Hooray and hoorah, Toad and Friends is now screening in the UK on Boomerang. This was such a lovely project to work on: bringing Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows to a new 21st Century audience with all the humour, fun and love this beautiful book deserves. But, as is the way of these things, it was all rather a long time ago and, when I had loads to say about the process, it would have been imprudent to do so.
I remember I wrote six episodes including one in which I got to tackle the book’s Chapter Nine – you know the chapter that always gets left out of the abridgements cos it’s well, a bit odd, a bit mystical and who is the piper at the gates of dawn anyway? Yeah, that one. The episode is called The Song Stone and there’s not a piper in sight. Or is there…
They also let me write about the horse that pulled Toad’s canary coloured cart in the book. Ha, I knew all that messing about with ponies when I was a kid would come in handy one day.
And the choir – I dug out the choir and wrote them a song. Well, truth be told, I got Ratty to dig out the choir. Then I appropriated some words from Mr Grahame and gave Gareth Davies the pleasure of composing a tune for it.
Screenwriting is all about collaboration 🙂
And then there were the otters and the weasels and an adder and a heron and all the daft things I’ve seen and done living in the country and well, as Toad would say, “Poop poop!”
