Meg and Mog

Story

Meg is a witch whose spells always seem to go wrong. With her striped cat Mog and her friend Owl, she is always getting into adventures.

Why we chose it

Meg and Mog is a classic children’s book, loved as a bedtime story for the very young and by children just learning to read.

Where it came from

Helen Nicoll and Jan Pienkowski worked together for over 40 years, first at the BBC and then creating Meg and Mog . As they didn’t live close to each other they worked on their first stories together at a service station on the M4 which was conveniently located halfway between them.

Where it went next

There are over 20 Meg and Mog stories. In 1981 Maureen Lipman starred as Meg in a West End play. David Wood adapted the stories and script can still be used by schools and theatre companies who want to perform the play. After that Helen Nicoll had the idea of making the books into audiobooks, narrated by Maureen Lipman with sound effects from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop..

In 2003 an animated version of Meg and Mog was released on television. Fifty episode were made, each 5 minutes long with Fay Ripley as Meg, Phil Cornwall as Mog and Alan Bennett as Owl.

Associated stories

Helen Nicholl died in 2012. Since then two more Meg and Mog books have been created by Jan Pienkowski and David Walser.

Pienkowski is known for his pop up books which include Little Monsters and Haunted House and for his beautiful paper cut illustrations of classic stories like The Odyssy, The Kingdom Under the Sea, The Nutcracker, The Thousand Nights and One Nights and The Glass Mountain. He won the Kate Greenaway medal for illustration for Haunted House and again for The Kingdom Under the Sea.

Helen Nicoll went on to found the company Cover to Cover which specialised in classic audio books read by great actors