The Snowman and the Snowdog: made to melt your heart Drawing is a dying art form in the age of computer-generated images and it pleases him that 77 artists have laboured for more than a year to reproduce the grainy feel and wistful colours of his original. He also sees the new film as a tribute to his friend the producer John Coates, whom he calls "the grandfather of animation," who died in September. Coates was in bed with flu when he first read The Snowman story 30 years ago. Tears coursed down his cheeks. He straight away started getting people to cough up the necessary millions to make a film. Coates believed there should be a sequel but Briggs resisted on the grounds that it would be a cynical cashing in. His endless lunches down the decades wore me down and I said yes. Why, he keeps being asked, has an old-fashioned story about a flying snowman become such a global phenomenon? I've not the faintest idea, really. You just follow the commonsense logic. This snowman melts, everything comes to an end. It's all very depressing of course, as is life. Did he ever consider a less sad ending? No, no, no, no, no. Snowmen melt, for God's sake. I've only ever had one letter of complaint about that in all the thousands that have come in. I don't believe in happy endings. Kids are down to earth. They know their cat's going to die. Their dog died last year. Granny died last week. Briggs is drinking coffee from a Snowman mug and looking quite Christmassy in a red shirt and green fleece with an arty knotted scarf at his neck. He sleeps in Snowman sheets and uses Snowman towels but he's aghast at the tons of merchandise his simple story has generated. Oh God, it goes on and on. The stuff comes in all the time. In Japan there are men walking around with my signature running up their legs, on their socks. It doesn't bear thinking about. Yet there is nothing Briggs relishes more than this kind of incongruity. His life's work is based on observing oddity, detail, humour. Walking into his crowded cottage in Sussex is like entering a museum of kitsch or diving into a toybox. Slippers wearing heavy glasses, a penis in a goblet, a collection of porcelain breasts. "All given to me," he says, bemoaning the dust, the spiders and three years of neglect. A still from the Snoman and the Snowdog Much of his time is spent looking after his partner, Liz, who lives in nearby Plumpton. Because of his extreme clutter, they have always lived apart. Now, he is seldom in his own home, but manages to "do a bit of scribbling" in a backroom at her place. Death and the handicaps of old age are what engross him now and he's putting together "a big fat book" on the subject, a conglomeration of drawings, photographs and memories. It's all there. It's the illustrating, the labour of doing bloody drawing that takes so long. Writing's so quick. You can alter something in minutes. If you're writing, you just say: "Ernest picked up the teapot and poured himself a cup of tea." Job done. Start drawing and it can take all day. The sheer physical labour of writing, drawing and designing books is something he's almost given up trying to explain. Each job is so damn long. The Snowman was in the files for six years before I got around to doing it. Fungus the Bogeyman took more than two years to do. After the "slime and muck and slipperiness" of Fungus, he longed for the clean and silent Snowman. Though privately generous, warm and mordantly funny, Briggs likes to cultivate the image of the solitary old git, not a sleigh-ride away from his curmudgeonly Father Christmas character. But now old age is upon him, it's for real. He really does seem like a hatless man bent into a bitter wind. Ah! Moaning all the time," he sighs. When you get older, your everyday life takes over: doing the shopping, walking the dog, doing the washing up, blah, blah, blah. The supermarket. Oh God. That takes almost the entire morning. Briggs was born in Wimbledon Park in 1934. His father Ernest was a milkman and his mother, Ethel, a lady's maid. Their lives are touchingly evoked in his non-fiction book, Ethel and Ernest and his house is a shrine to them, portraits and reminders everywhere, even a life-size painting on two cupboard doors. They were appalled at his determination to go to art school, but he understood their point of view. In fact, he says oddly, he got on very well with them, "considering they weren't my kind of people." Both died "before the fame thing really kicked in," and judging from his mother's delirium when he received his first £1,000 book advance, he thinks it was probably just as well. She would have bored everyone to death. Briggs shares their solid Labour allegiance but has a fatalistic view of the futility of modern politics in the face of global economic forces. It doesn't make that much difference which lot you have. His opposition to the Falklands War was exposed in his book The Tin-Pot Foreign General and the Old Iron Woman. He resents the foreign ownership of British companies but on most issues you sense it's easier, less wearisome, for him to feign detachment. For all his pioneering work, he pretends a sketchy knowledge of the rise of the graphic novel. It's become respectable, an art form. I try to keep up with it but you can't keep up with everything. So many I don't like because they can't draw. People are turning up, he says vaguely, to interview him for a "soppy film" about his life (How the Snowman Came Back to Life, which is on Channel 4 on December 30 at 6.05pm). I'm sick to death of it. I look terrible on TV with no smiles and twinkles. Briggs is a cherished fixture of the national Christmas. His Father Christmas is currently being staged at the Lyric, Hammersmith. A new Snowman is flying high. He may be unbothered, but he cannot feel under-appreciated. "Over-appreciated," he says with a speech bubble laugh. Ha, ha. The Snowman and the Snowdog is on Channel 4 at 8pm on Christmas Eve. The Snowman is on C4 at 6.25pm on December 23