This Christmas you can snuggle down in the warm and enjoy a very special event – the premiere of a new Mouse and Mole animated film on the BBC!
It’s called, simply, Mouse & Mole at Christmas Time, and features one of dear old Richard Briers’ final recorded performances as Mouse. He is joined by Alan Bennett and Imelda Staunton, no less, who between them voice many other characters.
The story is by the original author, Joyce Dunbar, and was in fact written many years ago, when the original television series was created from the books that she wrote, and which I illustrated. It has taken around 15 years to get this new film made… Happily, producer Joy Whitby of Grasshopper Productions (and creator of Jackanory) never gave up on Mouse and Mole.
The film is scheduled for Monday December 16th at 4.45 and will be shown on the CBeebies channel. A repeat showing is scheduled for Boxing Day on BBC 1 at 9.25 am.
The animation is remarkably close to the original illustrations and I hope will bring festive cheer to all! A great way to begin the Christmas celebrations!
You can read more about the production on the BBC website here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/latestnews/2013/mouse-and-mole-xmas.html
And you can read about when I met Richard Briers here:
And now I thought I’d post a little piece about how I came to be commissioned to illustrate these enchanting stories…
Many, many years ago, more than I care to remember, I visited Joyce Dunbar at her Norfolk home. We’d done a book together (Five Mice and the Moon) and had kept in touch. She told me she was having trouble finding an illustrator for some stories she’d written. Almost as an after-thought she gave me the manuscript to read on the train home. At once I began drawing… and drawing… and drawing! The characters leapt off the page and into my sketchbook, and were unusually easy to imagine and create. And I filled their world with so many details and all the paraphernalia of my own life. Illustratively speaking these are semi-auto-biographical and I remain hugely proud of these loveable creatures into whom I put so much of my personality.
Everyone loved the drawings and I got the job, and a series of four books followed. Sadly now out of print, I still get asked about these books. They’ve been much imitated; there is even a very cheeky American series called Mouse and Mole by a certain Wong Herbert Lee – a blatant rip-off but entirely lacking the charm and heartfelt storytelling of the original. So I am very happy that at least the films, if not the books, are being revived.
Here are some of those very early sketches… it’s been such a joy to look at these again. It’s made me want to return to using scratchy old pen and ink again!
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