大象传媒 Scotland - 大象传媒 Scotland - The curious daily journey of The Snowman鈥檚 85-year-old creator

The curious daily journey of The Snowman鈥檚 85-year-old creator

Photo: 大象传媒 / Alamy

When it comes to cajoling the nation into the Christmas spirit, Raymond Briggs has been doing the heavy lifting for over 40 years — long before the big retailers’ Christmas adverts started getting in on the act.

Alongside seasonal favourites The Snowman and Father Christmas, the beloved illustrator & author also disturbed a generation with his anti-nuclear story When the Wind Blows and enthralled kids & adults alike with Fungus the Bogeyman.

But a playful, moving documentary lifts the lid on many lesser-known aspects of his life and work, including a fascinating daily ritual.

Every day, he drives to his old house and collects the two bottles of milk delivered there. “I pick up the milk. Got to support the milk trade because my dad was a milkman.”

• (大象传媒 Two: Inside the Factory)

Raymond Briggs鈥� daily milk ritual

The illustrator and author recalls how he met his second wife Liz.

Briggs’ wrote his cherished story, The Snowman, in 1978. A few years later, it became an animated film and a staple of the Christmas television diet, broadcast every year since 1984 and enjoyed by millions of British households as a result.

Both Briggs’ parents died in 1971 and he chronicled their relationship in his 1998 graphic novel Ethel & Ernest. In 2016, it too was turned into an animated film, starring Jim Broadbent and Brenda Blethyn.