The Gruffalo was a book that Mo Northover tried to get his dyslexic son Elliot to read in 2020, on the day the Silurians attack their Welsh town of Cwmtaff. Elliot tried but soon gave up, insisting that he could listen to it by audiobook.
It contained the passage:
- "But who is this creature with terrible claws,
- Terrible teeth in his terrible jaws?"
When Sarah Jane Smith was reading an article from the Ealing Echo about an alien that the Shopkeeper claimed to have seen, Clyde jokingly compared its description to the book's titular monster. (TV: Lost in Time)
Behind the scenes
The Gruffalo received an animated TV adaptation in 2009, which featured the voices of James Corden, Rob Brydon, and John Hurt. The book's sequel, The Gruffalo's Child, also received an animated adaptation in 2011, with Corden, Brydon and Hurt reprising their roles, as well as being joined by Shirley Henderson as the voice of the titular child. Both films aired on BBC One. The former aired immediately before the first part of TV: The End of Time on 25 December 2009.
To promote the release of the aforementioned sequel film, the Gruffalo appeared as a computer-generated character in Consider Yourself One Of Us...