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