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Raymond Briggs: Snowmen, Bogeymen & Milkmen review – a timely look at an eccentric life

With everyone from Nick Park to Posy Simmonds discussing his bold, bizarre work, this documentary traced the life of the celebrated children’s author

Over 50 years, Raymond Briggs has illustrated 26 picture books, 25 of which he also wrote. At the age of 84 he’s still working, although these days he manages only one drawing a month, for the Oldie magazine. It’s not that he can’t draw any more – he certainly can – it’s that he keeps falling asleep while doing it, leaving a little trailing pencil line as he drops off. “There’s two falling-asleep pencil marks on this,” he says, looking down at his overdue assignment, as ever both slightly annoyed and slightly amused.

Coming close after the 40th anniversary of the publication of The Snowman, Raymond Briggs: Snowmen, Bogeymen & Milkmen (BBC Two) was a timely look at the long career of a man whose life and work have always been closely intertwined. If his subjects were varied (snowmen, bogeymen, nuclear war), his stories always stayed close to home; his childhood home in Wimbledon, in fact, reappears over and over.

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from Culture | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2EZr3bG
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