Actress Phyllida Law talks to Gerald Isaaman about her late husband, Eric Thompson, who wrote the original Magic Roundabout

Sarcastic Dougal the dog and boinging Zebedee are back, so too are witty Ermintrude the pink cow, Brian the snail and Dylan the rabbit, those beloved cartoon characters from The Magic Roundabout still so fondly remembered.
Some eight million viewers watched them for five minutes a day on BBC TV between 1965 and 1971 and later on Channel 4. So no doubt there is a whole generation out there waiting to take their offspring to see the Magic Roundabout, a major new animated film – with its own website too. Now that legend endures, updated, inflated and promoted with the voice of Robbie Williams playing Dougal, the shaggy dog who lives on a strict diet of sugar; Sir Ian McKellen the amazing springing Zebedee; pop star Kylie Minogue as Florence; Joanna Lumley as Ermintrude; Jim Broadbent as Brian; and Bill Nighy playing Dylan.
And as the film goes on release next week, it’s all causing a little fuss for that distinguished actress Phyllida Law, widow of Eric Thompson, actor and writer, who took the original programmes, created by Serge Danot in France, and turned them into an English television legend.

In a corner of Al Alvarez’s sitting room in Flask Walk, Hampstead, a bust of the poet and critic gazes out over a game of chess.
“I can’t stand it,” the real Mr Alvarez explodes with a twinkle. “The sculptor made me look all weedy and rabbinical, like a remote intellectual.”
Now 75, he had already given up his job as a university teacher by his mid 20s. “I’m a loner,” he says. “I hated the politics of having colleagues. And I wanted to write my own books, not books about other people’s.”

IT was a wonderful autumn day, sunny and crisp, as I fed the birds in Fitzroy Square. Then I crossed Charlotte Street and walked towards my flat nearby. “I could live here forever after all,” I dreamed.
Only one thing troubled me: 8.30am seemed an unusually early time for a hospital appointment – redolent of urgency.
It all started with a lump in my neck. “Just a swollen gland,” I thought, and ignored it. I had hopped on the train to Paris weeks before to look after a friend’s flat.