Raymond Briggs

Raymond Briggs0:00

Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Disc's Archive. For rights' reasons we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen eighty three, and the presenter was Roy Plumley.

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Our castaway this week is the artist, writer and cartoonist Raymond Briggs.

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Raymond, how would you view a spell as a Robinson Crusoe? Oh, I think I'd look forward to it, really. I'm

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It 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 uh

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technical and rather intimidating. Do you have any skill? Do you play any instrument?

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No, nothing at all, never have. Do you play music while you're working? No, I listen to radio four more than anything. I play music in the evenings between about six and eight, I think.

Raymond Briggs1:08

I play

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Mainly uh 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.

Raymond Briggs1:21

Yeah, fun.

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relief of the gloom that descends at that time when the day is all gone badly.

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Right, what's the first record you've chosen to relieve the gloom? Oh, this is Charlie Mingus' thing called Better Get It in Your Soul.

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That's full of drive and energy and enough to wake anyone up, I think.

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Better Get It In Your Soul by Charles Mingus and his Bam

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You're a Londoner, aren't you, Raymond? Yes, Wimbledon, just in Surrey, really, but it counts as London. One of a large family? No, I was only a child.

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Any family tradition in the arts? No, nothing at all. My dad was a milkmiller. My mum was a.

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Clerk in the war and a housewife the rest of the time. Were you a bookish boy? Did you buy a lot of books? Did you scrounge a lot of books? No, I didn't like books much as a child. I came to books and things very late when I was a student. I always rather despised booky things when I was young, and thought that it was only weeds that went in for books.

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But I've grown out of that since, I think. You decided quite early that you wanted to be a cartoonist.

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Yes, that was quite early, about twelve or thirteen.

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Uh I don't know why, I just was interested in the humour and the drawing side of it and went to art school originally with the idea of becoming a cartoonist. Were you influenced by comics? Not consciously, I was more interested in the kind of punch cartooning and the single one-off cartoons rather than strip at that stage. Had you had any art lessons at school? Yes, we did art at school and I then decided to go to the art school.

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You went to Wimbledon Art School? That's right, yes. Is there a cartooning course there? No, no, very much the opposite. We were all trained to be uh

Raymond Briggs3:55

Let's try.

Raymond Briggs3:56

Okay.

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Very much Renaissance style painters, all the um

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People who went there were rather discouraged from taking up any sort of commercial art, let alone cartooning. When I went there for the interview, the principal said to me, Why do you want to come here? and I said, Well, I want to come to art school to learn how to draw in order to become a cartoonist and he said, Good God, boy, is that all you want to do?

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So that idea was smashed right at the beginning.

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And I spent the next four years um trying to be a painter without much success. And then you had to do your national service. What did you opt to do? Well, you didn't have much option. You were put in the uh

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army and the signals, and I went to Catrick for two years, which was marvellous in a way, because we were up on the Yorkshire Moors and there was all the wonderful country round about, like Swaledale and Wensleydale.

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And I used to go out every weekend camping, making little shelters which would come in handy on this desert island thing. Oh, yes, indeed.

Raymond Briggs4:55

I guess it's.

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What sort of signalling were you doing? Mostly radio stuff, was it? No, I was a draftsman, really. It's the lowest class trade there is. If you're really hopeless in the signals, they make you a G D or a draftsman. G D's general duties. And the other lowest class trade there is is a draftsman, which is what we're doing. Yes, electric circuits and signs saying ladies and gents and things like that.

Raymond Briggs5:13

What do you draw?

Raymond Briggs5:15

Yeah, yeah.

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Did you find your skill as an artist helped you in service life? Were you sort of providing the the camp newspaper or anything of that sort? No, I didn't do anything practical. It's best to keep your talents of that sort of thing quiet in the army, because as you say, you'd be roped in for doing all these unofficial jobs, and it's boring enough doing the official jobs without doing the unofficial ones.

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Well, you did two years in the army. Then you did two years at the Slade.

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Well, that was a very prestigious what is a very prestigious College of Art. Yes, it was too prestigious for me. I I was a like a fish out of water there, because there were such sophisticated painters there, really good people.

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And I realized all the stuff I'd been doing at Wimbledon was really uh

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illustration in frames, really, and not painting at all.

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and I hadn't begun to understand what modern painting was about, and when I did begin to understand what it was about, I realized that uh

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I was not a painter by any stretch of the imagination.

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So did you finish your course at the Slade or did you leave early? Oh no, I finished it'cause it's only two years. Yes. And I spent the last term or two trying to do commercial art illustration on my own.

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and going round to publishers to get work,'cause I was worried stiff about how I was going to earn a living.

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And I was getting commissioned work before I left, actually.

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Well, let's talk about that in more detail in a minute. Let's have um another record. Oh, this is um Duke Ellington and Johnny Hodges called uh Big Fat Alice's Blues.

Speaker 37:01

Yeah.

Raymond Briggs7:31

Bun dun dun dun

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Big Fat Alice's Blues by Duke Ellington and his orchestra featuring Johnny Hodges.

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So you came out of the Slade out into the world. You tried portrait painting for a while, didn't you? Yes, I did a portrait of the model at the Slade, and she uh liked it a lot and offered to buy it.

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And I thought, oh, that's a way of earning a living, so I did some pictures and put them in for the Royal Society of Portrait Painters and got a couple in.

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and sat back and waited for all the commissions to roll in from the aristocracy.

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And nothing happened at all, so that was abandoned again, so the cartooning smashed, portrait painting failed, painting failed.

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So it was getting narrower all the time. So you were going round trying to get cartooning jobs and uh illustration jobs. What was the first one you were given as a full-time artist? Do you remember your first job commission? Yes, that was Thing for House and Garden, a magazine. It was called How Deep to Plant Your Bulbs.

Raymond Briggs8:41

Oh yes, Commission.

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And it was a little diagram about two inches deep and about six inches wide with five horizontal white lines and tulip bulbs and daffodil bulbs at various depths. And I got uh eight guineas for that, which was really good money in those days. You were doing advertising too? Yes, I did some advertising. I did a thing for the Breed Paper Group all about paper pipes underground. They use paper pipes for sewage and uh

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other paper use as corrugated cardboard and magazines and things.

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That was an incredibly disastrous, boring job. It was never printed, actually. Took me nearly two years to do. Really? Two years? Well, I didn't work on it for two years, but it it went on for two years intermittently, and then nothing came of it.

Raymond Briggs9:26

No nothing.

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What about the illustrating? That was, what, children's books? Yes, I did work in all fields for a while, newspapers and magazines and uh

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advertising, and gradually found I was getting more and more children's books. Mhm. And then I found that I preferred that, because although it was the least well paid, it was much the most interesting subject matter.

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And you also had a steady part-time job teaching? Oh yes, that started a bit later, yes. That that

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Uh safety from starvation at the time.

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And that's been going on ever since, yes, part time teaching. That's at Brighton School of Art. That's a good thing, isn't it? Because it gets you out of your studio. You're talking to other artists or embryo artists. Yes, it d I think you'd go mad if you're at home all day on your own seven days a week. I think that would be a recipe for disaster. I think getting out of the house to

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Meet these terrible people at the art school probably will keep you sane.

Raymond Briggs10:23

What keeps you saying?

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They can't all be Jesus.

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No, some of them are all right now and again.

Raymond Briggs10:30

And again

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Right, record number where have we got to? Number three. Oh, that's uh Hong Kong Blues Hoagie Carmichael, which is about the first record I was ever aware of as a kid, about ten years old, I think.

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That's the story of a very unfortunate couple, a man, who got arrested down in old Hong Kong.

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He got twenty years privilege taken away from him when he kicked old Buddha's gone.

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Hoagy Carmichael singing and playing the piano, his own tune Hong Kong Blues, and the drummer was the great Spike Jones.

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So you were illustrating children's books good ones and bad ones, I suppose? Yes, some were terribly bad, and that's what made me start writing my own, because I thought that some of the texts were so appalling I

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I could do better myself.

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And of course illustrating is a fee earning job. I believe I'm right in saying that an illustrator doesn't get a royalty. Yes, that was another encouragement, because um illustration for Chorden's books is very badly paid. It's a lump sum, as you say, and uh

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If you write your own, and i illustrate your own, you do get a royalty witch shrum.

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Can be quite well paid if the book sells well. How many books had you worked on just as an illustrator? Oh, golly, at that time I don't know, I'd done about um between fifty and a hundred now, I suppose.

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What was the first one you wrote yourself?

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Oh, that was uh called The Strange House, which is a just a little story book that's uh

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Still around. It's been around for about twenty years, I think. Which took longer, writing the story or doing the illustration? Oh, illustration's much longer. It's one of my big bees in my bonnet. The thing about the length of time illustration takes that people don't always realize, and that you can write something so much more quickly.

Raymond Briggs12:25

Yeah.

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and uh you don't need half the research for it that you do for illustration. You can just say, such as in a book I did about uh the climbing of Everest, and the author just says Hilary thawed out his boots over the stove in the morning.

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And that's all he has to say. But if you're going to illustrate that, you've got to know what Hilary looks like, what the tent is like, what sort of boots they were, what the stove was like. An enormous amount of research. It can take you three or four days just to find that out before you even start. How do you do that? Do you go round the libraries or do you keep great files of references yourself? Well, both. I have lots of books and things, more than files, but uh it usually means going to libraries and

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picture libraries and so on to find all that stuff out.

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So after your first book you went ahead with some more.

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Well, when I first started writing I got the first one accepted incredibly easily and I thought well if it's this easy

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I'm going to stick to writing because it's uh quicker, easier.

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and you get paid royalties and uh I'll switch to writing. But then I discovered that masses of people are doing writing.

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And for everyone who can illustrate well enough to get into print, there's about twenty people who can write well enough to get into print. But few who can do both. Oh yes, that's another point, yes, few who can do both. But because there's so many people doing it, it's very difficult to make any sort of impression. You hit a jackpot with the Mother Goose Treasury. Oh yes, that's well I did three picture books before that on nursery rhymes and the American editor thought that uh it was time there was a huge

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Biggest ever.

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Nasty rhyme book.

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And uh they commissioned this idea.

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about nine hundred or eight hundred pictures in it. Was this all new stuff or could you incorporate the preceding books? Oh no, I did all the new illustrations for it. Very quick things. You had to do them fairly quick rough things for a book that size. It took about eighteen months to do and

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Nearly drove me Barmy at the time. But that had a very big sale. Hm, yes, that's gone on since nineteen sixty six. It's still selling now? I think so, yes, yes.

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Oh, that's fun.

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Record number four. This is a drum solo by Joe Morello with Dave Brubeck.

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Call far more drums.

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Far more drums. Joe Morello with Dave Brubeck at the piano.

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Raymond, what was the first comic strip style book that you did?

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Oh, that was Father Christmas in nineteen seventy three. I got uh stuck into the strip cartoon thing, not because I wanted to do it, but because I found I'd got more pictures to do than there was space for, and people don't always realize that you've

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Only got thirty two pages in a picture book.

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and I had a lot more ideas than thirty-two.

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So I was forced to get about ten pictures per page, and was more or less forced into doing a strip cartoon, and I've been stuck with that method ever since, which is very laborious, and

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It's very pleasant to look at, all in colour, of course. Yes, yeah, it's full colour throughout. How many drawings roughly in Father Christmas? Oh, about a hundred and fifty, I think.

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Not sure. And your Father Christmas wasn't at all a a traditional sort of Father Christmas.

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No, he was treated realistically. It seemed to me that uh it was a very grim, depressing sort of job.

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grabbing up and down chimneys and going out on your own.

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In the cold at night, night work.

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rather, cross between a milkman and a postman and a chimney sweep.

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A lousy sort of job, and I wanted to show the realism of it, and the fact that he also is supposed to be a an old man, so he's probably rather fed up with doing it by the time he's the age he is. So I treated it that way fairly realistically. A rather bad tempered old gentleman.

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There was a bit of a fuss because in one drawing you depicted Father Christmas sitting on the lavatory. Yeah, some people didn't like that. A Baptist minister's wife in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, wrote me a letter about it, saying that she was horrified to see uh Santa Claus performing an act of personal hygiene, which was..

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Quite funny. I've still got the letter on the wall at home now. But this was a children's book. Did you get any complaints from children? Oh no, not from children. It's from the occasional parents and adults. The kids all always write in and say that they love that particular bit, that's their favourite picture. And it's these funny people who object to it, headmasters and things. One headmaster wrote a Penguin complaining about books, not just mine, but some others as well.

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And he ended up his letter saying, As for the other two, which were my two Father Christmas books, as for the other two, they're not books at all, but they're mere strip cartoons.

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Which says a lot for what sort of um

Raymond Briggs18:32

Says a lot for what sort of

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Cartoon Books in England. You talked about your two Father Christmas books. You did a sequel. Yes, it was Father Christmas Goes on Holiday, yeah. He seemed better tempered in that one, perhaps'cause he was on holiday. Got away from the ghastly job, yes.

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How do you work, Rim? At regular hours do you start at a certain hour in the morning and plough through, or what?

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Well, I try and do it all the time, really, because I find there's so many interruptions with one thing and another, like haircuts and going to the bank and

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going up to London and what not, that, um, unless you're trying to do it almost continuously, you don't even get eight hours a day in, really. So I'm work all the time when I can.

Raymond Briggs19:10

Really?

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On the comic strip books, you write the story first, I presume, and get the whole thing roughed out. Yes, it's very much like writing a film script, really. I think that's why some of these books go so well into film, because it's very much the same as writing a film script, really. And once it's done, you've got a ready-made storyboard, and filmmakers like it because the film's virtually planned out for them.

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Record number five.

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Oh, that's uh Albert Hammonds. Uh must have a bit of boogie woogie. It's called Boogie Rocks.

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Albert Ammonds, Boogie Rocks.

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Raymond, the complaints about Father Christmas on the lavatory were as nothing to the complaints that flowed in about Fungus the Bogeyman. Yes, yes. Um again, the kids didn't complain at all. It's um these are the peculiar people who uh 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, mould, you name it, it's all there in in a rather off shade of green. Yes, but uh it seems fairly natural to me. I don't find it uh horrifying at all. It's all part of everyday life.

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And I don't know why people object to it so much. Well, the children didn't seem to.

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Object, as you say. You sold, what, fifty thousand copies in a year? I never know the figures, actually. No, I don't know what I've got. Really? Oh, that's good.

Raymond Briggs21:37

That's the one I've got.

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Raymond, you have no children of your own? No, no, none at all. You are a widower, in fact. Yes, yes. Do you like children?

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Well, not uh

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Oh, mess at uh book signings and things. I I can't generalize about it really. I mean, it there's individual ones you come across that you like.

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Uh as a species, I suppose I don't really. I'm not drawn to them in the way some people feel drawn to be a teacher or anything. I rather prefer to keep away. I mean oca occasionally you come across kids who are

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are nice and you get on with them as individuals.

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Have you any child friends whom you consult about their tastes?

Raymond Briggs22:14

Yeah.

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Yeah, I've got some child friends. Well they're growing up now. Two uh kids I happen to know.

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But I don't really consult them. I don't think doing market research for this kind of work would be any good, though conversations with this lad that I know when he was about ten did give birth to um

Raymond Briggs22:29

There

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An idea for Gentleman Jim, a book I did, because I was talking to him about what he wanted to be when he grew up.

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and he was saying at the time he was ten

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that he wanted to live in the wood and catch rabbits and live in a cave and not go to work. And I was rather stupidly pointing out that you can't live outdoors any more, you can't

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trespass in people's woods, and there's laws about vagrancy and so on.

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And this made me start thinking that there's not much you can do without coming up against the law or education or something.

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stopping you doing it and that gave me the idea for that book.

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After Fungus the Bogeyman, the horror, he 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.

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And I turned to the snowman as light relief from the bogeyman, really. Now that's been made into a film and a very excellent one. Did you work on that? No, I had nothing to do with that, really, apart from uh

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Mm.

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Wandering around making approving noises at the work that was being done because they were so good, the people who did it.

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That there's nothing I could really do to help. They got on with it wonderfully and it was a smashing film, I think. They stayed very much in your style. Yes, it was all based on the style in the book, even down to being done with crayons. 44,000 drawings they laboured through to produce a 26-minute film. That makes even your efforts seem small. Don't know why I complain about strip cartoon when there's animators around. It's a film that's going to crop up every Christmas on the box for a long, long time. Record number six. Oh, that's called Dancey Dancey by the John Handy Quintet with a marvellous drummer called Terry Clark.

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The John Handy Quintet Dancy Dancy.

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Ah, Raymond, you mentioned Gentleman Jim just now, one of your comic strip books.

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This is about Jim Bloggs, who is in fact a lavatory attendant. Yes, that's right. It's a chap not.

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Very bright, I suppose, and he has uh mental age of uh of as I say, about a ten-year-old boy, with all the um dreams that ten year old boys have.

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And I just tried to see what would happen if you

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Tried to put ten-year-old boys' fantasies into reality. What happens nowadays if you want to become a cowboy or become a painter or anything else. And you revived Jim Bloggs in your next book, When the Wind Blows. Yes, it wasn't done deliberately. I was planning to do an entirely new book of an elderly working-class couple in the countryside, but it kept turning into a chap in Gentleman Jim, which rather annoyed me, really. I didn't want that to happen, but in the end, I had to give in and.

Presenter26:37

Let it be him. You can't really call When the Wind Blows a children's book at all, can you? No, not really. It's published as an adult book. It's a strip cartoon book, but it is uh

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Really for people over eleven or twelve, I suppose. You've got Jim and his wife, Hilda.

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They've retired to the country. Then there's a nuclear attack and they die pitiably.

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To what extent is this a political statement, Raymond? Well, it's not political at all, I don't think. It's not wasn't meant to be. It's just meant to be a fairly objective uh study of what the ordinary chap does when you hear on the radio that uh war is coming in the next three days, and later on you get a three or four minute warning that the missiles are on their way. And I try to think what the average person would do.

Presenter27:28

They're very simple people, the two. People have said they're too unintelligent, but I think they're no less intelligent than loads of people. I think that that there is a point here. Jem tries to do what he's told to do in the official handouts. Now, those are genuine documents that you

Speaker 227:44

Boom.

Presenter27:45

Quite sure.

Presenter27:46

Those instructions do seem puerile, but uh I think you make this mistake of making Jim such an idiot that he can't do what he's required to do. If he tried to do what he was required to do and still came unstuck, the message would be more powerful, wouldn't it? Yes, I think that's quite a good point, really. But I mean you see, i if he's a bit more intelligent, he wouldn't do those things anyway. There's it's a very difficult level to strike. If he's intelligent enough to do the thing properly, he wouldn't do it at all.

Presenter28:15

And he does the best he can. Anyway, there's not time, because the attack comes before he's had time to finish the thing. One thing that struck me, I I think it was presumably a unilateral situation. There was no talk anywhere in the story of retaliation, is there? No. What our rocket's going to blast in as well.

Raymond Briggs28:32

Yeah, as well.

Presenter28:34

No, no,'cause they they wouldn't be aware of that, I don't think. It wouldn't make any difference anyway. That's the whole fallacy of the whole situation. I mean, we might blast them to bits afterwards or before or whatever. It wouldn't make any fundamental difference except putting them in the same boat as us.

Raymond Briggs28:42

Hmm.

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You made the book into a radio play.

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Yes, it seemed to me to be a natural for radio really, because it's nearly all dialogue. When I write the things, they're all written in terms of dialogue.

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And um it seemed uh almost inevitable really. It was very effective as a radio. Yes, I thought it was uh terrific. Not not my writing terrific, but I mean the production was fantastic and the acting and everything.

Raymond Briggs29:06

It was

Raymond Briggs29:07

Uh

Presenter29:14

And there's a stage version which played at Bristol and came into the West End. Yes, it was at the Whitehall Theatre, and it had Ken Jones and Patricia Rantlidge in it. And there's a film to come? Well, we hope so, if they can raise the necessary millions.

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Needs such a huge amount of money to finance a one hour.

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Animated film

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Well

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You only need a set of lantern slides to complete the set.

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Yeah.

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What next? What are you working on? Well, I want to try and write more radio plays and I'd like to try and do a television play and I want to still continue to do picture books at the rate of one

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a year or one every eighteen months if I can

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Do it, but I'm mostly interested in radio at the moment. It's a marvellous medium, I think.

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Where have we got to? Record number seven.

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Yes, this is by Clark Terry, who's a marvellous uh trumpet and it's called I Want a Little Girl.

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On my own.

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One that I can speak with on the telephone.

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Just a little girl

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Uh

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If you get two, save me one, Clark.

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I want a little girl, Clark Teddy, with the Bob Bruckmire Quintet.

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How do you think you'd manage on a desert island, Raymond? Oh, quite well, I think, from the camping point of view. I like all that sort of thing, camp fires and making shelters and so on. The thing that would worry me is more the um

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diseases and things. Once you get outside England, the whole world seems to be seething with everything under the sun, even in France.

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And as I'm rather hypochondriacal,

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I think I'd succumb from hypochondria in the first few days before I even got a genuine disease. Yes, I'm not sure what diseases you'd get. There are a few animals, of course, small animals, no other humans.

Presenter31:19

You wouldn't get the common cold.

Presenter31:21

No, but you get typhoid and all these things you have to have injections for when you go abroad nowadays. You'd get typhoid on a desert island?

Raymond Briggs31:26

But

Presenter31:29

I'm not an authority on it, but uh every time you step outside England you have to have m injections and jabs and God knows what for everyone.

Raymond Briggs31:31

Every time

Raymond Briggs31:36

Right?

Presenter31:40

What are you going to eat?

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Well

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You always think of fruit, don't you, in desert islands? And fishing, I suppose. You better wash it carefully.

Raymond Briggs31:45

Is

Presenter31:48

In the polluted sea. Are you a good cook?

Presenter31:52

Well, I'm not good. I can get by. I'm not one of these kind of men who can't cook. I can do ordinary things, I think. Done any fishing? Used to years ago, yes. You could catch some healthier fish. Yes, I think so.

Raymond Briggs32:01

Yeah.

Presenter32:04

Would you try to escape? Could you build a craft? No, I wouldn't escape at all. It seems to me if you were on a.

Presenter32:10

A small boat, the one thing you'd be dreaming of was uh an island, and going from the island to a boat was like frying pan into the fire. I'd stay where I was. Probably just end up on another island.

Presenter32:22

Your last record.

Presenter32:24

Oh, that's uh Blues connotation by uh Olnick Coleman.

Speaker 233:02

Yeah.

Presenter33:28

Blues Connotation by the Ornette Coleman Quartet.

Presenter33:32

If you could take only one disk of the eight tube platists, which would you take?

Presenter33:37

Well it's terribly difficult because none of them are very spiritually uplifting or long-lasting or anything.

Presenter33:43

But I'd I'd better have the Albert Ammons because it's uh fairly recent. I only bought it a week or two ago, so I'll have that.

Presenter33:49

And one luxury, one object of no practical use whatever. Oh, that's easy. That'd be a full-size billiard table with uh snooker balls and cues and everything, because um snooker's the one game you can play on your own without being silly.

Presenter34:05

And it's also a game that produces some laughter. The one thing that you would be lacking on this island is uh any sort of laughter with no one else there, but such amazing things happen in Snooker that you can actually laugh out loud even when you're alone.

Raymond Briggs34:11

Maybe

Raymond Briggs34:12

No one else

Presenter34:19

Right.

Presenter34:20

And one book. You have the Bible and Shakespeare as standard equipment. The book doesn't exist. You'd have to make it for me. That's uh

Presenter34:27

The complete works of beach coma all the way through. The complete works of beachcoma. That'd be a pretty thick note. Yeah, yeah.

Raymond Briggs34:33

Yeah, keep it going.

Presenter34:35

And thank you, Raymond Briggs, for letting us hear your Desert Island Discs. Oh, thank you for having me. Goodbye, everyone.

Raymond Briggs35:06

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Islandists Archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk/slash radio four.