"After the Rutles had blown up in my face with the publishing thing, I decided I'd had enough of the music industry. And about the same time, somebody had asked me to do children's television.

"The head of children's television at the time, Yorkshire Television, rang up out of the blue saying, 'I want to do Terry Jones' Fairy Tales. And I said, 'Oh, that's nice.' And he said, 'Well, Terry's actually asked if you will adapt them for television, as a condition.' I said, 'I'd love to. Let's look at it and talk about it.' So that was it.

"Terry had bolted me onto the project because he liked the Innes Book of Records and thought if I brought something of that to the Fairy Tales, that might work. I think it was me that came up with the idea of East of the Moon from an old poem, 'East of the Sun and West of the Moon,' and I turned it round. Because Terry Jones' Fairy Tales didn't seem like a very grabbable title; a good subtitle, but not the sort of thing that would look good on the schedule pages. And I began to think, well, okay, yeah, we'll do it, along the lines of, let's do the stories… I think at least two dramatized stories and two animated stories with songs as a way of presenting them.

"It took years to get off the ground, actually, before we got the money to do it. And it wasn't the happiest of production times. In fact we only made seven when I'd written thirteen. I was going to direct them at one point, and then I realized that because we got money in from Channel 4 in Wales, they wanted a Welsh version as well. I said, 'No, this isn't going to work. Do you realize we've got to do all the spoken scenes twice!' Which is like doubling the budget, and they're only putting in like a tenth. So it doesn't compute. So I resigned. My first job as a director I resigned!

"Anyway, they went ahead and did it, and I came in and did music for it and odd bits of narration. But no, it's one of those things that happen in television. It had moments, but it wasn't exactly as I wanted to do it. And my recollection is, I spoke to the number two, I think, at Channel Four in Wales, and I said, 'Look, we can't possibly do it twice. You can't just have bilingual actors.' Because it meant we had to have Welsh speaking actors only who could speak English. I said, 'You know, we can dub. And whether they speak only Welsh or only English, we can dub the other thing.' He said, 'Yes, I quite agree.' And this producer just didn't see that at all, and insisted that we did it her way. I think, in fact she lost quite a bit of money with the overage as it were. And then Channel Four, because she went behind somebody's back at Channel Four to someone who's further higher up, they didn't forgive her, so the other six weren't commissioned. It's a real grown-up world there, children's television!"