Doggy D'Artagnan

 One of the pleasures of grandparenthood is enjoying all over again some of the things that most entertained us in our own childhood and, later, when our own children were young. Books, of course, but also vintage animations – the great Chuck Jones classics, Popeye, Oliver Postgate's Bagpuss and Ivor the Engine, John Ryan's Captain Pugwash, and more from the golden age when cartoons were lovingly made, creatively scripted and free of computer-generated razzle dazzle. And now there's another animation that the Lichfield grandsons (and their grandparents) are loving – Dogtanian and the Three Muskehounds, an improbable Spanish-Japanese production from the early 1980s. I'd forgotten how good this was (though I hadn't forgotten the signature tune, 'One for All and All for One' – no one can). As the name suggests, it's a retelling of Alexandre Dumas's The Three Musketeers, with some of the darker elements expunged, the names of Porthos and Athos swapped around (why?), the plot much simplified, and, er, the principal characters mostly played by dogs. Dogtanian, the canine D'Artagnan, looks rather like Snoopy in 17th-century French costume, and has a nose that responds visibly to strong emotion, but he is every bit as impetuous, honourable, romantic and handy with a sword as his human original. The story is as exciting and swashbuckling as Dumas (and told much more concisely), and the ethos is very much that of the original. So far we've watched six episodes, and happily there are twenty more to come. This is going to be fun.