julian_craster

David Mitton
Daily Telegraph
07/06/2008

Scriptwriter and director who brought the stories of Thomas the Tank Engine to the television screen and later devised Tugs.

David Mitton, who died on May 16 aged 69, wrote and directed more than 180 episodes of Thomas the Tank Engine, which became a perennial favourite on children's television.

Starting as a special effects technician for the Thunderbirds creator Gerry Anderson, Mitton also worked on Captain Scarlet, Joe 90 and UFO.

It was Mitton's painstaking skill as a director that was responsible for the distinctive look of Thomas the Tank Engine. His collaborator, the producer Britt Allcroft, said Mitton loved all the engines in the stories, and talked of them as living beings.

David Nelson Godfrey Mitton was born on February 27 1939 near Edinburgh, the son of a consultant engineer. He started writing when he was 16, but on leaving Strathallan School joined the RAF and served in air-sea rescue in Aden before returning to Britain in the early 1960s and launching a career in children's films.

In the 1980s he started a film company with Ken Turner called Clearwater Films, making television commercials using stop-frame animation.

After an approach from Britt Allcroft, who had acquired the rights to the Thomas stories from their author, the Rev W Awdry, Mitton made a successful pilot programme; he went on to direct, and later to write, more than 180 episodes of Thomas the Tank Engine at Shepperton Studios, Middlesex.

Mitton also worked on Britt Allcroft's American feature film, Thomas and the Magic Railroad (2000), starring Peter Fonda, and Alec Baldwin as the conducter. He subsequently devised another children's format for television, Tugs (featuring boats with voices and moving faces), which did well in the United States.

In 2005, with David Lane, whom he knew from Gerry Anderson's studios in the 1960s, Mitton formed the independent production company Pineapple Squared Entertainment.

There he created Orsum Island, a series for seven-to-11-year olds which was scheduled to launch this summer, and which Mitton believed would deliver the pace and variety demanded by modern young audiences.

David Mitton married, in 1972, Joan Ferris, who survives him, as does his first wife, Judy, and their son.

faginsgirl

The most bizzare thing I ever watched/heard was Ringo Star narrating Thomas the tank engine! erm.....why did he do it?

But then again, why not?

xx

We`re changin` lodggggggggings!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

NappieB

That's not bizarre.....

For REALLY bizarre I prefer the (true) story of the 20s -something reporter who interviewed Ringo and asked him about his success as a narrator on Thomas the Tank Engine:

REPORTER: Ringo, what did you do before you narrated stories on TV?

RINGO: I was a drummer in a band. You may have heard of us, we were called The Beatles!

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