Stop, Look, Listen Christmas specials – 1) The forgotten woman behind The Snowman

The story of Dianne Jackson, and a new interview about the making of Britain's most beloved Christmas film

“I remember going down for the live-action opening shoot in February 1982, down near Raymond’s house. We started shooting at dawn, walking down through these beautiful, frozen fields in Sussex.

I saw her there for the first time in action as a director. There she was, working away, making sure what we needed. I’ll never forget her calmness.”

This Christmas, as with many others over the last forty years of my life, I will be watching The Snowman, the short film first broadcast on Channel 4 in December 1982. The channel was only six weeks old then, but already becoming a launchpad for innovative British animation.

Now it is in middle age, with The Snowman already up for viewing on its streaming service, My4, but in a later version from 1984. I have written about this version before after watching it with my little boy when he was two, an act of parental love that suggested I wanted to share something special with him, although he was too young to understand what it meant.

Earlier that year, in 2016, David Bowie had died, and I explored how he had come to record a new introduction to the Raymond Briggs adaptation. I also interviewed executive producer Iain Harvey, and animator Joanna Harrison, who had knitted two scarves for the shoot, giving one to Bowie to wear, which she heard he’d given to his son. (One of the loveliest moments of my life as a journalist was to wonder out loud on Twitter about whether this was true, and then receive a tweet back from Duncan Jones to say it was. Here he is wearing it a few years later.)

But before Bowie in the attic, there was Briggs in the fields. His introduction to the original 1982 broadcast was only shown twice on TV, but it is still very beautiful: