Although snowmen have existed for thousands of years, Briggs was the first to recognise the commercial value of the brand. Briggs secured the copyright to snowmen in 1982 with the film adaptation of his  book about a little boy who builds a snowman that comes to life, melting shortly afterwards, but leaving a scarf as proof of his existence.

‘Our client’s snowman was a wonderful creation with lavish accessories including a woollen hat and scarf,’ said Mr Briggs’ lawyers. ‘Most of the little shits who copy his image don’t use proper clothes and make his arms out of  twigs. Most of them can’t even fly. It’s a disgrace.’

Briggs denies he’s a spoilsport intent on ruining children’s fun, but added; ‘I’ll certainly  be doing something about all those imitation Father Christmas characters, again one of my copyrighted creations, that appear every December. As far as royalties go, I expect I’ll soon be walking in the air,’ said Briggs.

The Prime Minister said in Parliament that snowmen were being lost at an alarming rate and that this was more than just a ‘face saving formula’ (although bits of coal were being provided for this as well). David Cameron lashed out at the plans, claiming that the government’s snowmen proposals were ‘all carrot and no stick’. The Liberal Democrats said that seasonal factors should be taken into consideration and perhaps we should come back to this problem in the summer. David Cameron also announced that the Conservatives may approach Raymond Briggs about setting up a ‘Snowman task-force’ to devise a workable plan for Britain’s hardworking snowmen and women.

However there were concerns that not all snowmen were deserving of emergency government support from the so-called ‘slush fund’. Some have been photographed lounging around on park benches, while others have been reported for exposing their genitals in public places. One guilty snowman claimed ‘exposing my penis like this really isn’t me. Honestly, this big thing was stuck on afterwards by a couple of schoolboys.’

andrewtaylor (one line malgor)

However visitors to Britain were shocked to see that national snowman standards had plummetted since the last cold winter, with the worst display of snow sculptures ever recorded. ‘Your country’s snowmen are bullshit’ said French Canadian Jean-Pierre Bertillon. ‘You are just making big lumps of slush with clichéd features that look nothing like human beings.’ Another tourist said it was pathetic to see the country of great sculptors like Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth producing such dismal attempts at the human form. Journalists from around the world have relished reporting Britain’s national humiliation with English snowmen being laughed at by newsreaders as the joke item at the end of their evening bulletin.

In a packed House of Commons, Conservative Education spokesman David Willets blasted the government for removing snow skills from the national curriculum and failing to promote ‘winter crafts’ as a specialism in the government’s flagship City Academies. ‘We are creating a ‘lost generation’ of children with no vital ‘real world’ snowman experience. Traditional skills such rolling a small snow ball into a larger one are in danger of becoming completely unknown to a whole generation of young people’ he said.

For their part the government blamed global warming and eighteen years of Conservative government although they pulled back from earlier briefings suggesting that Thursday had seen ‘the wrong sort of snow’. Leaked documents revealed that the government had considered employing professional ice sculptors from Poland and the Czech Republic to build high quality snowmen in prominent public spaces in the hope that people would assume had been made by British school children.

‘But I don’t accept that there are no high quality snowmen in Britain today’ said Education Minister Alan Johnson. ‘I have seen dozens of brilliant, original and realistic snowmen made by British children this week.’ However the minister neglected to add the detail that these snowmen had all been created digitally on ‘Nintendo Sim-Snow 07’.

Engels