The Mog Christmas special causes problems for parents like me

Redmond Mitchard, The Independent

When you’re three, an annual tradition might as well be a thousand-year astrological convergence. My son wakes up every day and runs through a mental flow chart. Is it Halloween? My birthday? Your birthday? He’s still trying to decide whether Christmas is a time or a place. The answer is neither, of course. It’s a state of mind.

One tradition he benefits from, if unknowingly, is the big budget Christmas children’s animation. Between Channel 4’s efforts like The Tiger Who Came to Tea or The Abominable Snow Baby, and the unstoppable Yuletide juggernaut of the BBC’s annual Julia Donaldson adaptation, he spends the entire year watching them over and over again… which means so do I. This means I have a more than normal investment in Channel 4’s adaptation of Judith Kerr’s 1976 children’s classic Mog’s Christmas.

I’ll confess that I am hiding behind my son to an extent. I like them too. They’re made with a level of care, attention and production values that would be unsustainable to produce more than once a year. It’s Channel 4’s Christmas bonus to the nation, like an M&S gift card in a garish envelope or a bottle of cheap bubbly. There’s an unspoken pact between myself and the producers of these specials. They spend all year making them, and I spend all year watching them. Seems like a fair trade.

To court the largest possible audience they invariably feature, at most, minimal Yuletide trappings. They’re often placed in non-denominational wintry settings, or don’t allude to the season at all. It’s this lack of specificity that keeps them evergreen. I won’t be able to watch Mog’s Christmas all year round, and not just because it heavily features a Sophie Ellis-Bextor song. Mog’s Christmas, well… it’s right in the name, isn’t it? The audacity. It feels like the Beatles are releasing Rubber Soul one or two tracks a year and one year they just decide to release Paul McCartney’s “Simply Having a Wonderful Christmas Time” instead of “In My Life”. You’d feel cheated, wouldn’t you? And not just because that song is a blight on humanity and the worst thing Paul ever recorded (I say that as someone who has seen Rupert and the Frog Song dozens of times). Maybe I’m still put off by Mog’s last small screen Christmas outing, where she sauntered right out of the uncanny valley and into a cloying Sainsbury’s ad. Maybe I’m just bitter because my childhood tabby cat would never look twice at a boiled egg, and I felt lied to. Maybe I’m annoyed because there’s a dearth of quality children’s animation that encourages them to read, and is made with the kind of care and attention that allows an adult to watch it dozens of times. Specials like this are, after all, the only thing I watch now.

Mog had a huge range of charmingly grounded adventures Channel 4 could instead choose from. She made her way through a panoply of babies, bunnies, and vet visits across the 30-plus years Judith Kerr was writing them. The most remarkable thing Mog ever did, however, was something we will all do — she died.

2002’s Goodbye Mog is a heart-wrenching and sensitive book in which Mog the cat passes away in her sleep. Children’s stories have their fair share of death, but usually it’s a villain’s comeuppance or a Bambi’s mother. Mog is, perhaps, unique in being a beloved and established children’s character that shuffled off this mortal coil. It was an incredibly bold move — but, in my opinion, a kind move. It provides parents with a framework to introduce children to the concept of grief in a way that is controlled, but not sanitised. It handles the topic delicately, but directly. I am self-aware enough to recognise that advocating for replacing a story about how the disruption of Christmas throws a cat’s routine into chaos with a story in which that cat dies of old age will put me somewhere between Ebeneezer Scrooge and the last lukewarm chunk of cranberry Wensleydale. I don’t care. I think Christmas is the perfect time to think about loss, grief and those we wish were still with us.