Backlisted - Fungus The Bogeyman by Raymond Briggs - Revisited

Episode Date: February 7, 2023

In memory of Raymond Briggs we are replaying the episode where John and Andy were joined by author-illustrator Nadia Shireen and writer Andrew Male for a smellybration of Fungus the Bogeyman (1977) by the great Raymond Briggs. The much-loved and bestselling picture book Andrew describes as "the children's Anatomy of Melancholy". We consider Briggs's life and work in full: Father Christmas, The Snowman, When the Wind Blows, Ethel & Ernest and the sepulchral Time For Lights Out (2019), his latest - and perhaps last - book; we also hear several times from the (often very funny) author himself. Also in this episode Andy talks about issues raised by reading Laugh a Defiance, a long out-of-print memoir by campaigner Mary Richardson; while John shares his enthusiasm for Jessica Au's new novel, Cold Enough For Snow (Fitzcarraldo). Timings: (may differ due to variable advert length) 10:12 - Laugh A Defiance by Mary Richardson 17:56 - Cold Enough For Snow by Jessica Au 23:31 - Fungus the Bogeyman by Raymond Briggs * To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops. * For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit backlisted.fm *If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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See in-store for details. Hello, I'm Andy Miller, one of the hosts of Backlisted. Thank you for listening to this episode from our archive. It was recorded in March 2022, just under a year ago. The subject is the classic picture book, Fungus the Bogeyman, by the much-loved writer and illustrator Raymond Briggs. We wanted to share this episode again by way of tribute to Briggs,

who died in August last year at the age of 88. We knew we wanted to make this one when the idea was first suggested to us by our friend Andrew Mayle, who is one of the guests on this episode. I won't spoil the surprise if you haven't heard it before, but Andrew's one-line pitch of the book was so perfect that the whole show proceeded from there beautifully. Our other guest on this one is the children's illustrator Nadia Shireen. Her admiration for Ethel and Ernest, Briggs' graphic memoir of his parents, made me think about that book differently, read it differently,

and in particular appreciate how Briggs have rendered even the brickwork of their little terraced house so carefully and so lovingly. This episode also introduced me to Briggs' Last Testament, an astonishingly brave and moving farewell to all that, entitled Time for Lights Out, which is a wonderful, wonderful book that I commend to you all. And I found listening again to Verity's reading from it at the end of this episode very moving indeed. In retrospect, I am so pleased we made this one when we did. Briggs was both much loved, yet also somehow taken for granted. He was also, as you'll hear from the audio clips, a very honest, lugubrious and above all funny interviewee. And so what I mostly remember from this recording is how much we laughed when we were making it.

It was a truly joyful occasion. If you haven't heard it before, please enjoy, or if you have heard it before, please enjoy again, backlisted episode number 159, our tribute to the life and work of the very great Raymond Briggs. Nadja, where are you calling from in the world? I am calling from Brighton, by the seaside. Yeah. Oh, my goodness. Yeah, why? Why, oh, my goodness.

I was a student in Brighton many years ago. And now a close family member is a student in Brighton. Right. I took him out for drinks at the Basketmakers. Right. I'm still getting to know it. If I look out of my window and really squint i can just about see the sea and that's a really nice thing i sit here days out to sea and miss all my book deadlines ah the best of all possible i've been doing that for years yeah it's great

john you're not calling from your usual Oxfordshire, are you? No, I'm in Stillington in North Yorkshire. I'm looking out. Well, I'm not actually. I've got my back to the Hawardian Hills, which are very beautiful. It's very near Castle Howard. Castle Howard, please. Castle Howard. Sorry, sorry.

I forgot. We've just done South Riding. I'm more or less in South Riding. If South Riding was a real place, this is more or less where it would be. Our magnificent Yorkshire access just won't quit, listeners. Still. Oh, was that meant to be Yorkshire?

Was that Yorkshire? Sorry, I didn't realise. I'm very much afraid it was, yes. Okay, okay. A lot of people write letters in. And Raymond Briggs lives near Brighton, doesn't he? My understanding is he lives in a village called Westmeston, which is probably about a 15-minute drive from where I am.

So after this, I'm going to go round with some capes. Are you? That's very nice of you. Go and tell him we all think he's great. He'll love that. I will, I will. I probably won't get very nice of you. Go and tell him we all think he's great. He'll love that. I will. I will. I probably won't get very close to the front door, but you know.

He was certainly living there in 2015 when we filmed the film that we made for Notes from the Sofa in his amazing ramshackle house. I mean, his most incredible house full of stuff. And full of stuff that you recognize from the books as well which is which is particularly exciting with a view out the window of his studio is the view that you can see in several of the books including i'm somewhat

looking the worst for wearing when the wind blows oh blimey Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast that gives new life to old books. Today, you find us deep underground in a damp and oozy land of muck and grime. We've just put on our deliciously wet and filthy vest and trousers and are pulling on boots full of groom and gleat. We're about to set off through the dimly lit tunnels towards the top to indulge in some half, hopefully involving glyphs, flays, horripilations, and if we're lucky, boils. I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound, the platform where readers crowdfund the books they really want to read. And I'm Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reading Dangerously. And today we're joined by a new guest and an old

favourite, Nadja Shireen and Andrew Mayle. Hello, both of you. Hello, hello, hello. Hello. New guest, Nadja Shireen is a children's book author and illustrator. She mainly works in the picture book format, but has recently moved into making middle grade books, the ones with black and white drawings in. I didn't know what that was. Thank you very much. Yeah. Yeah. I thought I better underline what that was. Thank you. With a new series called Grimwood. She used to work in magazines as a sub-editor, most notably for Smash Hits just before it folded. Yep. True story.

How has your work on Smash Hits influenced your current work? It's influenced it really directly, actually, because I worked on, I was a sub-editor, so I was helping to put together the magazine. So I was learning about image and text and funny captions. And I had an education in kind of on-the-job education in graphic design and editing that it really really has informed how I work yeah on another level just the way that I write and kind of the silly words that I sometimes use one of my picture books is called the bumble bear and there's a page in the bumble bear where a load of bees are surprised at something and they all say what the jiggins and i wasn't sure where i wasn't sure where i got what the jiggins from and then one day i was leafing through a back issue of smash hits as i

want to do of an evening and um and i came and i found i found a feature from like 1986 or 87 and it said what the jiggins is morrissey going on about now? And I thought, oh, there you go. Yeah. Nadja is also a true backlisted friend because she's a massive Pet Shop Boys fan and she lives in Brighton with two indifferent cats. That's what we require from all true backlisted fans. Meanwhile, our old favourite guest who to use the Argo of smash hits

is back, back, back is official friend of the show Andrew Mayle. Hello. Yay. Andrew is making his ninth appearance on Backlisted. Goodness me.

As well as all six of our Halloween episodes, Andrew has previously joined us to talk about Norwood's Oh, goodness me. and writes regularly on music, books, film, art, TV, architecture, clothes, especially hats. He's just making it up now. God bless him. He is the Big Issues hat correspondent. Had no idea. Had no idea that was him.

I'm still waiting for my first column. They haven't got back to me. They promised. Yeah. And he does all those things for Sunday Times Culture and The Guardian. And we're really... It's so nice to see you here in a non-ghoulish capacity. It's vaguely ghoulish, isn't it?

It's not to say that there aren't ghoulish elements to Fungus the Bogeyman. We already know what this year's Halloween choice is going to be. And when we get to it, I'll tell you. You'll see how the choice was between the book we're doing today and the book we're doing in October. It's quite a dramatic difference. Unlikely to be found on the same shelf. Okay, the book we are here to discuss, if you haven't already guessed,

is Fungus the Bogeyman by Raymond Briggs, first published by Hamish Hamilton in 1977. The illustrated story of a working class bogeyman undergoing an existential crisis about exactly what his night job of scaring dry cleaners, that's us humans, is four, became a huge international bestseller, as well as spawning merchandise of all shapes and sizes, of which more later. The book has been adapted for stage and twice for television, including a memorable BBC version in 2004, written by the novelist Mark Haddon, and most recently in a Sky three-parter, starring Timothy Spall, Joe Scanlon, and Victoria Wood in her last television role. But before we sink knee-deep into the mulch and mould of bogeydom, Andy, what have you been reading this week? Thank you very much. I've been reading a book called Laugh of Defiance by Mary Richardson,

which is a memoir that was published in 1953. It's not in print. I had to get it out of the library in order to read it. And the reason I wanted to read it was that it's mentioned by an artist and writer called Tom de Fresten in a new book called Wreck, which is published by Granter this month in March. It's about the painting The Raft of the Medusa by Jericho and various things that come off that painting. And I'm going to talk about it on a future episode of Batlisted.

But in the course of this book, Tom de Freston talks about something that happened on the 10th of March 1914. entered the National Gallery in London, produced an axe from up her sleeve and broke the glass on Velazquez's painting, popularly known as the Rokeby Venus, and slashed it in five places. And she was restrained and arrested immediately, of course. And she issued this statement via the Women's Social and Political Union, the WSPU, which is the suffrage organisation popularly referred to as the suffragettes. She said, I have tried to destroy the picture of the most beautiful woman in mythological history as a protest against the government for destroying Mrs. Pankhurst, who is the most beautiful character

in modern history. So that's what she did. And she caused a sensation. And she caused, amongst other things, single women were barred from being able to go into art galleries for some time after that, because they were all considered suspects. And indeed, it is true that there was a spree of copycats, vandalisms, destructions of artworks following Mary Richardson's lead. Now, this is what she says. She's in the National Gallery. She's trying to find a moment where she can make her protest. I went back to the Venus room. It looked peculiarly empty. There was a ladder lying against one of the walls, left there

by some workmen who had been repairing a skylight. As 12 o'clock struck, one of the detectives rose from his seat and walked out of the room. There were a couple of guards protecting the painting. The second detective, realising I suppose that it was lunchtime and he could relax, sat back, crossed his legs and opened a newspaper. That presented me with my opportunity, which I was quick to seize. The newspaper held before the man's eyes would hide me for a moment. I dashed up to the painting. My first blow with the axe merely broke the protective glass.

But of course it did more than that, for the detective rose with his newspaper still in his hand and walked around the red plush seat staring up at the skylight which was being repaired the sound of the glass breaking also attracted the attention of the attendant at the door who in his frantic efforts to reach me slipped on the highly polished floor and fell face downwards and so i was given time to get in a further four blows with my axe before i was in turn attacked it must all have happened very quickly. But to this day, I can remember distinctly every detail of what happened. Two Baedeker guidebooks, truly aimed by German tourists, came cracking against the back of my neck.

And then she's basically mobbed. A huge pile of people jumps on top of her and the police come and get her. She's taken off to Holloway, where she had been frequently before. I believe she is the suffragette who have been force fed the most times. Oh, my God. She suffered for the cause. Sounds amazing. Right.

Does that sound amazing? So that book was published in 1953, 40 years after the events it describes, 10 years before Mary Richardson's death. And in his book, Tom de Freston discusses what the meaning of that act might be, a protest for women's suffrage, or he tries to reclaim it as an artistic act. What is the meaning of the canvas with the slashes in it? You can see the photographs of it on the National Gallery website and on the internet. But he also says that later in her life, and this is something that is not mentioned by Mary Richardson in her autobiography at all, that in the 1920s, she stood as a Labour Party candidate in a London election. She wasn't elected. And then in 1932, she joined the British Union of Fascists, led by Sir Oswald Mosley.

she joined the British Union of Fascists, led by Sir Oswald Mosley. And she said, quote, I was first attracted to the black shirts because I saw in them the courage, the action, the loyalty, the gift of service and the ability to serve, which I had known in the suffragette movement. OK, so. I read the book and I thought, this is really interesting. If we're talking about who appropriates stories, who owns what story, is this a protest? Is it an artistic protest? Is it a protest against the male gaze? as specifically about, she said later in life, I didn't like men gawping at women's bodies.

She also said there was a financial value to the painting. We never attacked life. We attacked things that had value that would then attract the government's attention. And the book is a really carefully told and excellent, I must say, account of her struggle as a suffragette, her repeated imprisonment under the Cat and Mouse Act, her force feedings culminating in that act.

So the painting is presented to you as the slashing of the painting is presented to you as the inevitable consequence of the psychological and physical torture she underwent. And that struck me as having contemporary relevance

in two ways. First of all, how do we feel when we think about the different meanings that that act could have when we compare it with the toppling of John Cassidy's statue of Edward Colston in Bristol? So it has a real contemporary resonance 100 years later in terms of why people seek to take that kind of action, direct action. So that's the first thing.

The second thing is, in the dangerous 21st century, despite whatever other meaning might be put on it, and despite the meaning that the author herself would like to present to you, it's quite difficult not to read this book as an account or chronicle of someone vulnerable to radicalization by a charismatic leader or leaders either the pankhursts for the good or oswald mosley for the bad she has a particular type of highly wound personality seeking strong leadership where she can get it, and a righteous cause, which history judges one to have been righteous, quite correctly, and the other quite correctly not to have been righteous. But I could almost see this book, I feel quite strongly,

the book ought to be republished with a very careful contextualisation. Yeah. Like a sort of Edwardian Valerie Solonass, isn't it? Yes. It's a totally, totally fascinating book. Anyway, it's called Laugh of Defiance. John, what have you been reading this week? Almost completely by contrast, although there is an overlap

in the bit I'm going to read from this marvellous which i've been reading called cold enough for snow by australian writer jessica ao takes place in an art gallery but there's as you'll see one of the joys of this book is that very little happens in it it's 100 pages long it's ostensibly about a mother and a daughter going on a holiday together to Japan. They go to art galleries, they eat in restaurants, they talk about the past. There isn't much capital P plot to go on. And yet, the word lapidary is perhaps overused about prose, but that's what you've got here. You've got 100 pages of the most beautiful descriptive.

It's a novella. It's one story. It's not really, you know, it's that strange bit where a short story grows into something a little bit bigger. It's not clear by the end of the book, really, whether actually any of it has happened. Is the daughter actually just remembering the mother as a ghost? Are they really on holiday together? Is it all the same narrator all the way through? So I really, really love this. I'm going to read a little bit. I'm not going to say much more about it except to say that the thing that fiction does is open things up. At the point where the book is, you feel the narrator is going to have some profound insight. It flows through her fingers.

But what happens by the end of the book, you find yourself going back and reading and rereading. It's a joy. It came through the post, thanks to Fitzcarraldo. I started reading it and I read 20 pages without being able to put it down. The prose is that good. So I'll read a little bit. This is the narrator and her mother.

Her mother is from Hong Kong, Cantonese, from a Cantonese family. That's kind of important, although you know nothing really else about the narrator other than memories from her childhood. So they're finding a church in a Japanese Tokyo suburb. I had some trouble at first finding the church, but eventually we came across it, a low box-like building in a quiet neighbourhood, and entered. Inside, the walls were made of raw concrete, which absorbed most of the light, making the interior dim and grey. The floor was not flat, but sloped ever so slightly downwards, as if pulling everything towards the simple southern altar. On the wall behind the altar, two great

cuts had been made, one from floor to ceiling and the other horizontally, so that they resembled a giant cross. As we sat, all our attention was focused on this large shape and the brilliant white light that streamed through the gaps in contrast to the subdued atmosphere of the room. The effect was riveting, not unlike staring out at the daylight through the opening of a cave, and perhaps, I said to my mother, this too was what it had felt like to be in the earliest churches when nature itself was still a force in the world, visceral and holy. I said also that the architect had originally intended the cross to be unsealed so that air and weather would have gusted through the openings like the will of God itself.

It was a grey, cold day and we were the only two people in the room. I asked my mother what she believed about the soul and she thought for a moment. Then, looking not at me, but at the hard white light before us, she said that she believed that we were all essentially nothing, just series of sensations and desires, none of it lasting. When she was growing up, she said that she'd never thought of herself in isolation, but rather as inextricably linked to others. Nowadays, she said, people were hungry to know everything, thinking they could understand it all as if enlightenment were just around the corner.

But she said, in fact, there was no control, and understanding would not lessen any pain. The best we could do in this life was to pass through it, like smoke through the branches, suffering until we either reached a state of nothingness or else suffered elsewhere. She spoke about other tenets of goodness and giving, the accumulation of kindness like a trove of wealth. She was looking at me then, and I knew that she wanted me to be with her on this, to follow her, but to my shame I found that I could

not, and worse, that I could not even pretend. Instead, I looked at my watch and said that visiting hours were almost over and that we should probably go. It's just a little snatch of it. It's a beautiful book. Like smoke through the branches. Yeah. That's beautiful.

It kind of never goes anywhere, but then it sort of does in a way that you don't stop thinking about it, which is, I think, honestly, what fiction is good at doing. This is published by? Fitzcarraldo Editions. I'm a big fat one last time, and this is a tiny little one.

$9.99. It's Cold Enough for Snow, Jessica Au. Wherever you're going, you better believe American Express will be right there with you. Heading for adventure? We'll help you breeze through security. Meeting friends a world away? You can use your travel credit.

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And snow. Snowballs and making snowmen. So we're here to talk about Fungus the bogeyman. And Andrew, this was all your idea. And when you pitched it to us, just tell everyone what your one line was. It's the children's anatomy of melancholy yeah job done just say that again for everybody it's the children's anatomy of melancholy that's the cornerstone of this episode i think think that is one of the greatest truths we have ever hit upon

in backlisted history, the children's anatomy of melancholy. That I had not read. John, I don't know how long it is since you read this book. I haven't read it for years. And it was not what I remembered it being at all. No. I read it in the 70s when it came out, when I was a mere strip of a lad myself

and remember enjoying it. And I remember the bogeyman fever that kind of overtook the world. But it's the force of revelation of reading it this time around and realizing that it is a meditation on, it's a proper existential crisis that fungus is having. It's a meditation on the modern world of such beauty and profundity. I'm absolutely amazed I didn't read it again, but I'm really pleased I've had the chance.

Thank you to Nadia and Andrew for giving me the chance to reread it. Amazing. Nadia, I would just like to make the point, Fungus the Bogeyman has all the poos and farts that we would expect to find in much contemporary children's literature, but also massive intellectual content that we perhaps would not find in much contemporary children's literature.

So my memory of it, I don't know what your memory of it is, but my memory of it was that people were scandalised by the rudeness of it, whereas in fact, going back to it, it's just the, as Andrew identifies, the elements like Robert Burton's burton's anatomy of melancholy which seems surprising yeah in a work for children i'm not convinced i actually sat down and read the whole thing when i was a kid i know that i was aware of fungus the bogeyman i'm pretty sure i had like a fungus the bo Bodhi Man stationery set I'm pretty sure you know because the the typeface the fonts you know the hand-drawn Fundus the Bodhi Man writing on the cover that's very familiar to me the character's familiar to me when I was reading the book I was like did I ever

actually sit down and read this because I'm not sure I did yeah yeah yeah if I'm being you know truthful yeah I would say that's probably fairly common you You do get a lot of bogeys and farts and poos in kids' books now. But this was kind of a revolutionary book in that respect. Yeah. Because that hadn't really happened much before this. And, you know, Raymond Bridges had the kind of stature and he could go for it. Also, you've got to remember the number of author-ill illustrators working in the country at that time compared to now radically different there's a huge huge range now of books and authors and

there's something for every taste pretty much but back then it was these giants of these art school giants who'd kind of gone through the art school system at kind of the same stage so you know you've got uh brian wildsmith and then you know raymond bridge various other contemporaries but there were there was quite a small number small in number i was amazed by how dense the text was there's so much text and it's so crammed in sort of book you would dip into as a child I think you would open like a double page spread and then you would kind of lose yourself in it right I mean we we must ask Andrew Andrew you've got your original copy there haven't you when did you when when did you get your copy

in 1977 um my brother bought it for me for my birthday. And it's interesting, kind of, I was having a conversation recently on Twitter, of course, about things that I thought were too young for me in 1977, which included Star Wars. I didn't go to see Star Wars because I was too grown up for Star Wars. And 2008 AD magazine. 2000 AD magazine came out in in 1977 i didn't buy it because it looked silly and i thought i was far too grown up for it however i did not think that i was too grown up for fungus the bogeyman and neither did my brother who bought it for me and i think i actually think 11 is the right age at which to read fungus theus the Bogeyman, because I completely got lost in the text and the denseness of it. And what's interesting about it, I mean, just as an aside, I went back and looked at the TV adaptations.

And the thing that they get wrong about it is that it's noisy. It's got like burps and farts and everything. And the thing that you notice about going back to Fungus the Bogeyman is how quiet and contemplative it is. You know, it's about thought and it's about an immersion in silence. And it was interesting that when John was talking about the plot, you know, you've basically got this kind of discontented working class man railing against the system and pondering the meaning of his existence.

And then his wife tells him not to worry and it'll all be fine and it doesn't really help. And that's the end of it. And you kind of think, well, that's kind of the sort of stories, the books that Briggs was growing up with, the kind of angry young man books by the likes of David Story and Alan Silliton. They're basically this kind of man, working class man,

railing against the system, but he still has his tea on the table when he gets home. It's also the plot of all his other books as well. I mean, they're all Robert Briggs books. Discontent working men who think there must be more to life than this, including, of course, Father Christmas. But one of the interesting things about it, going back to it, is at the time I loved the language and the kind of depth of language.

But realizing now and having the internet and the chance to look it up and realize that he's quoting people like John Milton. I mean, all the poetry and the literature that's quoted in there is people like Thomas Carlyle, John Milton, Edmund Burke. John Donne. And John Donne. And John Donne. And so I'm reading about this stuff. I'm basically kind of reading about Robert Herrick's book,

Hesperides. And that is basically about, it's a picaresque guide to the history and weather and people and customs of the isle. And you realize that he's, that's what Briggs is doing. He's writing his own he's writing the bogey version of Hesperides and all those jokes are in there and it's so rich so Andrew are you saying it's plot driven rather than plot driven oh very good very good um I think we should hear from Raymond Briggs we've got a few bits to hear from Raymond, who is a wonderful...

You know, we've been so lucky this year. Some of the writers we've featured are also brilliant conversationalists, and that's very true of Raymond Briggs. Here he is setting the tone on Desert Island Discs with Ray Plumley in 1983. Raymond, how would you view A Spell as a Robinson Crusoe? Oh, I think I'd look forward to it, really.

I'm fed up with all the things we have to deal with every day, like paperwork and telephones and form-filling. How important is music in your life? Not very much. I'm not a great music fan. I've always found it rather complicated and technical and rather intimidating. Do you have any skill? Do you play any instrument? No, nothing at all, never have.

Do you play music while you're working? No, I listen to Radio 4 more than anything. I play music in the evenings between about six and eight, I think. Mainly cheer-upping sort of music, such as I've chosen. That's the time when you feel you want to be cheered up at the end of the day rather than the beginning. Despite the fact you've done a good day's work. Yes.

Relief of the gloom that descends at that time when the day's all gone badly. I love him. I love Raymond. I love him. And that's the start of the show. They haven't even played a record yet. It's wonderful.

You want to say, Raymond, you do know what this show is about. Yeah. But the thing is, this is classic Raymond Briggs. On that one, on the 1983 one, he plays eight red-hot jazz records in a row. Wonderful, wonderful jazz music. He loved jazz. And then when he comes back in 2005, he chooses a whole different palette of types of music. Totally, totally fascinating. So we talked a bit about how Fungus the Bogeyman

doesn't have a plot. And Nadja, you said you don't think you read it as a child can you remember what's the earliest Raymond Briggs book you can remember or or the presence of Raymond Briggs? I remember well I I came out a year after Fundus the Bodhi Man so maybe my age has something to do with it, so to speak. I remember the snowman kind of being in my childhood. I remember the book and I remember obviously what I think the animation might have been 1980. I'm going to get this wrong. I'm going to guess it's 83-ish, maybe 83, 84, when the snowman animation came out. And it was just a snowman explosion. So that would have been the first time I was aware of him. John, I don't know about you,

my mum wouldn't buy me Father Christmas by Roman Briggs because it was too rude. It was considered too shocking at the time. Yeah. I had to read Father Christmas in the library. I remember getting the snowman, it would have been a year or two years afterwards, being massively disappointed in it.

Right. Because it had no words. It had no text. What is this shit? Oh, no appreciation. No appreciation of the visual narrative, Andrew. Come on, the sequential image. It brought out the Greal Marcus in me.

It was literally I was looking at it going what is this shit and um more more text more dense quoting more misery more existential doubt please yeah I'm always on the back foot with these sorts of things because people assume because I'm a picture book maker they always assume like oh when you were a child did your parents read to you did you have a wealth of picture books in the house and and the truth is no we had no picture books in the house so I don't kind of have the I don't have the well-thumbed kind of sentimental pile of picture books that loads of my contemporaries do but my parents are Pakistani immigrants told me it just wasn't a thing. I don't think that then

is different now. I've got the Hamish Hamilton paperback here. It cost £1.95. And on the back, it doesn't have any blurb. It just has review quotes. It says,

A super book, Daily Mirror. A revolting book, Evening Standard. A very decent book indeed, BBC Kaleidoscope. You need a strong stomach and a quick eye, Sunday Times. Exquisite perversity, Quentin Crisp. Now that's what you want. I want that on all my books.

Yeah, yeah. So here's Raymond Briggs talking again in 1983 about the relationship between writing Fungus the Bogeyman and then The Snowman. Albert Ammons, Boogie Rocks. Raymond, the complaints about Father Christmas on the lavatory were as nothing to the complaints that flowed in about Fungus the Bogeyman. Yes, yes.

Again, the kids didn't complain at all. It's these other peculiar people who find it disgusting and can't see what's behind it. They only see the superficialities, I think. Well, the hideous world of bogeydom, slime, pus, mildew, mold, you name it, it's all there in a rather off shade of green. Yes, but it seems fairly natural to me.

I don't find it horrifying at all. It's all part of everyday life. And I don't know why people object to it so much. Well, the children didn't seem to object, as you say. You sold, what, 50,000 copies in a year? I never know the figures, actually. That's the one I've got. Really? Oh, that's good.

After Fungus the Bogeyman, the horror, you went on to The Snowman, which was really sweetness and light all the way through. Well, that was done in reaction to Fungus. I'd spent two years doing Fungus, all immersed in this snot and slime and muck and everything. I was a bit fed up with it, also with the wordiness of it. And I wanted to do something that was quieter and simpler

with no words and relatively quick to do. And I turned to the snowman as light relief from the bogeyman. Yeah, Andrew. We'll talk about this in a minute. But Nadja, all the interviews that Briggs gives, that persona is brilliant. Because what he always says when he's asked, why did you write your own pitch books? He says, well, I realized that it was, you know, I was being asked to illustrate texts that were terrible.

And I thought, oh, wait a minute. It's much easier to be a writer than an illustrator. I might as well just write my own stuff, which I think is a fascinating, but it's a fascinating bit of blood. I mean, more in terms of Raymond Briggs himself. It's a really interesting persona he puts forward that you'll hear all the way through this that is a brilliant example of someone

pretending to be somebody for the purposes of going out and talking about their work. Completely. Don't you think? I absolutely agree. I wonder, I mean uh i wonder how much of it i'm sure he was quite a grumpy individual in many ways but i wonder how much of that was a a kind of camouflage for shyness social awkwardness and also um it when you when

he talks himself down as a writer i wonder if that's a defense mechanism he is a writer there's no doubt when you're reading his books, you know, the way he uses language, his ear for dialogue. We'll talk later on about Ethel and Ernest, which is, you know, speech bubbles. It's all dialogue, but you don't just toss that off. You know, he's not just plonking words in. But it's interesting, maybe he felt more confident being regarded because he went through art school I think he went to Slade maybe he felt more confident being regarded as an artist and didn't want to be judged as a writer I don't know I'm speculating but that as you say that that kind of mask he puts on that being oh it's just oh I may

as well get paid for the words as well yeah yeah is i think concealing concealing some insecurities maybe he writes so beautifully john could you give us a bit yeah i will and this is there's a thing about him that i never until you were just saying that he was kind of a hero kind of a hero for what we would now call neurodiverse people, quietness, visual, you know, that I think, you know, he was an introvert. He didn't like socializing. He didn't want to be forced into the limelight, didn't want to talk about his work. But I'll just read a little bit about bogey ball because it's one of the best things about sport ever written, I think. Bogey ballers are so wrapped up.

It's a wonder they can move at all. Yet despite this and the layer of filth, they seem to move with an effortless grace and dignity, which makes the fussy scurrying about of surface footballers appear slightly ridiculous. The bogey ball is much larger than a football, being 31 binches in diameter and of an extremely light nature, more like a balloon than a ball.

Bogeymen seem to be entirely lacking in the competitive spirit, for the object of the game is to put the ball into the player's own goal and help the opposing team to put the ball into their goal. The aim is to lose the game, that is, to score the fewest goals. This is quite difficult when the opposing team is helping you to score. Bogeymen are shy, gentle and retiring by nature, so there is no physical contact between them in their games. Should two players accidentally bump into one another,

they will immediately step back and bow formally, emitting a quiet hiss at the same time. In bogeyball, the ball is passed gently from one player to another, more often with the head than the feet. For this reason, bogeyballers wear bogeyball bonnets, which are flat-topped hats designed not to protect their heads, but to protect the ball from damage

by the bogeyman's little horns. Bogeymen never run or hurry, not even in their games, so the match proceeds with an almost dreamlike slow motion. There is no shouting or cheering the crowd expresses its approval with a quiet hissing a goal is greeted with complete silence and stillness many spectators instantly fall asleep the strange and unnerving silence which follows a bogey goal is a memorable event to anyone who has ever experienced it.

That's just beautiful, isn't it? Oh, Nadja, you're right. What brilliant writing. It's brilliant. And what he's done, he does that thing, the inversion thing, which runs through the book. It's just beautifully done there. I think Roman may have the same opinion of football as Andy. I could.

Relatable, Nicky. It's relatable. opinion of football as andy i i could relatable nicky it's relatable um andrew you compared it to the anatomy of melancholy i wonder did you feel going back to it that the depths of the book are you know the surface of it is the rather the love of language and the jokes. But beneath it, there's deep currents of learning and gloom, I suppose I would characterise it. It seemed to me so green and boggy for what's nominally a children's book. One of the lovely things about it is,

in the same way that he presents bogey facts, like there are pages from encyclopedias and it's a question of sort of learning, that that's kind of how it's presented to you, that you are in a process of learning and you're deep within knowledge. And it kind of, mentioning kind kind of when we were saying earlier that he quotes from people like kind of Carlyle and Milton and everything, but not only does he quote from them,

he borrows the structures of a lot of their books, you know, so you can compare it to Burke's philosophical inquiry into the sublime or, you know, you can compare it to Carlyle's Sartre or Rassartus. You know, these are, you know, obviously I didn't pick up on that when I was 11, but, you know, you go back to it now and you can see kind of the erudition and the knowledge and even the, well, you know, kind of,

that was by the time I got, I was 12 by the time I twigged it. But, you know, there's like that lovely passage about the National Bogey Gallery, which you kind of realize is about, it's kind of Briggs writing about Victorian art, you know, and kind of, and a lot of the time you feel that he's kind of, he's writing a kind of history book about, you know, almost like a past age. There's a nostalgia in there and there's a kind of sentimentality, you know, in the sense that he's kind of writing about. Yes, he's writing about bogeydom, but he's also writing about this kind of he's writing with a sense of nostalgia for it, of something that's gone, which is incredibly moving, incredibly beautiful. Yeah. Why don't we we hear so the audio quality on

this isn't very good but it is totally fascinating this is uh raymond briggs talking in 1980 about fungus the bogeyman and the background noise you can hear in the second half is him referring to a filing cabinet you can find this on youtube stuffed with the research for fungus the bogeyman when he opens the drawer it's broken up with dividers saying things like culture and slime and so the reading that has gone into the book is clearly immense having got the character coming into the thing i work with the dictionary a lot because i always work from the words and from the literary side of things and um i spent a long time going through the dictionary making lists of words which either sounded bogeyish or could be turned into bogeyish stuff and um started having to draw stuff because

most of the things you when you publish something only a fraction of what you actually do gets into the book appearance or anatomy what they look like flora and fauna and big section slime or bogey buildings shops clothes and equipment literature all this stuff and the bogey glossary was the main thing list of words which were used listed which didn't get in in the end cupid and blanket and foglet and markender was quite interesting one that's an 18th century word for um handkerchief which is quite a good word because it's where all the muck ends up so muck end is a good word for that. And a huge amount of stuff which doesn't actually get into the book at all,

but helps you to build up the thing in your mind so you can make it a bit more convincing. Fantastic. I mean, I'm sorry about the quality, but that's the best way I could get it. Oh, no, it's brilliant. But totally exactly what we've all been saying, the depth of work that goes into into creating the the world now we asked everybody

to bring um in addition to fungus the bogeyman their favorite uh raymond briggs book and nadia which book did you choose well i've chosen ethelest, which is a long form comic strip. Some people would say graphic novel to make it sound respectable. Whatever you want to call it, graphic novel, long form comic. And it's about his parents, Ethel and Ernest. It spans their relationship from their early courtship, the moment they first meet all the way up to their deaths. It's it's so, so beautiful. And I think for me, it kind of distills my, you know, the things that I love the most about his work. And I respond. I don't know why, but I just respond to his illustration style in this book a lot more than I actually do with Fundus the bogeyman, for example, or the snowman.

There's something about how he observes. There's something about how he observes kind of the fabric of everyday life, the light switches and lampshades, the bricks of the house that he grows up in. of the house that he grows up in. Steve Bell, the garden cartoonist, says one of the great things about Raymond Briggs' work is his ability to draw bricks, tiles and slates. Yes, it is. Because he draws, I am useless at this. I think that's one of the reasons I'm so in awe of him.

I consider myself just this, I am a terrified amateur, but when it comes to buildings and he draws every brick sort of has soul and, and he draws every line and every tile is imbued with feeling and you can, you can feel it and smell it. And it's that, you know, so aside from the story, the kind of narrative and the dialogue dialogue which is fantastic aside from all of that i'm just you know in awe of the drawings um they're just so beautifully perfectly observed you know that he knows this house inside and out yeah yeah and there are some images uh towards the end as his parents are declining in health, which just take your breath away.

Heartbreaking. The kind of raw emotional nakedness of some of the images at the end. You know, I really was having to, you know, have a few deep breaths when you get there because it's so moving. There's something quite Larkin-esque about Ethel and Ernest. Andrew, and also, yeah, that's right, the Larkin-esque, but also you see his parents throughout his work, don't you? Yeah, you do. As we look back on his work.

So this is specifically about his parents, but where else do we find a couple who are like his mother and father? To Andrew. Well, of course, it's in Fungus the Bogeyman as well, isn't it? Yeah, yeah. And in When the Wind Blows as well, of course. And When the Wind Blows. But that thing I wanted to say about the Larkin thing,

it's kind of because of, it's about that eye for detail that Nadia talks about, but it's also about his fascination with the banal and the poetry of the banal. And that's in Fungus the bogeyman, and it's in Ethel and Ernest as well. And just that sense that he finds things of interest in aspects that we would look past. and he looks at the bogey world like that, like, you know, the little, you know, depressions in the earth where the bogeys go to sleep and dream when things get too difficult for them,

which I'm quite envious of. I know, I want one of those. Exactly. But also, you know, he does that with Ethel and Ernest. He says in interviews, you know, there's nothing very much happened in their lives, but that is the point that he's making that you can take a story about two ordinary people and if you've got the right eye

for detail you can find the beauty in it and you can find the poignancy in it here's a little bit of Raymond talking about the influence of his parents on his work and also I just must tell people that in the second half of this clip he's referring to some furniture that he's painted in his own house with a portrait of his mother and father of Ethel and Ernest. I mean the one I like best is my mum and dad one of course Ethel and Ernest. I seem to be obsessed with my parents got 500 photographs of them up on the wall and drawings and things very unhealthy. I do look at it quite often it's the only photographs of them up on the wall and drawings and things. Very unhealthy. I do look at it quite often. It's the only one of my books I ever do look at because it's like a family picture book

in a way. I don't look at the death bits at the end, of course. That's a bit upsetting. This was done when I was filling in time, I think. I waited to hear what they said about Ethel and Ernest when I'd drawn it out in pencil. They were ages looking at it. So I filled in the time, doing this sort of knitting, just doing my parents again. Just to pass the time, really. I never finished it. It's so crude and unfinished and bad in all sorts of ways, but I've ceased to see it now.

I might paint it over soon because it's rather ghastly. It's a bit like those people at Bloomsbury Lock, you know, decorating cupboard doors atrociously. Yes, that's what it is, really. Yet another parental thing. Oh, he's so it is, really. Get another parental thing. Oh, he's so wonderful. How wonderful. So I would like to talk very briefly.

I'd just like to give a shout out to one of his later books, which I found I'd never read before with a prep for this. It's just brilliant. Have any of you read Ugg, Boy Genius of the Stone Age? No. I haven't actually. Oh, it's so funny. It's so funny.

And like the Anatomy of Melancholy, Andrew, it has loads of footnotes in it. Oh, this sounds good. It's all one song, as we're fond of saying on here, but it's the same story again. It's about a Stone Age boy called Ugg who is sensitive and a visionary and has the misfortune to have parents who aren't called Doug and

Doug's. His mom is called Doug's. And he dreams of having trousers that aren't made of stone. That's the plot. Oh. The plot. That we all. He says, these trousers are too small, Dad.

I wish trousers weren't made of stone. They're so uncomfortable I can hardly move. And Doug, his dad, says, they were made for you by me, hand-carved trousers. And Ugg says, why can't trousers be made of something else, something softer? And his father says, why can't trousers be made of something else, something softer? And his father says, softer? Look, there's nothing in the world except mud, bushes and stones. So take your pick. What do you want?

Trousers made of mud? Trousers made of bushes? Listen to me. Nowadays, everything is made of stone. That's why it's called the Stone Age. Brilliant. No spoilers in this, but even by the standards of Raymond Briggs, the ending of this one is absolutely bleak beyond all imagining. I don't want to say what it is because it would spoil the reading,

but it's such a little pathetic drop at the end of the book. They get so close to making soft trousers. That's all I'm going to say. In keeping with so many of Raymond Briggs' books, they have sad endings. And here's a bit of Raymond talking about that now. Your children's books don't always have happy endings, and here's a bit of Raymond talking about that now. Your children's books don't always have happy endings, do they? No, usually sad endings, people tell me.

But most endings are sad anyway. It all ends in death. Snowman melts, and the bear goes back to the Arctic, and everyone dies at the end when the wind blows. Well, quite. But you think that's important? Yes, absolutely. Because that's what we've all got to face. That's the reality.

And Father Christmas, according to you, is a grumpy old wad'sit. Well, it's bound to be. It's only being logical. And we know if you treat it logically, all these things I do, you take something that's fantastical, like a bogeyman, Father Christmas,

and from then on assume that they're real, and from then on treat it completely logically. So Father Christmas gets cheesed off getting dirty and coming down the chimney. Dreadful job. I mean, we know he's old, we know he's fat. Who'd like to climb down one chimney, let alone hundreds? Covered in soot, freezing cold,

on your own. Dreadful, dreadful job. He's bound to be fed up with it. Are you telling me you're a grumpy old man? cold, on your own. Dreadful, dreadful John. He's bound to be fed up with it. Are you telling me you're a grumpy old man? No, no, no. I'm very cheerful and light-hearted. So lovely. I think it's interesting what he says there.

He is truthful. He doesn't shy away from the truth. I mean, you know, even with Fundus the Bodhi Man, you know, Bodhis and all the other unpleasantness that's that's very true that's a true part of being human and he knows that children haven't yet really learned to i think he does i don't think he's that concerned with his audience actually but i think he he recognizes that children also just look at the truth yeah yeah oh we die at the end okay it's like and i i think yeah i think that's exactly right i think i think i think in children's books we i mean i've put death in some of my children's books and it's adults who get upset it's adults

who write angry reviews on amazon about me or who will send in angry emails. It's not children. Adults are closer to death, you see. They're more scared of it. Yeah, yeah. But it's funny because, I mean, the book he wrote, The Man, which feels very much like a kind of reaction to The Snowman, but also a reaction to,

I think also like a reaction to books like the tiger came to tea because it is it's basically about this kind of horrible little homunculus who comes to live with this boy and he's he's an absolute nightmare and he's miserable and he and he just messes everything up and just kind of is a burden to the young boy and and then leaves you know and it's kind of like you think is he writing about you know young people looking after their old parents you know is he kind of is it another reference to Briggs's own life but it's a brilliant way of doing it it basically says you know that these people might come into your life and unlike the snowman which is which is a you know a magical event that else ends in it melting the arrival into your life. And unlike the snowman, which is a magical event

that ends in it melting, the arrival into your life could be an absolute sod. Yeah, they bicker. They spend the whole book bickering. And at the end, he misses him terribly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's just incredible. Surely.

Yes. Yeah, he just kind of creates oh yes fantastic John what book have you brought to us I brought this it's called Notes from the Sofa and it's a collection and this is the book you published right we published this I'm bound published it

he'd apparently heard Dan my partner business partner on the radio, and he said, I hear you're giving publishing a kick up the arse. How can I help? Wow. Dan and James Pembroke from The Oldie and Raymond had a marvellous old school boozy lunch. We had several of those after that.

And it's basically his columns, but it's, you know, the columns are sometimes ranty, but they're very, very funny. And they are, of course, also heartbreaking. I mean, the last column is about the death of his dog.

He writes about the death of his chicken, where he falls in love with this chicken that adopts him. But I just thought there's, I'm not going to read very much, but there's just a brilliant little story in here,

which this is classic Roman Briggs, right? He says, almost half a century ago, I became a friend of the great Kay Webb, founder of Puffin Books, and known affectionately in the trade as Big Fat Puffin. I didn't know that was true, but if Roman's saying it's true. So my wife, Jean, this is great. You know, you talk about those sort of focus pulls he's able to do. My wife, Jean, had died in 1973 and Kay kindly took me under her wing as I had no family,

something you desperately need at such a time. My parents had both died in 1971 and I had no brothers and sisters. Anyway, they go on this mad tour to Norfolk and they end up being locked out of their hotel and they have to sleep in his van, in his car. They go into the reception and say, what the hell was going on? And they say, well, did you not see the signs? The hotel closes at 11.30 PM. And he writes this, whoever heard of a hotel closing at 11.30 PM, it makes you want to bring back hanging. Kay was over 60 at the time and an october night spent virtually outdoors could have had serious consequences for her health

newspaper headlines might have read ronald searles ex-wife frozen in van a 39 year old a 39 year old van driver that's him has been arrested anything for a quiet life in solitary anyway it's it's it's just a lovely lovely collection but he was a total joy to deal with everybody fell in love with him and you know it's it's still in print stills obviously sells really really well it was yeah just one of the great publishing experiences so i hadn't appreciated until we were researching for this, that in fact, basically all the books we think of as Raymond Briggs from Father Christmas onwards from the early 1970s

are in reaction to his personal situation in the early 70s where he lost both parents and his wife in the space of a year. And I think when you know that, and also the fact he was in his late 30s to early 40s, all this huge success that came to him was almost not irrelevant. It clearly made things more comfortable, but secondary to the exploration artistically of what those losses meant to him.

And so before we talk about that and we talk about what will probably be his final book, I think we should hear him talk about his wife, Jean. She has schizophrenia, which is not something that I wish on anybody. Absolute nightmare. But that governed our whole lives, governed her life, of course, and governed mine for many years.

She was constantly in and out of mental hospitals. But you've also said that she was an inspiration as well in her meanderings, as it were, sometimes. Yes, well, they are very inspiring people because they have wild flights of imagination and tremendous enthusiasms and excitement and they're very stimulating to live with, if exhausting. But you have all the bad side of it,

the agoraphobia, claustrophobia, and physical attacks rather like epilepsy to cope with. Lying on the bed and shuddering and screaming. It's all rather alarming, really. The burden was for her more than for me. Mine was just helping to look after and to deal with it. What did she die of in the end? Leukemia.

Had both these things going at the same time, leukaemia and schizophrenia. I wrote a template, a poem about it when she was in hospital. These two things ravaging this person. There we are. Nadia, you were talking about truth. Yeah. It's very hard to listen to that and and not respect his willingness to deal with these dreadful things in his art and in his life it's it's unflinching and yet

unsentimental he refuses to give in to that sentimentality doesn't he i think that's how he honors them whether it's his gene or his parents he honors them by representing them whole completely wholly and speaking about gene completely truthfully i think that's his yeah that's his that's his tribute to them and he would probably disagree with you saying this but in that context it's very easy to look at his books as a kind of therapy isn't it and a kind of a way of working through ideas and thoughts and kind of you know and and they are kind of all they're ruminations on existence aren't they they're and they're about brief lives and they're about people who come to stay and then leave suddenly.

Yeah. Absolutely. I think people working in the field of children's books and picture books, and I'm not comparing everyone to Raymond Briggs, but I do think a lot of that happens in the form. to Raymond Briggs but I do think a lot of that happens in the form I do think any author illustrator worth their salt who means it or cares about the form will put some of their own stuff in there and it it will not be noticed by anyone or you know maybe not even them but it will be in there and certainly for someone of Raymond Briggs's kind of you know, calibre, that's hugely the case. I think he had that thing of, I mean, spending time with him, you know, there was a lot of bravura, but that one skin too few thing. He reminded me in lots of ways of Alan Garner in that respect,

very different kind of work, but they were both, the war, you know, loomed over their lives in such a huge way and you know both of them i suppose you i mean as you say it's not not the way he would have described it but they use their art to cope with the fact that they feel things so deeply that they they have to make it they have to they have to leaven it with humor they have but actually you know as we've said, Raymond's books are not. They're comedy in that sort of Shakespearean,

Beckettian sense. They're not comedy in the kind of slapstick sense at all. I mean, they're very, very deep and quite dark. I agree, Johnny. I mean, for me, going back and revisiting or visiting both those things Raymond Briggs' work for this

for me my understanding of him as an artist in the true sense I don't mean just someone who draws things I mean as an artist you know that someone who draws on in their 40s 50s and the rest of their life the things that matter to them the particular things that Someone who draws on in their 40s, 50s and the rest of their life,

the things that matter to them, the particular things that matter to them, they come back to them again and again to present universal ways of looking at them. And that's what art is, it seems to me. How moving is that final hug in Fungus? The slimy hug in that, I hug, where it's about love. She's loving him through his existential doubt. It's beautiful. Could we talk a little bit before we go about his most recent and what will probably be his final book?

This was published in 2019 by Jonathan Cape. It's called Time for Lights Out I didn't really know about this book and I read it for Backlisted and I think everyone else did didn't they I think we all kind of we did

as much as like a bear I was absolutely blown away by this this seems to me to be a fantastic example of a forgotten book published in 2019 and weirdly what we're here for to draw people's attention to i mean you probably know fungus the bogeyman listeners and you probably don't know time for lights out but it's the it's the product of 20 years work it's the book briggs said he was writing for years about old age. And it is the, I,

I can't find the vocabulary. I've never read a book like it. There you go. I've never read a book like time for lights out. What did, what did everybody else think of it? I thought it was incredible. And the thing that struck me immediately is how similar to fungus.

The bogeyman is, is and a lot of his books but finally he is writing about himself he is you know so he is finally the character at the center of the book it's no longer he's no longer using father christmas or fungus the bogeyman it is about raymond briggs but it's following the same same path. It's that it addresses all those things like a quest for meaning. You see parallels in the way that kind of he is someone who kind of thinks about poetry and prose and kind of and is incredibly learned, but is constantly confronting the questions that other people don't so like fungus is is asking what is the point why are we here and and and you know and mildew and and his pals down the pub don't want to address it and right up until the present day he is you know he is on that final path that he talks about

and he's asking those questions that even people at his age would would not dare ask about their own existence now what about the way the the art and the the text interact in this book well i mean that's what i was going to say is that i find that fascinating that you know the the the artwork is black and white pencil scattered throughout the book. It's not necessarily, it's not particularly consistent. Occasionally there'll be a comic strip. Sometimes there'll just be some scrawled quick drawings that he's just, you know, sort of some light sketches.

But I think that kind of speaks to what Andrew was just saying. He's stripped away the need to have the kind of world building of fundus the bogeyman where these themes are weaved beautifully within this colorful sludgy but still colorful uh comic that is really stripped away and everything is just the information is being laid down as he needs you know almost i know it took 20 years but it feels quite quick yeah almost like he's just trying to get everything down what he really feels about every interaction whether

it's a passage about his dad dying he wants to he takes us there exactly to the bedside and you know all his thoughts like get on with it dad and then he got on with it so he's getting rid of anything extraneous and getting it all down. But at the same time, that light pencil gives you the feeling that it could all just blow away. That there's a real sense of... Impermanent. There's a real sense of impermanence about it.

That we are at the end and it's only just staying on the page and it's utterly delicate. Amazing, amazing book. I just want to read one poem from it which seems like raymond briggs wrote as an epitaph talking about the house that he lived in that we've talked about talking about maybe the attic that we heard david bowie at the beginning in with a reminiscing about the snowman this is a poem from Time for Lights Out called Future Ghosts. Looking round this house, what will they say, the future ghosts? There must have been some balmy old bloke here,

long-haired, artsy-fartsy type, did pictures for kiddie books or some such tripe. You should have seen the stuff he stuck up in that attic. Snowman this and snowman that, tons and tons of tat. Three skips it took and a whopping bonfire out the back. Thank God it's gone. And he's gone too. He must have been a nutter through and through. And if that's not bravery, listeners, I don't know what is.

I'm afraid it's now time for our lights out. Large and moist thanks to Andrew and Nadia for reminding us of the melancholy wit of Raymond Briggs. To Nicky Birch for producing a bogey-friendly hiss of a show and to Unbound for the supplies of Soggies and Kluwaka Cola. You can download all 157 previous episodes

plus follow links, clips and suggestions for further easing by visiting our website, backlisted.fm. We're always pleased if you contact us on Twitter and Facebook and now in sound and pictures on Instagram too. You can also show your love directly by supporting our Patreon at www.patreon.com forward slash backlisted. We aim to survive without paid for advertising and your generosity helps us do that. We aim to survive without paid-for advertising, and your generosity helps us do that. All patrons get to hear backlisted episodes early. And for little more than the price of two pots of green slime at the King Orgeus,

lot listeners get two extra lot-listed a month. Our own public liberality, where we three give vent to our libidinous natures and discuss the dross we've heard, watched, and read in the previous fortnight. Oh, dear. A lot of listeners also get to hear their names read out on the show as a mark of our thanks and appreciation. This week's Batch Roll Call is Yasmin Awad, Stuart Galloway-Walker

and Charlotte Gieta. Thank you all for your generosity. All our patrons are heartfelt thanks. Thank you so much. Enabling us to continue what we do and love and enjoy. Nadja Shireen, is there anything you would like to add about Raymond Briggs that we have yet to say? Any last message for our listeners?

Oh, well, do you know a nice thing that happened? I had this huge pile of Raymond Briggs books in my living room and my eight-year-old, actually nine-year-old, wandered past and went raymond briggs blooming christmas and wandered off brilliant so i was really heartened by that it continues it the power continues very good wonderful andrew if and really only our longest term listeners will understand why i'm asking you this but But if Fungus the Bogeyman were a Gene Kelly film, which Gene Kelly film would it be?

You won't be surprised to hear that I had to dig quite deep for this one. But in 1962, Gene Kelly directed a film called Gijo, in which Jackie Gleason plays a giant, unwashed, sentimental mute who travels the foul-smelling back streets of Paris and tries to explain concepts like death, religion and war to a small, questioning child. Brilliant. Brilliant. Nicky, can we drop in the end of the 1812 Overture

to salute Andrew's achievement there Magnificent Andrew Listen thanks very much everybody We're going to leave you with A tribute that I think Raymond would hate Which has been Recorded by

Our dear friend Verity McCormack Who is 8 years old And you'll recognise the poem Recorded by our dear friend, Verity McCormack, who is eight years old, and you'll recognise the poem. So thanks very much, Nadja, Andrew. This has been wonderful. Brilliant. Thank you, guys. Thank you so much for giving us this opportunity.

Bye-bye, Driers. Bye-bye, Driers. Future ghosts. Looking round this house, what will they say, the future ghosts? There must have been some barnyard bloke here. Long-haired, artsy-fartsy type. Did pictures for kiddie books or some such tripe? artsy type, did pictures for kiddie books or some such tripe.

You should have seen the stuff he stuck up in that attic. Snowman this, snowman that, tons and tons and tons of tat. Three skips it took and a whopping bonfire out the back. Thank God it's gone, and he's gone too. He must have been a real mutter through and through. Do you like children? Well, not a whole mess. I mean, occasionally you come across kids who are nice and you get on with them as individuals. As a species I suppose I don't really.