The Festive Spirit

EVER TAKEN SOME clothes into a fitting room, and wished there was a bright green door you could exit into an adventure? Then you no doubt grew up watching Mr Benn. First aired on BBC One at 1.30pm on 25 February 1971, this children’s favourite about a magical fancy dress shop was repeated constantly for three decades, indelibly imprinting its 13 15-minute instalments onto young viewers’ minds.

The series was the brainchild of David McKee, also the creator of King Rollo and Elmer the patchwork elephant. Speaking from his home in France, he tells SFX he fell into writing and drawing children’s books rather by accident: “I’ve never had a career plan!” Studying at art school in Plymouth in the ’50s, McKee “realised that it wasn’t going to be easy to earn a living as a painter”, and began speculatively submitting cartoons to newspapers, with the Daily Sketch the first to buy one.

“My art college background made me look differently at cartoons,” he explains. “I realised that a lot of cartoonists were actually fantastic draftsmen and artists –. When I saw that I thought, ‘Well, I can tell stories. I can do one of those’.”