This article originally appeared in Radio Times Magazine<\/strong>.<\/em><\/p>\n

The house is overwhelmed by artwork. It\u2019s piled up on drawers, spilling out of cupboards, teetering on shelves. Some is finished, some half-worked up, other pieces are no more than an inked line suggesting a shape. And everywhere, the same motifs: horses, moles, foxes and a tow-haired boy. Several of the drawings, spotted with tea and marked with dust, have spilt onto the floor of the south London Victorian terrace where a small and ancient dog snuffles at their crinkled edges.<\/p>\n

Amid this fantastic mess stands Charlie Mackesy or, as he introduces himself, \u201ca random scruffy artist, who happens to have made a little book\u201d. He might be employing understatement. The random scruffy artist has previously collaborated with Nelson Mandela and his little book is an international phenomenon. With its origins in a series of social media postings that went viral, The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse is a picture book about a young boy who encounters three animals and, with them, learns the wisdom of kindness. The book was published in October 2019, just before the pandemic arrived. \u201cNo one knew of course,\u201d he says, \u201cbut I do remember thinking there was something coming and that we had to get the book done.\u201d<\/p>\n

Without knowing or planning it, Mackesy had written a psychological survival handbook for a worldwide epidemic. By December 2021 there were more than 5.5 million copies in print internationally. In the UK alone it had sold 1,967,949 copies by last Christmas, becoming the bestselling UK hardback since records began. \u201cI didn\u2019t imagine we\u2019d be selling very many books,\u201d says Mackesy. \u201cCertainly not that many.\u201d With his ink-spotted workman\u2019s shirt and shock of grey curls, he doesn\u2019t look like the wealthy man such sales must be making him \u2013 a question Mackesy, Radley-educated scion of a military family, sidesteps gently. \u201cIf you want to be a millionaire, you don\u2019t do this job,\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019s got to be your vocation, something in you. And for me, I like making people feel a bit better about life.\u201d<\/p>

Now The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse, a Winnie-the-Pooh for our demanding times without, perhaps, Pooh\u2019s steely core, is coming to BBC One this Christmas. Co-directed by Mackesy and Peter Baynton, its soundtrack composed by Isobel Waller-Bridge and performed by the BBC Concert Orchestra, it\u2019s a delightful 30-minute animation set in a winter landscape modelled on the Northumberland of Mackesy\u2019s youth. Here, when the flurries of snow settle, a mole takes up with a lost boy and the two travellers are joined by a fox and a horse. \u201cThey all discover in their own way that they\u2019re lost,\u201d says Mackesy. \u201cAll four of them need connection, need shared vulnerability, and their home is in those relationships.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mackesy is finely attuned to such things, to questions of being an outsider in a world that can seem cruel or uncaring. Now 60, Mackesy first went into therapy when he was 30. \u201cThere was a time when I\u2019d lost a good friend and I was finding living day to day difficult. You don\u2019t think asking for help is an option, you don\u2019t think it\u2019s going to achieve anything and you think you\u2019re being indulgent, so you just have another piece of cake and keep going. It is the English way, but there comes a time when that\u2019s not enough.<\/p>\n

\u201cI remember my first session,\u201d he says. \u201cIt was huge to me because all my life, I thought: you\u2019re a freak, or you\u2019re weird, or you\u2019re abnormal. But what I got back that day was, \u2018You and the rest of the world!\u2019 That, to me, was like walking through a door into a new world of hope and possibility. My humanness, in all its oddness, was accepted and universal. I realised, to be human is to be like each other.\u201d<\/p>\n

This sense of shared humanity means he likes working in a team and relished guiding the 150 animators it took, from countries around the world, to turn the book into a film. \u201cEach frame is hand-drawn,\u201d says Mackesy. \u201cI went through with them frame after frame. I was like a teacher. I\u2019d say, \u2018Make this line thicker under the tummy,\u2019 then send it on to them. Suddenly they started doing way better drawings than I could. I remember when we got the boy\u2019s face right. It was June 2021 and I ran around the room, screaming. It was a massive moment.\u201d<\/p>\n

The soft centre of Mackesy\u2019s philosophy is best illustrated in an exchange between the horse and the boy. The horse asks, \u201cWhat do you want to be when you grow up?\u201d \u201cKind,\u201d says the boy. Understandably, this had a strong resonance during the pandemic when thousands of people, often in lockdown or working in hospitals, depended on the kindness of others.<\/p>\n

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