I remember my dog chasing her neighbour's sheep into a corner and Helen keeping astonishingly calm about the whole matter.
We had long walks over the hills, sometimes in perpetual drizzle, which didn't seem to matter at all. Helen had a house in the west of Ireland, where we had a writing spree, and she also loved the Lake District, where I went to see her several times to work on our later books.
#Mog and meg books how to
This taught us how to create an illustrated narrative and, when Helen left the BBC in 1971, we decided to have a go at creating picture books together. I was allergic to something and kept having to blow my nose through the veil, which had to be changed at regular intervals.Īs the programme seemed to be a success, Helen suggested that we should make up stories for this medium that we had invented. In order to be invisible to the camera, I had to wear black from head to foot, with a black veil in front of my face. The secret was that I drew my strong black-on-white pictures on the back of a glass screen. We developed the idea of drawings appearing on the screen as if by magic, so that the artist was never seen.
When we first met in the 1960s, she had just been offered a job with BBC Television to develop a new children's programme which she named Watch! She needed an artist and I was the lucky one she chose. She was educated at Badminton school, Bristol, and worked as a teacher. Helen was born and brought up in Westmorland (now Cumbria). In 2003, our characters were animated for television, with Meg voiced by Kay Ripley, Mog by Phil Cornwell and Owl by Alan Bennett. Soon, Helen hit on the idea of producing audio versions of the books, with Maureen as an inspired narrator and a magician from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop handling the sound effects. In 1981, Meg and Mog made their entrance on the West End stage, in an adaptation by David Wood at the Arts theatre, with Maureen Lipman as a brilliant Meg.
Helen Nicoll's style was to be clear, brief and to the point.
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