In the late seventies I became involved with one of the most original and innovative animation houses in the world - Cosgrove Hall Productions Manchester.

Mark Hall phoned me to say that they were working on a TV series about a Mouse Super Agent and had got bogged down. Mark and his partner Brian Cosgrove wondered whether I had any thoughts on the matter. When we sat round the table it seemed to me to be fairly simple. The characters had got stuck in reality and were doing James Bond type things rooted in the solid real world. I argued that once you invented a Mouse Secret Agent then all of creation and a good chunk of not creation was his oyster. In other words we could be as barmy as we wanted.

I invented some more characters such as the two Crows (who I originally called Leatherhead and Dorking and gave cockney accents to ), wrote a trial script about bagpipe rustling and called the Evil Toad Greenback after a farmer I knew in the Yorkshire Dales that I didn't like much. I also rough scripted nine or so other ideas and Brian Trueman took the baton and ran with it. The rest is animation history.