#Mog the cat tv#

'I didn't want to do that.' She has to stop talking for a moment to recover. 'Oh, I'm sorry,' she says, visibly distressed. I tell Kerr that Nina, my eight-year-old daughter, and even Theo, my husband's 10-year-old-son, found reading Goodbye Mog upsetting.

#Mog the cat tv#

An original sculpture from the TV series, crouched and long of talon - a prototype ET - lives on the top floor of the house where Mog was drawn. And while Mum was writing Mog, Dad was the inventor of Quatermass, the science-fiction horror story of the 50s, written in the wake of the atom bomb - 'a sort of controlled paranoia,' as Kneale has described his brand of fear. It was a cosy family set-up for the Kneale children to grow up in. The drawings in the books, the first of which was published 30 years ago, feature various of the children's scattered toys. Mog's family are called Thomas because Kerr's husband, Nigel Kneale, is Tom to his family and friends. Her daughter Tacy (Deborah) Kneale is a film designer, and her son, Matthew (Nicholas) Kneale, is the writer, who won the Whitbread prize for English Passengers. The children in the Mog stories, Nicky and Debbie, carry the second names of Kerr's own children. With the birth of her son's son, says Kerr, came the realisation that - though she fiercely wants to live long - she may never see this boy go to university. But it wasn't so much that I wanted to kill her off, as that I wanted to say something about dying and being remembered.' I wished sometimes I'd made her a plain-coloured cat. 'I've done enough Mog books - you know, drawing all those stripes became very tedious. 'I didn't think of it so much in terms of 'That's an end to Mog', though I think it is,' says Kerr.

While Goodbye Mog is plainly a children's book, about the death of children's pets ('goodness, the funerals we've had of hamsters and cats, and it's always very sad,' says Kerr), it was the human background that shaped the writing of it. Her brother's illness coincided with the birth of her first grandchild. I started writing this book about the death of Mog about two years ago, and, uh, even the cat hadn't died, though he died soon after, then Michael - I feel I've brought it all on.' She expresses it in almost childlike language, with the classic child's fear of having been the reason bad things come to pass: 'It's all very weird. His death in April this year is a loss his sister feels keenly. The family were Jewish, though completely assimilated, and Kerr's father, Alfred, a famous theatre critic, wrote articles that were fiercely critical of the Nazis and were later burned by the SS.Д®scaping first to Switzerland, then Paris, the Kerrs finally landed in England, where Kerr's brother became a lauded appeal court judge. It is a story she told - lightly fictionalised - in the children's classic When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit. Kerr was just nine when she fled Nazi Germany with her parents and her brother Michael, in 1933 - 24 hours before the Nazis came for their passports. Perhaps it is the way Kerr says 'remember' and the piles of books about Nazi Germany on her coffee table that remind me of her background, and explain, possibly, how she is the children's author most likely to confront the death of her main character. 'I'm coming up to 80,' says Kerr, in her soft, hesitant voice, 'and you begin to think about those who are going to be left - the children, the grandchildren. So why banish Mog? 'I don't think it was so much about killing off Mog, as rather doing something about dying. The author herself looks much younger than her age, and is impeccably dressed in short-sleeved wool jumper, tweed skirt, pearls and black patent shoes tipped with a bow. The sun shines in on welcoming fresh coffee and fine biscuits. Her living-room furniture is white and green 70s, as expected, though the television is widescreen and expensive. In Kerr's home in south London, there is light in all the stairwells. It would be an unusual thing to do to an adult - like allowing Jeeves to succumb to cancer - but it is remarkable for it to be done to the age group just beginning to read. Except that this time round, Mog goes to heaven. Nothing in this world has changed (Kerr says cats look the same when dying as they do all their adult lives). The 70s furniture is still in place, the Thomas family as fresh-minted as in the first Mog, which came out in 1970, two years after Kerr's other enduring classic, The Tiger Who Came to Tea. Inside, the pictures - as always, drawn by the author, each stripe in Mog's fur a multitude of carefully inked horizontal lines - have not aged.