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The Full Story · Told by the Makers

The Full Story of Danger Mouse on Nickelodeon

The evil toad was named after a farmer in the Yorkshire Dales that the writer did not like much. The scenes set in total darkness, where all you can see is one glowing eyeball, were there because the studio could not afford the drawings. And when this show reached America, it became the first cartoon a brand new cable channel ever aired, then settled in permanently at number two behind a Canadian show about green slime.

Danger Mouse was created by Brian Cosgrove and Mark Hall at Cosgrove Hall Films in Manchester, written mainly by Brian Trueman, and voiced by David Jason and Terry Scott. It premiered on ITV on 28 September 1981 and ran to 19 March 1992 across 89 episodes. On 4 June 1984 it became the first animated series to air on Nickelodeon in the United States, where it ran until 1987 and again from 1991 to 1994.

The show got stuck, so they called a folk singer

Cosgrove Hall had a mouse secret agent and a problem. The writer and musician Mike Harding, brought in to help, has told the story on his own site.

"Mark Hall phoned me to say that they were working on a TV series about a Mouse Super Agent and had got bogged down. Mark and his partner Brian Cosgrove wondered whether I had any thoughts on the matter."

Harding's diagnosis was that the show was being too realistic for a cartoon about a rodent spy.

"The characters had got stuck in reality and were doing James Bond type things rooted in the solid real world. I argued that once you invented a Mouse Secret Agent then all of creation and a good chunk of not creation was his oyster. In other words we could be as barmy as we wanted."

Then he populated it. "I invented some more characters such as the two Crows (who I originally called Leatherhead and Dorking and gave cockney accents to ), wrote a trial script about bagpipe rustling and called the Evil Toad Greenback after a farmer I knew in the Yorkshire Dales that I didn't like much."

The bagpipe script became "Who Stole the Bagpipes?", broadcast 30 September 1981, the show's second episode. The farmer's name became Baron Silas Greenback, the recurring villain of a decade of television. Harding wrote 21 episodes and composed for many of them, then, in his words, "Brian Trueman took the baton and ran with it."

Cosgrove's own summary of the premise, given to The Guardian, was blunt about the silliness being the point: "We reckoned a secret service mouse foiling the plans of an evil toad ... was suitably ridiculous."

The writer who never said he wanted to write

Brian Trueman wrote the vast majority of Danger Mouse. He was hired for reasons nobody has ever been able to explain, including him.

Trueman was a Granada Television broadcaster, a newscaster turned presenter, documentary producer, and voice artist, and he knew Cosgrove and Hall as graphic artists at the same station. In an interview with Northern Soul, he described the phone call that started his second career.

"About a year later, he rang me to ask if I could have a go at writing a script for an animation film pilot. No-one knows why he thought I might be able to. The only writing I'd done at Granada were things like my scripts for Cinema and for the umpteen documentaries I made there. Brian has no idea why. Mark told him it was because I'd said that I'd always wanted to write. In fact, I'd never said any such thing."

He wrote it anyway. That pilot went nowhere, but the next call did not, and Trueman went on to script Chorlton and the Wheelies, Jamie and the Magic Torch, Cockleshell Bay, Danger Mouse, and Count Duckula, in which he also voiced Stiletto and Nanny.

The pace, once the studio was running two hit shows at once, was industrial. "Once I got up to speed, I was writing a 20-minute Danger Mouse script from early Monday morning to lunchtime on Wednesday, and a 20-minute The Wind in the Willows script from then to Friday night, with script revisions over the weekend."

His method was analogue even by 1981 standards. Trueman hand-wrote scripts at home, phoned the studio twelve miles away, and a motorbike courier collected them.

The dark was a budget

Danger Mouse looks like a cheap show that made a virtue of it, and that is exactly what it was.

An episode could require 2,000 drawings, which the studio could not always afford. So footage was reused, and scenes were set in the North Pole, or simply "in the dark": the screen goes black and the characters are reduced to floating eyeballs, or in Danger Mouse's case a single eyeball, because he wears an eyepatch. The archival record notes that both Cosgrove, who conceived the show, and Trueman, who wrote it, cheerfully admitted this was a time-and-money saving device.

It is the rare budget hack that reads as style. A cartoon that regularly plunges into blackness and keeps talking is funnier than one that does not, and generations of viewers took it for a joke rather than an economy.

Casting the mouse

Cosgrove and Hall picked David Jason after seeing him in Only Fools and Horses. Cosgrove described the voice test years later, in a 2012 interview with HeyUGuys, and what struck him was not the performance but the work ethic.

"When I first met David, I voice tested him for Danger Mouse. There was another actor with him," Cosgrove said. The other man was loud and brash and filled the room. "David wasn't like that, he was concentrating on the character that was on the page, and he was working hard to get inside the skin of that character, almost from the first time he read the script."

Cosgrove's verdict on how the casting aged: "It may be at the beginning some people said, 'that's David Jason', but as time went on, in my view, he became the character, and all you remember is Danger Mouse."

Elsewhere Cosgrove has put it more warmly: "His voice had the perfect mix of forcefulness, humour and gentleness. He was totally committed to doing voiceovers for silly cartoons, which warmed my heart, and we became great friends."

Jason's own account of what he was aiming for, carried in the series record, describes a hero built with a flaw on purpose: "I wanted to make him sound believable. We decided he would be softly spoken, very British, very heroic, but also a bit of a coward. He'd save the world, but he'd also run for it!"

Terry Scott, then famous from Terry and June, played Penfold. In the same HeyUGuys interview Cosgrove described asking Scott to try out for Toad in The Wind in the Willows during a Danger Mouse recording, only for Jason to approach him afterward and quietly ask, "'I don't want to interfere, it's nothing to do with me, and I'll do whatever you want, but do you mind if I had a go at Toad, just put it down on tape?'" Cosgrove said yes, "and it was perfect."

America, and the accent that went back where it started

On 4 June 1984, Danger Mouse and Belle and Sebastian became the first animated shows Nickelodeon ever aired. The mouse quickly became the second most popular program on the channel, behind You Can't Do That on Television. American reviewers reached for a domestic comparison and landed on The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show, on the strength of the gentle political satire and the outlandish plots.

One thing changed on the way over. Stiletto, Greenback's crow henchman, spoke with an Italian accent in the British broadcast. For Nickelodeon he was redubbed with a Cockney accent, to avoid offending Italian-Americans.

The tidy irony is that Cockney is where the character began. Harding's account of inventing the two crows says he "originally called [them] Leatherhead and Dorking and gave cockney accents to" them. The British series made the henchman Italian; American standards handed him back the accent his creator first imagined. Nobody planned that.

Danger Mouse ran on Nickelodeon from 1984 to 1987, and returned from 1991 to 1994.

How the telling has grown over the decades

The tellings do not contradict each other so much as they barely overlap. Harding tells the origin, Trueman tells the writing, Cosgrove tells the casting, and none of them tells the others' part. The one thing they agree on completely is that nobody expected it to work. Trueman's version: "The success of Danger Mouse took us all by surprise. We seem to have loosed an arrow into the air and somehow hit the bull. And when the show came in at number one in one week's viewing figures, there was more giggling than there was the punching of air."

The honest bottom line

Danger Mouse was made cheaply by a small studio in a Manchester suburb, on a schedule that had one man writing two twenty-minute scripts a week by hand, and it hid its budget by turning off the lights and letting the characters talk in the dark. The plots were nonsense on purpose. The premise was a mouse in an eyepatch fighting a toad named after somebody's disliked neighbour. It should have been disposable. Instead it hit 7.2 million viewers in Britain on 3 January 1983, became the first cartoon on Nickelodeon, and taught a generation of American kids that a cartoon was allowed to know it was a cartoon. The cheapness is not a footnote to the charm. It is the source of it.

Sources

More show stories live at /full-story/. Related: the full story of You Can't Do That on Television, the show it ran second to on Nickelodeon, and the full story of Inspector Gadget.

Frequently asked

When did Danger Mouse air in America?

It premiered on Nickelodeon on 4 June 1984, as one of the first two animated shows the channel ever ran, and aired there until 1987. It returned to Nickelodeon from 1991 to 1994.

Who created Danger Mouse?

Brian Cosgrove and Mark Hall created it at Cosgrove Hall Films for Thames Television. Mike Harding helped develop the idea and named Baron Greenback, and Brian Trueman wrote the majority of the episodes.

Why is everything dark in some Danger Mouse episodes?

Money. An episode could need 2,000 drawings, so the studio reused footage and set scenes "in the dark", reducing characters to visible eyeballs, or one eyeball for Danger Mouse. Both Cosgrove and Trueman openly acknowledged it as a cost-saving device.

Who voiced Danger Mouse?

David Jason, cast after Cosgrove and Hall saw him in Only Fools and Horses. Terry Scott, then known for Terry and June, voiced Penfold.

Why does Stiletto sound different in the American version?

In the British broadcast Greenback's crow henchman spoke with an Italian accent. For Nickelodeon the dialogue was redubbed with a Cockney accent, to avoid offending Italian-American viewers.

How many episodes of Danger Mouse were made?

The original series ran 89 episodes on ITV, from 28 September 1981 to 19 March 1992. A separate revival series launched in 2015 with a different production company.