Time For Lights Out

Product Information

The fact that the Snowman book and film have merged in the public imagination is a further source of frustration.

9781787331952: Time For Lights Out - Briggs, Raymond

It's an eccentric and excellent book with great drawings, the emphasis being the end of life and old age, the musings and mind of Raymonds last few years. Time For Lights Out, Raymond Briggs’ exploration and contemplation of old age and death, is published by Jonathan Cape today.The book was turned into an animated film in 1986 featuring Sir John Mills and Dame Peggy Ashcroft as the voices of the doomed couple and with anti-nuclear songs by Roger Waters, David Bowie and Genesis. The ‘Now’ section presents Briggs as a seventy-something year old who surveys himself as an old man and is somewhat annoyed that this is what he has turned into. As a picture book presented in graphic novel format, Briggs's work was ground-breaking when first published and remains cutting edge twenty years later in its creative unity of text and picture. So I'm sad to say this book is quite disappointing, depressing and disgusting, and I wouldn't recommend it. D. Martin, "Raymond Briggs", in Douglas Martin, The Telling Line: Essays on Fifteen Contemporary Book Illustrators (Julia MacRae Books, 1989), pp.

Time for Lights Out by Raymond Briggs review - The Guardian

He looks back at his schooldays and his time as an evacuee during the war, and remembers his parents and the house in which he grew up. It was the animation that brought in troops of dancing snowmen around a jolly Santa Claus – and it took many “liquid lunches” before Briggs agreed to sell the film rights to producer John Coates. For his contribution as a children's illustrator, Briggs was a runner-up for the Hans Christian Andersen Award in 1984.

The stretch of time that has elapsed since his parents’ death in 1971, two years before his wife Jean, now astonishes Briggs. Of course, there’s not a frond of tinsel to be seen in Briggs’s original, which ends with a mournful heap of melted snow.

Raymond Briggs | Books | The Guardian Raymond Briggs | Books | The Guardian

Other books were translated for stage and radio, with Briggs taking a keen interest in the overall production.Firstly, the book is largely made up of bits of writing that are shaped like poems on the page, but don't really rise to the level of poetry - they're just quite flat, humdrum reflections on the more miserable aspects of growing old; complaints broken up into short lines. Briggs continued to work in a similar format, but with more adult content, in Gentleman Jim (1980), a sombre look at the working class trials of Jim and Hilda Bloggs, closely based on his parents. Featuring a retired couple, Jim and Hilda Bloggs, who had first appeared in a previous work, Gentleman Jim, it describes a Soviet nuclear attack on Great Britain and the aftermath.

Time For Lights Out by Raymond Briggs | Waterstones

Briggs won the 1992 Kurt Maschler Award, or the "Emil", both for writing and for illustrating The Man, a short graphic novel featuring a boy and a homunculus. Recommended for anyone who deals with aging through black humor and doesn’t avoid talking about the inevitable (and has the patience for a book that would never be described as a page turner). He started out in 1957 by hawking his portfolio around as a graduate of the Slade School of Fine Art, London, picking up freelance illustration work from newspapers, magazines and design studios.With surprising page-turns, felicitous pauses, and pitch-perfect dialogue, Briggs renders the drama and humour of child–adult and child–bear relations, while questioning the nature of imagination and reality. All this deft self-awareness of his aging self is populated by a sort of commonplace book of quotes spanning thousands of years, compiled by an artist who spend the post war era explaining to people of all ages what despair looks like. This article was amended on 21 August 2022 to add the surname of Liz Benjamin, the long-term partner of Briggs. He told the Guardian in 2004 that when drawing the scenes of his parents' deaths, he could work for no more than a quarter of an hour at a time.