The family also went on to thank the staff on Overton Ward at Royal Sussex County Hospital “for their kind and thoughtful care of Raymond in his final weeks.” He played practical jokes and enjoyed them being played on him. All of us close to him knew his irreverent humour - this could be biting in his work when it came to those in power. He liked the Guardian editorial describing himself as an ‘iconoclastic national treasure’”. Raymond Briggs, the British author and illustrator of the classic children’s books Father Christmas (1973), Fungus the Bogeyman (1977), and The Snowman (1978), died on 9 August, aged 88.

Barber, Martin (24 December 2012). "The Snowman and The Snowdog animator revisits classic". BBC News Online . Retrieved 25 December 2012.The story was expanded to fill 26 minutes and include a longer flying sequence which takes the boy to the North Pole and a party with Father Christmas which is not present in the picture book. The animators also brought in personal touches – a static sequence with a car is replaced by a motorcycle ride, as one of the animators was a keen motorcyclist and it was noted by Iain Harvey that this sequence kept "the action flowing after all the fun and comedy of the boy and the Snowman exploring the house and forming a friendship – and what could be better than a midnight run in a snowy landscape". [6] Similarly, although the boy in the book is unnamed, in the film he is named "James" on his present tag, added by animator Joanna Harrison as it was the name of her boyfriend (later her husband). [7] [8] Interviewed in 2012, Raymond Briggs recalls that he thought "'It's a bit corny and twee, dragging in Christmas', as The Snowman had nothing to do with that, but it worked extremely well." [9] Briggs’s life moved into a minor key in the 2010s with the death in 2015 of his partner of 40 years Liz Benjamin, who had brought a stepson, a stepdaughter and stepgrandchildren into his life. He remained as involved as ever in his writing and adaptations of his work, and was the executive producer on the film of Ethel & Ernest, although his health kept him from attending as many production sessions as he would have liked. One of his final works was Time for Lights Out (2019), which he described as a "big fat book on old age and death".

After they play with the lights on the family car, he prepares a feast that the duo eat by candlelight. The snowman takes the boy outside and they begin to fly over the South Downs and watch the sun coming up from Brighton pier before returning home. When the boy wakes in the morning, he finds that the snowman has melted. Choose a series of images and write captions to accompany each one. Use time words (e.g. first, next, then, after, later, finally) to show the sequence of events.

The book

As the 1960s dawned, Briggs had begun to despair at the quality of the books he was illustrating. “They were so bad that I knew I could do better myself,” he told the Guardian, “so I wrote a story and gave it to an editor hoping he would give me some advice. But instead he said he would publish it, which shows what the standard was like if a complete novice who had never written anything more than a school essay could get his first effort published.” Born in 1934, Briggs went to the local grammar school in Wimbledon. His decision to leave school at 15 to go to Wimbledon Art College may may have puzzled his milkman father, but he was not dreaming of becoming Michelangelo.