David Jones

David Jones
Biographical Background
Born	David S. Jones 27 February-20 March 1946 London, England
Nationality	English
Occupation	Firefighter (formerly) Writer

David S. Jones (born 27 February-20 March 1946) is an English writer from London, England, who created the concept of the children's television series Fireman Sam, with Dave Gingell, after purchasing a stop-motion animation book by artist Anthony Miller. He also released a novel called Trevelyan in 2016. In 2019, Jones defended Fireman Sam saying that it is not sexist.

Career

Jones worked at a Clerkenwell fire station in London in the early 1980s. Back then, you would really want to be a fireman, because the wages are terrible. Jones said that the advantage is that you had a lot of spare time – doing a single 15-hour night shift might constitute most of your working week. Jones and the other firemen all had other, part-time jobs.

Jones had been a motorcycle messenger, a carpenter and an odd-job man and then he started a mail-order company that made figurines and memorabilia of uniformed workers. The pieces we sold ranged from little plastic firemen's hats to Royal Worcester china. A lot of kids were buying them, so Jones thought that he should create a character and write some children's stories about firemen. His daughter came up with the name Sam.

Jones was considering self-publishing them, but then he heard a radio interview with Mike Young, who created the cartoon character SuperTed. Jones phoned the BBC to ask for his number. They were difficult about it, but he chatted up the receptionist. When he got past Mike’s secretary he said: "I get 10 calls a day from people like you." Jones said: “You don't – this is something special."

Jones asked his company's figurine-maker to create a model of Sam. He gave the guy one of his uniforms, and he made his wife put it on so he could work from it. After Jones sent the model to Mike, he called him and said: "You better come down here, this is good." He introduced Jones to Rob Lee, an artist at his production company, and they developed the series for the next two years. It was all done in stop-frame animation.

There was a gap in children's programming for a hero like Sam. Postman Pat was around, but how much can a postman really do? And the public safety message that Jones and the other firemen put out was good. There were far more fires in the 80s and fewer smoke detectors or sprinklers. People had paraffin heaters, and paraffin is volatile stuff to have in your house.

Jones has also said that the helicopter introduced in later series is a bit weird, and believes that they must have run out of plots.

Jones teamed up with Rob for another show, Joshua Jones, which turned out to be a bit of a disaster. A lot of the profits from Fireman Sam went into creating this show, but they were not to know there was another canal boat based series in production called Rosie and Jim, which was almost identical and much more aggressively marketed by Ragdoll Productions (the company behind other children's shows like Tots TV and Teletubbies), swamping Joshua Jones and causing a lot of money to be lost on it.

Gallery

David Jones with Dave Gingell

David Jones when he was a fireman

External links

• An interview with David Jones in The Guardian.