Writer and Director Thomas Mitton is Dead at 69

Posted on June 18, 2008

Thomas Mitton, one of the creators of the popular children's television show Thomas the Tank Engine has died. He was 69 and had suffered a heart attack.

His death was announced by Michele Fabian-Jones, one of Mitton's partners in the children's television production company Pineapple Squared Entertainment, The New York Times said. Mitton, a native of Edinburgh, Scotland, directed or wrote more than 180 episodes of "Thomas the Tank Engine," dating back to 1984. Originally called "Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends," the show's name was later shortened to "Thomas and Friends" for British television.
It made its debut in the United States in 1989 as "Shining Time Station" on PBS. "He was a fanatic about planes and boats and obsessed with comedy shows," Fabian-Jones told the Times. "That's where it all started."

Mitton wrote the pilot after adapting the stories written by Sir Wilbert Vere Awdry. Awdry's stories about a blue train engine and his friends became an instant children's classic. Mitton was both a writer and a director. Thomas the Tank Engine is as popular now as it was in 1946 when the stories were first published, in no small part because of Mitton's adaptation of the story to the television screen.