RAYMOND BRIGGS INTERVIEW

Fungus the Bogeyman exploded into childhoods thirty years ago with the disgusting thrill of a boil bursting. He was green! He was slimey! He loved eating dead snails, smelling farts and wearing filthy clothes. His entire life consisted of doing and promoting all the things that children are forbidden to do or even think about. Perhaps more surprisingly, he was the work of Raymond Briggs, now better-known for his pristine fantasies The Snowman, The Bear and Father Christmas – all favourite Yuletide TV fare.

Fungus was a huge underground hit with children and teenagers, but never quite achieved the fame he deserved. Now, however, Fungus and his family are about to hit our TV screens, in a three-part BBC adaptation, starring Martin Clunes in a script by the Whitbread winning Mark Haddon. Stardom beckons at last for the monster with horns and a special fondness for slime, who regards all humans with horror as “dry-cleaners” and who guards the existence of Bogeys from human knowledge or interference.

“I think it’s brilliant” says Briggs. “It’s been in development for seven or eight years, and so many different people wanted to do it and failed I’d just switched off. First it was going onto the stage at the National Theatre, and one of my great heroes, Terry Gilliam, did the pilot. But nothing came of that. Then Michael Palin and Terry Jones wanted to do an animatronic version, with four different people working the levers for the face and ears – but nothing came of that. So many people in so many countries have been involved in making the TV version, I thought nothing would ever come of it. But it has.”

The problems facing adaptors were understandable, in a sense. Brigg’s original book – constrained, like all picture-books, to 32 pages – introduced Fungus and his world in enormous detail, but didn’t tell a story. Readers learnt all about the Bogey’s ideas of a good meal (crushed slugs and snails, golden waxy bits, maggots and sour milk), about the Bogey anatomy, and their pleasure in giving us boils, but nothing more.

“I wanted to show the petty nastiness of life,” Briggs says; “the slime and snot and spit and dandruff, all this awful stuff which is slightly funny because it detracts from human dignity and our pretensions.”

The son of a milkman and a lady’s maid, Briggs was born in Wimbledon in 1934, and went to the Wimbledon School of Art and the Slade before becoming an illustrator. His parents’ jobs had an acknowledged influence on his books. He comments that “Father Christmas and the milkman both have wretched jobs: working in the cold, wet and dark;” and a mother who worked as a maid must have alerted the son to the intrinsic comedy of human mess and filth. He was later to celebrate their lives in Ethel and Ernest, but as a child he was given daily speech lessons, and learned how to be middle-class. His work, however, is about life’s underdogs – working-class characters who make do, griping and complaining, yet savouring life’s small pleasures. Fungus himself is an extreme version of this, and his daily chores and glum existence are made tolerable only by his affection for his family and his pride in creating a boil on a human’s neck.

Yet Briggs’s work, while possessed of an excoriating satirical vision (expressed most clearly in his picture book about a couple innocently preparing for the nuclear bomb, When the Wind Blows) is also full of excitement, love and happiness. The novelist Philip Hensher has called it “instantly recognisable both in its warm look and in its serious moral world. It is peculiarly English – his attractively fuzzy style draws on a line of beautifully domestic and idealistic English artists going back to Samuel Palmer.” His characters express and embody a state of wonder, whether flying through a winter’s night with a snowman or revelling in the sewer; yet end being dragged back to the mundane and dreary.

It wasn’t easy to marry this kind of sensibility with regular employment, and as a graduate of the Slade, Briggs says he found conventional children’s illustration work, emphasising the clean and pretty, tedious. He began doing his own books after realising that he “could do better” than the anodyne stories he was illustrating, winning the prestigious Kate Greenaway medal, for his Mother Goose Treasury in 1966. He only began developing his darker side when playing around with an illustrated alphabet.
“ Instead of F is for Flower, which I thought tiresome, I did F is for Fart, and it evolved. Most of my ideas are based on the simple premise, “let’s assume something imaginary - a snowman, a Bogeyman, a Father Christmas – is wholly real, and then proceed logically from there.”

Getting Fungus accepted in 1977 was an act of courage on behalf of his publisher, Jonathan Cape because, Briggs says, “It was rammed down my throat when I started illustrating that we were all threatened by librarians. In those days, there were 10,000 libraries up and down the country, and if they each took a copy, your publisher was covered financially. We were terrified of these women, whom we imagined as strict Victorian spinsters, peering through their pince-nez and saying, This Won’t Do.”

What saved Briggs’s creation was the counter-cultural revolution, which adopted Fungus, like Maurice Sendak’s Wild Things, as emblematic. Fungus, who is, as the critic Nicolette Jones pointed out “a suitable hero for an age of punk”, inspired Paul McCartney’s 1980 hit, Bogey Music, and became the mascot of the Cystic Fibrosis Trust. His existential angst (“Why am I a Bogeyman. For slime’s sake, WHY?”) made him a pin-up to teenagers as well as children. Yet despite writing sequels and having an entire filing cabinet full of Bogey material, Briggs published no further books other than a “plop-up” version of the original, which displayed not only the Bogey’s 3 nipples, 4 stomachs and six webbed toes but the secret Bogey Umbilical Cord in its full glory.

The BBC adaptation by Mark Haddon provides a plot in complete keeping with the spirit of this weird, cloacal hero. Fungus’s teenaged son Mould, formerly the pride of his parents in being “the smelliest boy in the street” is rebelling by becoming every Bogey parents’ nightmare, and “dropping in.” He is washing, and wearing clean clothes. Worst of all, he has made contact with a “dry cleaner” from the overworld….and the Bogey’s very existence is about to be uncovered by Martin Clunes as an ambitious journalist.

Briggs, who has no children of his own, relishes the anarchic spirit of the young while feeling he is no expert on them. “It’s so good to see their uninhibited behaviour – the way a toddler will pee in full view of others, or run around naked. I think Fungus is an appeal to the forbidden, to making a mess. Kids love mud,” he says. Yet living in the Bogey world did exhaust him.

“For the two years I worked on Fungus, buried amongst muck, slime and words so I wanted to do something which was clean, pleasant, fresh and wordless.” The result was The Snowman. People who read this, or see the animated version, often miss the way that, too, is suffused with melancholy and a sense of loss. The Snowman, after taking the boy on a magical journey to the North Pole, melts, leaving the boy alone and lonely.

“Some people says it’s about the death of a friend,” Briggs says, but will not be drawn on whether this was his intention. Other picture-books, such as The Bear and The Man also leave the child, temporarily transported into a different world, bereft. Briggs says that his impulse to become an illustrator probably began when he was evacuated. Sent to live with his aunts in Dorset, he sent back letters whose margins featured pictures of cows in a field or the sun in the sky. That loneliness, combined with affection, is characteristic of his work, and makes a deep emotional appeal to thoughtful children. When his heroes provide their own solutions to problems, such as his Stone Age cave-boy-genius, Ug, when searching for soft trousers, these are not understood or valued, with parents preferring to go on as before. “They aren’t disgusting, just ignorant,” he says of Ug’s family.

A long, lean man without a trace of muck or slime on his silvery hair, Briggs is dryly funny and protects his privacy while having a considerable presence on the internet, where sites devoted to him and his work abound. He lives near Lewes in Sussex, and is at present working on illustrating Ted Hughes’s poems for children.

“The essence of being able to draw from memory is to be a mini-actor,” he says. “All these characters are aspects of yourself, as Martin Amis said. If the figure is to walk jauntily with its nose in the air, you have to imagine what that feels like.”

I don’t quite dare ask him if he, like Fungus, sleeps in a sardine-can, but from the end of this month we can all have a better idea what that might feel like.

The Sunday Times, November 2004