder whether you were going to write an autobiography, or whether | :02:48. | :02:49. | |
this was the closest we were going to get to a Raymond Briggs memoir. | :02:50. | :02:53. | |
I thought of trying to write a memoir ages | :02:54. | :02:55. | |
It takes a long time to write a memoir. | :02:56. | :03:01. | |
But you're a man whose commitment to long lasting projects is evident. | :03:02. | :03:04. | |
I mean, they are not - it takes a long time to create | :03:05. | :03:07. | |
People don't realise, When the Wind Blows, | :03:08. | :03:16. | |
which is a well-known one, that took over two years, a full-time work. | :03:17. | :03:19. | |
Some magazine, The Times, I think, doing a thing on terrorism, | :03:20. | :03:26. | |
said "Can you illustrate this thing like your When the Wind Blows, | :03:27. | :03:29. | |
You couldn't even begin it in that time. | :03:30. | :03:38. | |
You started as a children's illustrator, and you began creating | :03:39. | :03:40. | |
your own books, which were obviously clearly aimed at children. | :03:41. | :03:43. | |
I have to keep saying this to people. | :03:44. | :03:47. | |
They are not missiles - you just do them | :03:48. | :03:54. | |
and then hope somebody else might say, "This is for the 7-10 market", | :03:55. | :03:57. | |
Because what is evident is that to begin with, the people who saw | :03:58. | :04:05. | |
the books said these are children's books, then you produced a number | :04:06. | :04:11. | |
of books - When the Wind Blows, about a nuclear Holocaust, which is | :04:12. | :04:15. | |
one, Ethel and Ernest, a sort of | :04:16. | :04:16. | |
biography of your own parents, which are manifestly not children's | :04:17. | :04:21. | |
You seem in Britain, almost single-handedly to have | :04:22. | :04:25. | |
repositioned the graphic novel, as something suddenly that was | :04:26. | :04:32. | |
capable of really being quite a sophisticated literary vehicle. | :04:33. | :04:34. | |
Were you consciously trying to do that? | :04:35. | :04:37. | |
You just do what the form, what the idea you have got dictates, | :04:38. | :04:41. | |
and other people, Dan Frankland at Jonathan Cape, who published Ethel | :04:42. | :04:44. | |
and Ernest, said this had helped him establish the graphic novel as a | :04:45. | :04:47. | |
form, and they have done lots of graphic novels since. | :04:48. | :04:50. | |
Because it's always been a degraded form in England, | :04:51. | :05:01. | |
any sort of thing with strip cartoons, whereas on the Continent - | :05:02. | :05:09. | |
in France you have bandes dessinees, and it is looked upon as the ninth | :05:10. | :05:13. | |
art or something, they call it. | :05:14. | :05:14. | |
Go into a French book shop, you have theatre, film and strip cartoon. | :05:15. | :05:17. | |
In Japan, of course, there are millions of Manga, | :05:18. | :05:19. | |
It's only England that has this snobby thing that anything | :05:20. | :05:29. | |
resembling strip cartoon is very down market, but that has improved. | :05:30. | :05:33. | |
Count the number of knighthoods there are in the theatre | :05:34. | :05:34. | |
Then there was Sir David Lowe, real cartoonist, which you wonder whether | :05:35. | :05:41. | |
that was given to him to butter up the owner of the paper or something. | :05:42. | :05:52. | |
But whether it will come through to strip cartoonists, | :05:53. | :05:54. | |
You, I read, have been working for years | :05:55. | :06:15. | |
And is that, is that a dry-run for that, will we see that? | :06:16. | :06:20. | |
My wife got Parkinson's, which gradually turned into | :06:21. | :06:24. | |
dementia, and so that completely mucked up the last several years. | :06:25. | :06:31. | |
I have been doing this whopping great book, 107 pages, | :06:32. | :06:33. | |
about old age and death, which I was really into, but then you can't do | :06:34. | :06:37. | |
Then she went to a care home for 20 months and died, on 3rd October, so | :06:38. | :06:49. | |
But does it mean you might return to that project? | :06:50. | :06:59. | |
It's some other people, and everything about old age and death. | :07:00. | :07:11. | |
Raymond Briggs, thank you very much indeed. | :07:12. | :07:18. | |
Hello. By this time tomorrow, our weather will be turning much colder | :07:19. | :07:32. | |
from the North. Next week temperatures recover again but not | :07:33. | :07:35. | |
to the degree of the mild | :07:36. | :07:36. |