Brian Trueman TV presenter who wrote madcap cartoons including ‘Danger Mouse’
Brian Trueman, who has died aged 92, was a newsreader and current affairs presenter for Granada Television in the 1960s but found his spiritual home with the innovative animation studio Cosgrove Hall, as a scriptwriter and voice actor on Danger Mouse, Count Duckula and Jamie and the Magic Torch.
In 1974, Brian Cosgrove and Mark Hall, two graphic designers whom Trueman had known at Granada, invited him to write scripts for their new venture Cosgrove Hall Productions. Their studio was housed in an old tobacco factory, in the Manchester suburb of Chorlton-cum-Hardy where Trueman had lived for much of his childhood; he proudly regarded Cosgrove Hall’s “quirkiness” as essentially Mancunian.
Trueman scored an immediate success writing their first series, the stop-motion animation Chorlton and the Wheelies (1976-78).
Next came Jamie and the Magic Torch (1977-79), a cartoon about a young boy’s nightly visits to a psychedelic fantasy world; this time Trueman provided all the voices as well as the scripts. Both series proved highly popular, but they were eclipsed by Danger Mouse (1981-92), which at one stage drew more than seven million viewers. As Danger Mouse’s lead writer Trueman scaled heights of comic anarchy previously unapproached in British cartoons, channelling the chaotic comic spirit of The Goon Show and Round the Horne.
David Jason voiced the eyepatch-sporting hero, with Terry
Scott as his sidekick Penfold and Edward Kelsey as Greenback. Trueman provided several voices, notably Greenback’s henchman Stiletto, a trenchcoat-clad crow with an Italian accent suggestive of the Mafia.
When the series was sold to the US, Stiletto was judged likely to offend Italian-Americans and Trueman had to redub all his scenes as a Cockney.
By contrast, Trueman captured the gentler rhythms of Kenneth Grahame as the main writer on the stop-motion television series of The Wind in the Willows (1984-88) and its sequel Oh, Mr Toad! (1990). He voiced the hapless henchman of David Jason’s sinister Chief Weasel.
He was also head writer on Count Duckula (1989-93) — it was his idea to make the eponymous vampire duck a mild-mannered vegetarian — and provided the quavering Bristolian tones of the Count’s Nanny, a giant accident-prone hen.
Brian Richard Trueman was born in Manchester on May 16, 1932, the son of Cyril and Elsie Trueman. AHe was diagnosed with TB, aged seven, and spent 20 months in Abergele Sanatorium in North Wales. The long hiatus in his education meant that he failed the 11-plus “but my father, a bright, articulate, left-wing trade unionist, talked Stretford Grammar School into taking me on”.
His teacher encouraged him to audition for BBC Manchester, and, aged 14, he was cast as Tubby the cook in the Children’s Hour radio serial Adventures of the Plover Patrol, for a fee of two guineas. He became a regular on Children’s Hour alongside other Northern child actors such as Billie Whitelaw, Judith Chalmers and Beryl Bainbridge.
He continued to act on radio and occasionally television while studying English at the University of Manchester. In 1958 he went to be interviewed for a newsreader’s job at Granada; the next day he was on the air. Finding himself at Granada during its golden years under Sidney Bernstein, Trueman progressed to being a reporter and presenter for news and magazine programmes such as Scene at 6.30 and Granada Reports. By 1968, he was popular enough to be given his own magazine programme, It’s Trueman.
He served as a consultant when Danger Mouse was rebooted by the BBC in 2015 and remained proud of his legacy. Brian Trueman married, in 1961, Angela Philpot, who survives him with their two sons.