I have my Christmas Radio Times, so I am more than aware about The Snowman and the Snowdog (Channel 4, 8pm Christmas Eve 2012 as well as a few repeats) – and somehow I stumbled across The Snowman and The Snowdog in iTunes – it’s free, so I figured it’s worth a download.

It’s a really charming app! It features all of Raymond Briggs’ artwork from the Snowman book – the Snowman flies over various places (including some London landmarks – at The London Eye I pointed out Shaun’s work, and H exclaimed “Why  is Daddy’s work on the iPad?!”) – you collect snowflakes to earn more time (I’m not sure how much per snowflake but there’s lots – I’ve managed to do two and a half circuits of the game on them) and you have to pick up objects on your journey to get bonuses and badges.

The app is run in conjunction with Channel 4, and there’s plenty of ‘Don’t forget to watch!’ type things on there which weren’t too obtrusive (but enough to remember!).

You can slow down the flying by swiping downwards and speed things up by swiping upwards (which didn’t seem to work for me) – worth knowing as we had no idea until it told us a few minutes in. You work your way through the map, so there’s Hastings, North London, the North Pole, back to South London, the countryside and right back to Hastings – although if you run out of time you’ll have to try again. When you complete all tasks in an area you’ll get three stars.

If you want a game you can sit and play with your (younger) child, this is the kind of thing – older children will enjoy it too and probably need less help. Personally, I love it – I can see us going back to this app several times due to the amount of things you need to do!