Raymond Briggs Meet the Author


Raymond Briggs

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chance of benefiting from them. We appreciate your time. Thank you for

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coming on. Chris Butler there in Cardiff from the University of

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Oxford. On BBC News now it is time for this week's Meet The Author.

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Raymond Briggs is the man behind The Snowman, Fungus

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the Bogeyman, and an especially grumpy version of Father Christmas.

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Children's classics all, but in works for adults, like

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When the Wind Blows and Ethel and Ernest, he has done more than anyone

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to elevate the strip cartoon to the condition of serious literature.

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For the past few years he has written

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Now those columns have been collected in Notes From The Sofa.

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That is a self-portrait on the front, with the words

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"Oh heck, now they want me to do a drawing for the cover".

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Which pretty much sums up this book's wry humour

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Raymond Briggs, this is a book of entertaining columns,

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aimed at your fellow oldies, about the business of getting old, and it

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manages to be both kind of grumpy and entertaining at the same time.

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What are the positives about getting old?

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You don't care so much about things, if you miss things, or lost

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something, you think, "What the hell?",

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You are not trying to get on in your career any more,

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You just do what the hell you like, and things like this - you could say

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A world class grump likened you to your own Father Christmas character.

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How much of you was there in Father Christmas,

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I think it must be, because it's - I am supposed to be grumpy,

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everyone tells me I am, and Father Christmas is grumpy.

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You would have to be with a job like that.

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Can't imagine a worse job, really, working on your own, really,

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And being a great big fat chap, getting down chimneys,

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You tick off all the characteristics of old age - forgetfulness, the fact

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There is also a lot in here about memories.

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I wonder whether you were going to write an autobiography, or whether

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this was the closest we were going to get to a Raymond Briggs memoir.

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I thought of trying to write a memoir ages

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It takes a long time to write a memoir.

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But you're a man whose commitment to long lasting projects is evident.

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I mean, they are not - it takes a long time to create

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People don't realise, When the Wind Blows,

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which is a well-known one, that took over two years, a full-time work.

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Some magazine, The Times, I think, doing a thing on terrorism,

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said "Can you illustrate this thing like your When the Wind Blows,

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You couldn't even begin it in that time.

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You started as a children's illustrator, and you began creating

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your own books, which were obviously clearly aimed at children.

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I have to keep saying this to people.

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They are not missiles - you just do them

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and then hope somebody else might say, "This is for the 7-10 market",

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Because what is evident is that to begin with, the people who saw

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the books said these are children's books, then you produced a number

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of books - When the Wind Blows, about a nuclear Holocaust, which is

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one, Ethel and Ernest, a sort of

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biography of your own parents, which are manifestly not children's

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You seem in Britain, almost single-handedly to have

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repositioned the graphic novel, as something suddenly that was

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capable of really being quite a sophisticated literary vehicle.

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Were you consciously trying to do that?

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You just do what the form, what the idea you have got dictates,

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and other people, Dan Frankland at Jonathan Cape, who published Ethel

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and Ernest, said this had helped him establish the graphic novel as a

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form, and they have done lots of graphic novels since.

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Because it's always been a degraded form in England,

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any sort of thing with strip cartoons, whereas on the Continent -

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in France you have bandes dessinees, and it is looked upon as the ninth

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art or something, they call it.

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Go into a French book shop, you have theatre, film and strip cartoon.

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In Japan, of course, there are millions of Manga,

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It's only England that has this snobby thing that anything

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resembling strip cartoon is very down market, but that has improved.

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Count the number of knighthoods there are in the theatre

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Then there was Sir David Lowe, real cartoonist, which you wonder whether

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that was given to him to butter up the owner of the paper or something.

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But whether it will come through to strip cartoonists,

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You, I read, have been working for years

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And is that, is that a dry-run for that, will we see that?

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My wife got Parkinson's, which gradually turned into

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dementia, and so that completely mucked up the last several years.

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I have been doing this whopping great book, 107 pages,

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about old age and death, which I was really into, but then you can't do

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Then she went to a care home for 20 months and died, on 3rd October, so

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But does it mean you might return to that project?

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It's some other people, and everything about old age and death.

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Raymond Briggs, thank you very much indeed.

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Hello. By this time tomorrow, our weather will be turning much colder

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from the North. Next week temperatures recover again but not

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to the degree of the mild

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