Backlisted - Backlisted Special - The books of our childhood

Episode Date: January 24, 2023

Welcome to our first Backlisted special of 2023. Today we’re joined by the award-winning novelist and screenwriter Frank Cottrell-Boyce, an official friend of Backlisted, who returns for the first time since his appearance on the Christmas 2021 episode on The Railway Children by Edith Nesbit, one of our most popular shows. These specials are designed to fill the gap until the show proper returns in April. They differ from the usual Backlisted format in that they feature just one guest choosing a number of books in an area they know and care about. The discussion covers examines what inspired Frank’s love of reading when he was growing up, and includes favourite books by T.H. White, Ursula K. Le Guin, Joan Aiken, Tim Hunkin and Richmal Crompton. * To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops. * For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm *If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Image Credit: Archives New Zealand from New Zealand, CC BY-SA 2.0 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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That's BetterHelp.com. meeting with friends before the show, we can book your reservation. And when you get to the main event, skip to the good bit using the card member entrance. Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by card. Other conditions apply. Man We said we were on sabbatical and boy, we are. Well, it's very nice to be asked along to the party.

Oh, we're so pleased you're here. I'm so glad that when you played Trune from school, you said, Frank, come with us. It'll be great. That's so true. Exactly. So true. We'll It's so true. We'll go to the library.

Yeah. I've got the gobstoppers. Hello and welcome to our first Backlisted special. I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound, the platform where readers crowdfund books they really want to read. And I'm Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reading Dangerously. The format of these specials differs from the main backlisted podcasts, the usual ones that we do, in that they'll feature just one guest choosing a number of books in an area that they know something about, they care something about,

and most importantly, they can talk about for an hour. So let's see what happens as we welcome to the first Backlist special on children's books, Frank Cottrell-Boyce. Thanks, Frank Cottrell-Boyce. So we're joined by the award-winning novelist and screenwriter Frank Cottrell-Boyce, an official friend of Backlisted, who first appeared on episode number 79 to discuss Torvald Janssen's Moominvalley in November and then teamed up with fellow writer Catherine Rundell for episode 137 on Tristram Shandy and then again for the now legendary 2021 Christmas show with the weeping in it on the railway children our most downloaded show ever our most downloaded show ever frank that's true frank that's true and all welcome welcome back welcome back okay so frank's best-selling children's

books include millions which won the 2004 carnegie medals sputnik's guide to life on earth uh shortlisted for the carnegie in 2016 most recently noah's gold all of these books illustrated by stephen lenton and published by Macmillan. But there's also, isn't there, I think, Frank, a new book? The Wonder Brothers, yeah, June, July, yeah. Exciting. So one of the reasons we're doing this show is that Frank made the news before Christmas

when he and fellow writer Robin Stevens vented their frustration about the lack of critical conversation around children's books and how this is resulting in a narrowing of choice. The point they were making was simple. If you don't have conversations about children's books, they quickly lose visibility in the culture. So we thought, what better way of helping that conversation happen than by asking Frank about some of the books he loved when he was growing up. So welcome to the Backlisted Children's Book Special.

Listen, when you made that statement, when you and Robin issued your manifesto, when you nailed it to the door of a cathedral, what were you expecting there to be the surge in response that you got? Not at all, because honestly, I've been saying the same things for about a decade. It's just a very simple point about choice. And I don't really know why. I mean, I've gone to that cathedral door, nailed it on every morning. It's just blown away.

For some reason, it stayed on. So, yeah, I don't know why it worked this time. I think I had a good aphorism because it was sort of the swirl had started with people talking about celebrity authors and being cross about celebrity authors which they always are and at my contentions it's not celebrity authors fault and actually some of the celebrities that people are talking about got famous by being good at writing you know um um so i said i think i said something like but blaming uh david williams because he doesn't write books that something like, but blaming David Williams

because he doesn't write books that you like is like blaming Pizza Express for not selling scatter cushions. Because there is a choice. Somebody needs to tell you where to buy scatter cushions. And nobody is. Don't you think that's sort of the case with books in general, though, in the culture?

It is peculiar to me. I mean, I know there's the Sarah Cox show and there's the Graham Norton show, but we're not overburdened, really, with places where people can discuss books in the broader culture. I suppose there's a lot of recommendation that goes on online. But do you think children's books are particularly disadvantaged? Oh, I mean, definitely. I mean, I know what you're talking about, but the Booker Prize is still there.

There isn't really a prize for children's books. And if there is, it's very understated anyway. When I won the Carnegie, I honestly thought when I got back to Liverpool, there would be an open-top tour of the city, and the boss kept be holding it up. I didn't know that it wasn't a big deal. It's a hard way to find out, man. It's a hard way.

But, I mean, again, in that interview on Today, I said, look, I have a control experiment because I write films. And the most wretchedly rubbish film that I write is still guaranteed you know a quarter of a page review in every broadsheet I'll still probably be on front row I might even be on the one show someone from the film will be on the one show will be the writer and that's a film that I'll open on a Friday and close on a Monday and hardly anyone will go and see. And if they did, they won't remember it. But like I could write a towering masterpiece of children's literature, which I do like every year.

And I'd be very lucky to get like, I will be jumping around the house if I get a sentence in a roundup, you know? I mean, there are people who review children's books and they're brilliant. Alex O'Connell and, you know, there are people flying the flag there, but they're very beleaguered and they're very, very short of space. And Frank, do you perceive, I know you're going to say yes, but I'm asking this question anyway, do you perceive that there is a public appetite for it? Or is it playing, I'm playing devil's advocate here, is it an appetite amongst it or is it playing i'm playing devil's advocate here is it

an appetite amongst children's writers who would just like more coverage for their books i mean do you do you feel the public is in need of that conversation is wanting to have that conversation and doesn't have a forum for it i feel children are in need of it you know because you know how much you gain from the books that you read when you were little and and how how how much power you've you continue to draw from them and how much they helped build the the apparatus of happiness inside you you know we should all have found that out the last couple of years how important it is to know how to be happy and I gained that from children's books and I didn't gain them entirely from the children's books

that were being, you know, at the forefront of publicity at the time. And actually, I was very well served. You know, we had a children's book club in school where the scoop thing. We had K-Web. We had Jack and Ori. We had the Puffing Club. We had to come on to that, weren't we?

All those things that were kind of books in translation, and now that's narrowed down to virtually nothing, you know? So if you don't, if David Walliams isn't what you like, there's really not that much else on the show. I mean, I am absolutely not slacking David Walliams off at all whatsoever. I definitely think there's a place. But there's somewhere, there are other things, you know? Yeah.

Well, we're going to talk about books you liked as children. I've just been writing something about Winnie the Pooh and the House at Pooh Corner, which I have quoted from the works of Frank Cottrell Boyce because he introduced a volume of A.L. Milne's... Oh, Happy Half Hours. ...pieces of comic writing. And you wrote the script of Goodbye, Christopher Robin as well.

Yeah, I did, yeah, yeah, yeah. But personally, I think Winnie the Pooh is my introduction to comic writing. It's not a children's book per se. It's the earliest introduction I got to the beats of comic writing, which obviously is a huge thing for me in my life. And in my heart, as you say, Frank. It's very difficult to make someone laugh off a page.

And I guess what Milne does so brilliantly in Winnie the Pooh is that it's so quotable that you go and say those lines and you get a laugh. You give it so generous. Andy gets the laugh for saying that line. Pathetic, that's what it is. To just choose one. Yeah, anyway. So, Frank, what's the first book on your pile that you've chosen for us today?

The first sort of big fat book that I read, which I remember very clearly, reading on the bus, which was T.H. White's The Once and Future King. Troubled masterpiece, but an absolutely extraordinary... Troubled masterpiece or troubled man? Wasn't T.H. White a troubled man? He was a troubled man, wasn't he?

Well, he was troubled. Yes. Sylvia Townsend Warner wrote a biography of him, which is an amazing... Yeah. And it's like a very, very long school report, very disapproving school report. And it's like every page is like,

you'll never guess what he's done now. Yes, OK, yeah. Nicky, we got a clip from the Once and Future King before we talk about it. We have got a clip that I took from a BBC radio play from 2014. And this is where Merlin is describing his unique perspective on life or the way he sees life, which is slightly back to front. You know how much information I've got cluttering up my brain?

The entire contents of the Encyclopaedia Britannica doesn't even come close. It's one of the perils of living backwards, as I'm sure I mentioned when we first met. Or didn't I? If you did, I'm not sure I understood it then either. Roll on the Age of Enlightenment. Incidentally, what was I doing when you turned up? Fetching water from the well. Oh, yeah.

The absence of plumbing. No wonder they'll call this the Dark Ages. Brian Sibley wrote that script. Yeah. It's a very, very good adaptation, isn't it? Yeah. I mean, Brian wrote the Radio 4 adaptation of Lord of the Rings which is a massive influence

on the films he did the Box of Delights and this is so good he's so brilliant so what's going on there Frank well okay so in the first half of the first book of the Once and Future King is very familiar and that's how I ended up reading it it It's The Sword in the Stone, which was filmed by Disney. And it's got this great, it's got this brilliant idea in it that Merlin, it's a prequel to Mallory is what T.H. White called it. And it's the education of King Arthur by Merlin. So Arthur at that time doesn't know he's King Arthur.

He sort of lives this sort of feral life in a little castle in the woods. Merlin turns up, but Merlin is living his life backwards so he can remember things from the future. So it has this brilliant play with anachronism, which makes it incredibly light, but it's got this, there's a sort of magic in that because Merlin is in your time, which often in historical novels, people do that. Don't they? Yeah. Um,

you know, Hillary Mantel or whatever. It's like the hero is nice because he's a bit like someone from the 21st century. Not like these other tosses from the middle ages. It's always that, isn't it? It's,

um, it's Kevin Costner delivering a baby and Robin Hood and all that. So she, he does that, but he does it explicitly. And somehow that frees the description of the Middle Ages or this invented Middle Ages. So it feels really, really real. The Wildwood, the stuff about falconry, which of course is full of detail,

but also the stuff about armour, all this sort of course is full of detail, but also the stuff about armour, all this sort of boyish delight in detail is in there. But it floats. It's not clogged. A lot of historical writing is like an old antique shop, isn't it? It's full of dust and bits and bobs. It feels really alive, I suppose because Merlin is T.H. White. Right, that's interesting.

Yeah. What's the falconry thing? Well, T.H. White trained a gottle. He was very faddy. He had this great axiom, which is, if you're sad, learn something new. So he was constantly learning to fly, learning to drive. Right. But he tried to learn medieval falconry.

And if you read Helen J. Macdonald's H is for Hawk, she kind of follows his version of the goshawk. And he was a dreadful, dreadful falconer. Was he? He was awful. But he presents it with confidence. Absolutely.

But then when you read it and you've read her, you think, no, he's telling you he's doing a really terrible job. He just doesn't get that he's doing a terrible job. Right, OK. Because wasn't he... I mean, he was a teacher, right, at Stowe, and then he kind of dropped out and sort of lived on the land really badly as a sort of semi-feral lifestyle,

hunting and fishing and badly training his goshawk. Hunting and fishing, yeah. And then in the Second World War, he disappeared to the west of Ireland and did a lot of goose shooting and, you know, lived off... Well, by then, he could live off his writing because he wrote this monster success, which wasn't good for him, I don't think.

I was going to ask you, was The once and future king a bestseller when it when it was first published or did it take a little while to to warm up it was absolutely huge because uh well you know obviously disney bought it but the camelot is based on it it was a sort of big cult among the kennedy family and it couldn't have it couldn't be bigger it was huge i mean just it crops up if you're reading stuff about the 60s in america it crops up time and time again the guys who flew the the x10 the x10 the stealth plane you know that big black sort of yeah stratospheric plane they

used to because it's boring flying those things they used to read the ones of future king it's like it was everywhere because it's what about five books really isn't it and it's it he wrote it over a period of time yeah and it's the other books that really gripped me i loved uh sword in the stone because i've only read the sword in the stone i'd be really interested because apparently the the lancelot one the ill the ill the ill-made night i mean, what titles? Queen of Air and Darkness, The Ill-Made Light, The Candle in the Wind.

Yeah. And Lancelot is ugly. This is the key to his portrayal. So he has to be three times as good as everybody else as a knight in order to win Arthur's favour. But he also is trying to be good all the time. And of course, falls in love with Gwenevere. So he's like literally the be good all the time. And of course falls in love with whatever. So he's like literally the worst, the biggest sinner.

So he's this, he's the serpent in, in paradise, but he's, he loves paradise more than anybody else does. You know, it's, it's,

it is even, I must've been like 11 or 12, but even I, and I was gripped by it partly because it was, it's very sexy that, you know, it's not explicit, but it's sort of pulses with desire.

And I didn't quite know what was happening to me when I was reading it. But it's heartbreaking, that book. Absolutely heartbreaking. And there's a scene where Lancelot is asked to perform a miracle because he's so good and the Holy Grail thing is going on and all that stuff. And he knows that he can't because he's like this massive sinner and he kind of feels that if he if he doesn't then he'll give the game away and everyone will sort of suss it's a it's a really

strange situation but you're completely in it with him you're thinking and and he does a miracle and everybody's really thrilled but he's the only one who knows that the miracle is that he was allowed to do a miracle yes it's so weird and are these books much read now i do you know i don't i don't know anyone else has read them yeah right so i've i've heard of them of course i remember selling them when i was a bookseller yeah i think i've read the sword in the stone read that when i was a kid maybe but i have no sense at all i'd love to know if if you're listening to this and you're a children's bookseller or a bookseller whether this still does decent numbers through the tills here in the here in 2023 i have no sense of it at all you would recommend them though frank you think i don't know because like... You haven't read them for a long time.

Obviously times have changed. No, I do. I dip into them all the time and they're so vivid to me that they're like my personal memories. Right. Honestly, they're so vivid that there's some scenes in there that I think I've lived. I know that sounds bad.

And they've become part of me. I'm sure there are things to disagree with them. Like, for instance, the book that I loved most was The Queen of Her own Darkness, which is about the Orkney family. And now if I read it, I can see that part of that is a kind of very English, anti-Irish, racism is the wrong word, but scorn

for kind of Irish ideas about honour and bravery and sw swagger and it's a bit like alan breck in um in kidnap it's like he's glamorous but he's also an idiot and they're like that and i like now that like my family's my wife's from the west of ireland i read them i think i know what he's getting at here but they are lovely i really do want to be around them you know the way they call each other my hearts and my heroes your second choice has also got a wizard in it yeah I said before like building the apparatus of happiness so I've chosen the Wizard of Earthsea which yes by Ursula K Le Guin yeah Ursula K. Le Guin whose name comes up regularly in in discussions of authors we ought to feature on the main show yeah this one really this this appearance this cameo appearance by Ursula K. Le Guin will not preclude her getting her own full

episode of Batlisted in due course, everybody. Don't worry. Now, Ursula Le Guin died, didn't she, two or three years ago, maybe? Yeah, it's quite recent. I'm hopeless at time. I think of her more as a writer of science fiction than as a children's writer, Frank. I'm sure that's how she thought of herself as well. Right. When does this date from in her career the wizard of earth sea it's 60 it's 68 so she it was i mean you know she was she she published other other books before she definitely

published other sci-fi before yeah she was big right i mean because it came as a request as a commission wasn't yeah it was she started with a couple of stories I think they started as a couple of stories and that's when she kind of created the Earthsea what we might now call the Earthsea universe and then Wizard of Earthsea came in in 68 and it sort of became a trilogy and I think in the end there were maybe five books um in the yeah in the sequence i i think i was in year six when i read it i can remember everything about reading it i can remember what chair i read it in i can remember the font which is a beautiful font and most of all the map incredible it's got the best map of any book with a map is great but this is way the best map of any books because it's um an archipelago which i don't think if anybody's had done that before but so the whole of earthsea

is just a massive archipelago with and the names are brilliant and i think i could probably have named all the islands at one point um how many can you name now go on, let's do that. Gont, Kargad, The Hands, Dragon's Run, Pelnor, Uffish, oh, this is the, oh, the main one. Where's the school? Roque! Roque!

That was very impressive. I've got a question. We're talking about Frank's favourite children's books. So you've chosen your first, you've cheated twice now, Frank, because you've basically chosen ten of your favourite children's books for your first two choices. Why is the fantasy novelist drawn to five-volume sequences? Why can't they just stop at one?

I kind of wish she had, because I feel dreadful saying this, but like, Toons of Atuana is extraordinary. It's a very short sequel to, or it happens in Earthsea, but the other's a bit, sort of drops off a cliff, really. I mean... Drops off a cliff, right. She gets a bit kind of taken up with her own sort of moral kind of... It becomes very ideological and very political.

The Father's Shore, I remember being really disappointed by. What is the political outlook she's seeking to express, then? I think she thought that they were very male-centric, the books, because they are, you know, she chose to write about wizards, who are traditionally male, and the female characters in The Wizard of Earthsea don't have a lot of agency. And one of them in particular is your kind of seductress character.

She's only in it for a little bit. So from a purely feminist point of view, that's unsatisfactory. But her attempt to correct that feels apologetic. You know, it doesn't have the energy and conviction that she had when she just threw herself into that world. That's interesting. There's a good female character in Tombs of Atuan, isn't there? Oh, absolutely amazing. She should have given herself more credit for

having done that yeah seems that sounds extraordinary absolutely extraordinary book it's interesting but there's there's all there's a lot of stuff in there i mean people have said that unlike most of the wizards that are kind of derived from mallory you know the Merlin is a sort of middle-aged academic, which you could say in a way T.H. White does and Garner does with Cadelan and obviously Gandalf in Lord of the Rings. The original thing about Earthsea was to have a young wizard, a young wizard being trained. We've got a clip of her explaining about how she came up

with that idea. Do you want to have a listen? Yeah, brilliant. Yes, please. I'd been asked to write a fantasy for teenagers. And I thought, I haven't written anything for kids. So I sort of said, you know, I don't know how to write for children. It's a different art. And he said, well, think about it. So I went home and I did think about it.

And because the book was to be for young people, I guess, is what put it in my head that all the wizards in all the books that I had read in 1967 were old. They were old men, old white men with white beards and white hair and peaky caps, you know. But you can't be an old man without having been young. And it occurred to me, well, how does a wizard, how does he start out? And, well, obviously, he's got a lot to learn so where do you learn things you learn them in school so you go to wizard school okay now i'm telling you this is 1967 there have been other's poor you know he's got he's

he's a single his mum is a single parent they live the back of beyond no wizards come that way and he goes to this posh school you know and all that thing of like going to a big venerable institution feeling you don't really belong there and because you don't really belong there trying a bit too hard and in this case creating an absolute disaster by doing that but being sure that he's great as well and that social mobility side of it and also the sexiness of knowledge you know that that book really made knowing things cool and in particular there's like two different ways to know things there's there's illusion which is impressive and fancy and talkative and a bit boris johnson-y and there's also another teacher called origin who who walks around and really gets to understand a particular flower

so that he really understands that flower before moving on to the next flower or the next stream or the next pebble and gets to know a bit you know you just said gannon gone a bit like alan garner who lives in this tiny patch of land but knows it to the Earth's core. And it's the naming, isn't it? It's the power of the real names. I just still remember that bit when Ged gets his name Ged, doesn't it? It's amazing.

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You know, the Puffin, the books of our... We're all old and old now, and we remember the Puffin Club from the 60s and 70s and how important Kay Webb was running Puffin and the way in which she and the people she worked with pushed books which were often challenging is the right word. Yeah. But they knew were good.

Absolutely. In front of us. And books in translation, a lot of books in translation, which that doesn't seem to happen very much anymore at all. I suppose including, yeah, the Moomin books, for instance. The Moomins, Agaton Sachs, I've just reread. Agaton Sachs, yes. Which is a Swedish detective book, you know, mad things.

Like, yeah. Eric Kastner. And it made you feel like the world, Eric Kastner, yeah, of course. But you feel like the world eric castor yeah of course but you felt like the world belonged to you you know yeah and it was it was also that genius of the the club idea wasn't it and puffin post and that sense of being of being part of something with other with other with other kids which yeah and i i mean, I didn't go on those. You could go on a puffing holiday. Yeah, I know. Never afford it.

No, I whirled away, but I read that Kay Webb biography, and she was a brilliant editor. She wasn't great on health and safety, I don't think. Well. She obviously thought the puffing club had members to spare. She obviously thought the Puffing Club had members to spare. Your next book was also another classic Puffin author. Well, I've chosen an anthology of Joan Aitken's stories. And my copy is called A Small Pitch of Weather.

But I think those stories were always being shuffled around. Joan Aitken produced... She's like a kid's Michael Moorpark or something. Over a hundred books. But all in different kind of franchises. You know, so there's like books set in

the wolf world. Yeah, wolves of Willoughby Chase. Yeah, where James III is king of England or whatever. And there's Mortimer and the Mortimer the Raven, this raven that goes round going nevermore, which was sort of very, very overtly funny and they were written for Jack and Ori.

But what I loved, and honestly, it was like, I remember reading them thinking, are you allowed to do this? Were the Armitage stories, which are stories about a very, very middle-class family. Like for some reason that didn't bother me. And they live in a, I want to say they live in a magic world,

but like the magic is so taken for granted in these stories that it's just sort of an annoyance, isn't it? They've got like an uncle who comes to stay, who's sort of badgered somebody and he's bought the Apple of Discord off somebody. Yeah. And he's very bumptious and he's a colonel and he doesn't notice things.

So he doesn't notice that the furies, the ironies are camped on the doorstep because they want the Apple of Discord back. But the rest of it is like, it's as though that happened in a william brown story you know there's a grumpily preoccupied father kind of quite caring but sort of slightly distant mother and kids dealing with all these you know elemental forces but there's none of that kind of like oh the adults wouldn't believe us type of thing it's like they would but they would just be busy oh the furies are on the doorstep well you know can you see to that darling

the great uncle the great uncle gavin is a brilliant character because he's just incredibly sort of um he's just grumpy all the way through and he can see them can't he can see the furies they're on the doorstep the furies're on the doorstep. The Furies are on the doorstep, pointing, the kindly ones, pointing accusingly at him. And he just sort of breezes past them all the time. bothered me class was not a thing that bothered me when i was a child reader it never bothered me amongst her favorite books were the bag thoughts yeah by helen cresswell she said and i didn't read those thinking guru i resent these these bag thoughts with their nice house and their their ramshackle existence she was just i just i thought how lovely it must be to live like that she said she used to watch the good life on tv and think, well, that's the house I want to live in. Margot and Jerry's house, by the way, not Tom and Barbara's.

Margot and Jerry's lovely house. It depends, though, doesn't it? Because some of those, well, I said the armistice didn't bother me, but I hated Matilda. I couldn't bear to look at Matilda because I knew that the finger was being pointed. The baddies and the ridiculous people were my people, you know. So it depends.

Matilda by Roald Dahl. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. It's, you know, class hatred. How are you? It's awful. Yeah. And the twits.

Yes. I couldn't agree with you more. Have you got a bit to read from the Armitages? I've got a little bit here about Great Uncle Gavin, which is quite funny. Oh, you read it, John. We love to hear it in your voice. Okay.

So this is Mark. There's Mark and Harriet, the kids, right? And Mark is being told off by his great uncle Gavin. Here we go. Bless my soul, boy. Nearly all great-uncle Gavin's remarks began with this request. Bless my soul. What are you doing now? Reading? Bless my soul. Do you want to grow up a muff? A muff, great-uncle. What is a muff exactly? Mark pulled out the notebook in which he was keeping a glossary of great-uncle Gavin.

A muff? Why, a muff is a funks sir. A duffer, a frowse, a tug, a swat, a miserable little sneaky milksop. Mark was so busy writing down all the words that he forgot to be annoyed. You ought to be out of doors, sir. Ought to be out playing footer. Oh, but you need 22 people for that, Mark pointed out, and there's only Harriet and me. Besides, it's summer, and Harriet's a bit of a duffer at French cricket. Don't be impudent, boy. Gad, when I was urgent, I'd been out collecting bird's eggs. Bird's eggs, said Mark Scandalous, but I'm a subscribing member of the Royal Society

for the Production of Birds. Butterflies, then, growled his great uncle. It's brilliant. It's really good. So Joan Aitken, she had a long and glorious career this year. I love the description of her as the Michael Moorcock. Yeah, she was 2004. 2004 she died.

She's got that kind of Moorcockian volcanicness as well. So if you do sit down and read all the endless sequels to The Wolves Are Going to Be Chased, they're full of contradictions and discontinuities because she was just like, get it down, get it down, get it down. It's like there's nothing considered about them. They're just full of this energy of like, would it be great if there was a huge pink whale?

Or we had a gun that could shoot us to America. It's like, let's do it. Bizarrely, she wrote a whole sequence, I think six or seven, Jane Austen. Jane Austen sequels. Sequels, you know, Mansfield Revisited and The Young Miss Ward. Yeah. And were those written for children?

Were they sequels for children or were they books for adults? I think they were for Jane to show how she could do it. Yeah. She put her mind to it. But I want to say there's one story. I mean, stories are fun and i really like them and some of them have really stuck with me smoke from cromwell's time harriet's heirloom where she inherits a yeah it doesn't matter but uh there's one the cereal garden yeah it's one of the most painfully romantic and beautiful story that you've ever read. And it starts with cutting out of, you know, do you remember the back of cereal packets?

There used to be models that you would cut out and bend, flap A, glue to C. He's building one of these and it's from an engraving of, and they're on breakfast bricks, which is a rubbish cereal. And he builds this garden and it's from a rubbish cereal. And he builds this garden. And it's from a set of 18th century engravings. And it turns out that someone has been hidden in this garden magically inside the engraving for love. He's waiting for the lover to come. Yeah.

And you do know who the lover is and who's now an old man. And it's so beautiful. It's so perfectly plotted. It's like a little piece of Mozart, isn't it? It's just a heartbreaking story. Amazing. Everybody should read it. I can't tell you the ending,

but I know that Joan Aitken herself was so mortified by, she had so much correspondence from people saying, how could you have done this to these beautiful characters? She took it out of her collection of stories because she was so, she felt that she. Really? Yeah. And it is certainly of all the Armitage ones,

which I thank you for recommending because I read them this week. What joy. I mean, amazing. But that's just one of the great saddest stories ever told it's it's absolutely heart-wrecking story and we're talking to frank about his favorite children's books and we've talked about fiction so far but uh maybe we should talk about non-fiction and john my dear co-host john has written the following words on my notes. Discussion of iSpy. Oh, right.

Now, iSpy books. Who wants to start on these beautiful things? iSpy books. Frank, did you have a set of iSpy books as a child? I've still got them. I've still got mine as well. Not here, Frank, but it's like it is. But don't you think if you were a curious child in the late 60s, early 70s, they were absolutely the most brilliant thing. I mean, I've talked about them on Lotlisted and how my father was absolutely mortified because it was the Daily Mail

where big chief I spy would communicate with his chief. Couldn't be more problematic. Yeah, so we weren't allowed to have the Daily Mail in the house. You know, as far as cultural appropriation goes. I remember, didn't Pig Chief I spy Abbie's wigwam, presumably? Wigwam by the water. Wigwam by the water. Yeah, wasn't it Shepard's Bush Green?

Something like that, yeah. I can remember being on a birthday outing in the 70s driving through Shepard's Bush Green, and this is true, looking desperately round for Big Chief I Spy's wigwam and seeing nothing.

You used to get a little badge, an I Spy badge, and you'd see other people who had iSpy badges. It was a bit like people with VWs waving. Amazing. There's another, you know, what are you? And mine were always on archaeology and the countryside. George, do you know anything about the wizard publisher

who came up with that idea? Do we know anything about how lucrative they were? I think it was very lucrative. Who invented the plan for it? Big Chief iSpy was Charles Warrer, a former headmaster who created iSpy

towards the end of his working life. He retired in 56 but lived until 95 when he died at the age of 106. Wow, did he? Yeah.

And he presumably absolutely loaded. Yeah. David Bellamy became Big Chief iSpy at one point in the 80s, loaded. Yeah. I think David Bellamy became big chief ice spyer in the 80s. Gosh. Well, they're about noticing things. They were about noticing things.

The beginning of happiness is noticing things, isn't it? So they were telling you to keep looking. And the things that are problematic, I mean, everything was hierarchical, wasn't it? Yeah. So we moved, like, this is terrible but i i had ice by birds right and we lived i live with my gran right next to the docks and we never saw any but we saw seagulls that was it and then we moved and they weren't there's no seagulls in there and so we moved this

to this um housing estate on the edge of liverpool which had um fields behind it and i was like this is going to be ace so I just sat in the window at this ice five book and honestly because of course what happened to Sicleer the estate there was like every tree for miles around had gone there was like nothing for a bird to eat or roost on and I sat there with this book and like literally never saw a bird for months and we went to Wales for the day and I saw dippers. I thought, yes, banzai, dippers. And there's hundreds of them.

I got home, dippers are not in the book. What? Everything was hierarchical. There's something Paquettian about that. Endlessly waiting for the bird that never comes the bird does come it's not in the book those books dominated our my childhood in a way you know family trips out were all about i need to collect some more things okay so i'll tell you this little well two things one is that in that spring spring after we moved in the whole estate was just absolutely invaded by house martins

because there was so much mud and it was like a two species living space and five five bloody points you got for a house martin for christ's sake it's like i knew i was seeing this like massive wildlife spectacle but we got five same thing happened with wax wings there was a massive invasion of wax wings in felling in the northeast when i was a kid and wax waxwings in felling in the northeast when I was a kid. And waxwings weren't in the book, but I wrote them. There's a bit where you could say an interesting bird that you have seen.

Oh, yeah. Anyway. So the reason I've still got my copies is that I've been decanting my mum and dad's house. They died last year. And I found Ice By in the countryside. And it was just full of lies, you know. But filled it in full of, you did not, as if you did.

I lie, Bruce. But this is so, right, so we went to the same place. This is getting very autobiographical now, but we went to the same place on holiday every year where we saw the Dippers. A tiny village just outside in north wales every year no no exceptions that's the only place we ever went and um so it scattered my mum and dad's ashes there then i found these i spy books in our house

and on the last page of i spy in the countryside it says what's your favorite view my dad had filled it in with a tempo pen, and he described where we went on our holidays, where I'd scattered his ashes. Oh, that's beautiful. Yeah, amazing. Yeah, I must have been about six or seven when he'd done that. But I Spy wasn't actually the book you'd chosen.

The book you'd chosen was another Noticing Things book, wasn't it? I don't know this book at all. This is a book called The Rudiments of Wisdom by Tim Hunkin. That is QI. You want to know where QI comes from? It comes from that... Oh, really? Really, yeah, it does.

So, Frank, tell us about the book. What is The Rudiments of Wisdom? Right, so The Rudiments of Wisdom was originally a cartoon strip in the Observer magazine in which he would tell you something about something. These great drawings. I love the drawings because they were so imitable strip in the observer magazine in which he would tell you something about something these great drawings i love the drawings because they were so imitable and that the people looked a bit like kind of that they had a look of the easter island statue and he would use them to illustrate how

the mechanical turk worked or how a tower bridge worked or something like that it would be a diagram about how machines worked but also he would give you these fantastic kind of experiments that were kind of bordering on magic tricks you know how to make an uh how to make your own toothpaste how to make steel floats how to how to use two umbrellas to amplify sound how to make an ink volcano these are all stuck in my head you know um how to walk through a postcard uh how to pull a piece of string through your neck how to chop a banana in half before you peel it all these like and they were just like it was like it was that kind of on the cusp between mechanics and magic you know and that's an Ursula Le Guin phrase isn isn't it? Isn't it? At some point, every technology might as well be magic.

And so there would be, this is how your TV works, and this is how to vanish. It's like the same. And then he made The Rudiments of Wisdom into a book, like an encyclopedia in the late 80s, which is just, I think it's still available. It's just a joyous kind of ragbag of stuff. He invented The Secret Life of Machines,

the TV show, The Secret Life of Machines. And I was worried that I was cheating choosing it as a book because it was a book in my house because I cut it out every week and stuck it in a scrapbook yeah but then it did it did come out as a book didn't it but he he would have loved that he's he's kind of you know he's in that great tradition Andy of sort of mad English inventors I was going to say children's books with cross sections and diagrams they're a lovely hundred percent yeah and especially this because fundamentally unserious and therefore it stuck.

There was like an element, as John just said, it's Wilfred Makepeace Lunn is the other one. Yeah, Wilf Lunn, that's right. There was also my great hero, the jazz composer Neil Ardley, who had a second life in the 1980s as one of the authors of How Things Work. Oh, yeah. Which, so he'd been getting,

he'd been living on Arts Council grants and brown rice for 15 years. And then he becomes a million-selling children's book author in the space of a year. It's the most incredible. There's a biography coming out of Ardley, which I'm really looking forward to reading. It's very, very interesting. It makes me think of the recently reissued usborne ghosts books and or the usborne to being a spy do you remember that one that that

it's that mixture of as you say frank kind of diagrams and practical suggestions of how to do amazing things yeah that you the child can if you just do follow this instruction you can you can astonish the world yeah and he does he does the most have you you might have seen the water clock at covent garden um in neil's yard uh andy outside that's that's a tim hunkin invention but he was um what i love is there's a great i found this great little quote from he said a few years ago while i was doing a short fellowship at Xerox Park, the director asked me if I was attached to an institution or if I was a floater. He said it implying that being a floater was a good thing.

I was amazed. As in Britain, people like this are regarded as mad eccentrics. And the word floater means a turd that won't sink. Definitely. He also, he designed, you'll love this rock trivia he designed the flying pigs and sheep for pink floyd's in the flesh tour their animals tour yeah did he do you know what i was just thinking he sounds really like you weren't will flan he sounds like bruce lacy he sounds like bruce lacy's famous 60s and 70s inventor who kind of has one foot in the goons camp and another

foot in the rock and roll camp you must have met him have you met no i mean i would love to meet him because he is he's just i think like like frank he was in the back of the observer magazine and that was for me that was i used to do the same thing i used to cut out all the the um the rudiments of wisdom clippings and i often wondered what happened to him and then i discovered he'd sort of re-emerged on television. And the magazine had a children's section. Yeah. Can you believe it?

Amazing. You're back on your, you're back on your warpath, if you don't mind me saying, Frank. We should go on to the fifth of Frank's choices. The final choice. Final children's books that you've chosen. What, what, Frank, have you chosen for us?

Just William. Because, well, because they're breathtaking. But I owe a particular debt to Just William. books that you've chosen what what frank have you chosen for us just william uh because well because they're breathtaking but i owe a particular death debt to just william shall i tell you what that is please do when my dad was very little he my dad is much the youngest of his brothers and his brothers were all at sea um as at the time that when he was a little boy and um his brother jim my uncle jim came back from see i can still i can picture this even though obviously i wasn't born but he came back with his backpack you know his kit bag swung it down and took a present out of the bag and gave it to

my dad and it was just william and it was the first book that my dad had owned and my gran my mum was very suspicious of it she said what is that and uncle jim said he said it's about a young boy who commits depredations that's what which he's obviously why did his mom up and it's how just william is that word depredations it's very it's a very just william word anyway my dad dad read it, loved it. And my dad, you know, became a big reader, went to night school. And when I was young, my dad did open university and became a teacher. And that kind of thread of autodidacticism and writing comes from just William, comes from that gift of a book at the right age to the right, the right book, the right age, the right boy. Yeah. And everything, you know, that I've had this enchanted life goes back to that gift from Uncle Jim. book at the right age to the right the right book the right age the right boy yeah and everything

you know that that I've had this enchanted life goes back to that gift from Uncle Jim and goes back actually to Richville Crompton's amazing ability to turn a funny sentence what is it about Richville Crompton's prose I want to say what what what does she capture that other writers struggle to capture well and that you can't dramatize either no you can't make just william funny on screen it's it's it's the style it's like she's the first writer that you read where you think the way she writes her sentences is amazing you know that's she's the first writer whose style you notice um okay what is it about like just the inappropriateness of talking about a little boy

who just wants to be left alone with a bag of bull's eyes and a mongrel dog as though it was you know the united nations this amazing vocabulary that she wears brings to bear on it all you know um and he's preoccupied you know and that william stands for something you know he stands for the great virtue of just being left alone just because all he wants to be left and i think the other thing about just william that people forget is that just william is always trying to be good you know that's the difference between him and other badly behaved children he is burning for justice uh he always wants to put things right and he's always just trying to be good it just it just goes hideously wrong so So I've got a question.

Is she, and again, I'll just ask the question straight from a writerly point of view. When you read her now, Frank, does she seem totally in control of the material? You know, because when you say it's hard to dramatise, I know exactly what you mean. It doesn't seem particularly distinguished. And therefore, what distinguishes it is the style. Now, has she chanced upon it?

Or is she a Woodhouse-ian stylist who can make it sing? Yeah, I think she can make it sing. I think she knows how to create a really great phrase. Yeah. And particularly a great speech, a great rant. But the stories that work are the stories that work up to a great big set piece. So where William is told a lie that just as you're reading it,

that lie is growing and getting more and more out of control. And it's happening on the page. It's at its best when it's just him talking. And you're thinking, just shut up. And he's just making everything worse. So she's brilliant. I mean, what I read her for is like how she engineers those. It's usually a lie that's grown.

Or, yeah, it's never frank. It's the ones that are alive that really work. And she's one of those, Crompton is one of those writers. And she was, her dad was a vicar. She a teacher she never married she never had kids but she became quite wealthy and it's rather sweet story she bought a house that she and her mother lived in on bromley common through through the because they were they were incredibly successful from day one it was another one she hit on some formula that was perfect at the time and wrote what I hadn't realised.

The first one was written in 1922, you know, sort of alongside Ulysses and The Wasteland. And the last one was written in, William the Lawless, was written in 1970. Yeah. Which is. Wow. So it's nearly a 48 year

career wow and he never aged a day and all that no he never grew up he never grew up

that's like P.G. Woodhouse I always think P.G. Woodhouse those first ones are satirising suffragettes and

at the end of his life he was working on something with Andrew Lloyd Webber yeah it is mad isn't it yeah um uh now i've got one more note here before we go and i can't let this pass no frank to mount his narnia defense before the bun really okay well i just i just you know people are constantly slagging off on here because it's

um proselytizing and also because it's inconsistent and i want to defend it you know that father christmas is in it and nymphs and satyrs and you know talking animals and what where is that supposed to be and where that is is that room in the house that he grew up in full of children's books and it's a great kind of synthesis and where you know people are always saying oh it's is that room in the house that he grew up in, full of children's books. And it's a great kind of synthesis. And we're, you know, people are always saying, oh, it's indecorous the way it mashes up all these things together.

And I think that's the most powerful thing about it is that where it's set is where stories are set, you know? And it brings all those different stories together. And it's that room full of books in his house, that is the wood between the worlds. And he's allowed to do that. I think that's all. I think of all the worlds that you know,

that you've read, Narnia is the one you want to visit. It's a multiverse, Frank. Yeah. Well, it is. Because they go to charm. I also think, I mean, The Magician's Nephew is a seriously underrated book. It's an amazing book.

And I think that's, I mean, I think you know, I'm really interested because I think he does cop a lot of unfair kind of criticism and they don't like the fact that he apparently punishes Susan in the last battle and there's sort of borderline racism

in some of the or straightforward. If we did one of these novels, if we did one of C.S. Lewis' novels as a novel on Batlisted and because it's Batlisted, we wouldn't be allowed to do The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. So which novel do we do?

I would do The Magician's Nephew. Because it had that power that you get when you're addicted to a comic as well and then you suddenly find the origin story comic. After you've read 10 Spider-Man Adventures, you suddenly find. And it had that origin story power, which is for me. And I had one question. I know that you'd listened to our Christmas episode on Noel Streetfield.

But The Giant Under the Snow was a book. Your Giant Under the Snow story. Well. Your Giant Under the Snow story. Well, I was, right, okay, so by the time I got to secondary school, I was a very school-shaped boy, in a way that was probably quite obnoxious. I went to the same school that Johnny Vegas went to, and that Una McCormack went to.

Yeah. And I finished my math exam very quickly, and I just slipped the copy of Giant Under the Snow out from Wundernight Blazer and just started reading it because I was bored. And my teacher came around. He wasn't a math teacher, but I had a nice math teacher. The teacher who was invigilating came around and said,

what the hell do you think you're doing? I said, well, I've finished it. Do you want to take it? He just took Giant Under the Snow off me and he hit me across the face with it and then he took it away right and i never it was a scoop you know puffing club copy so it wasn't in the library never saw it again he never gave it me back and then i found a copy in wig town when i was a grown-up you know and i did it i thought oh there's that book and i took it and honestly i didn't need to start again. I remembered everything. But as soon as I opened the book, the font again, I opened it, found where I was up to,

and carried on reading from there. And I didn't need to, because it stayed with me so much, you know? Yeah, yeah. Brilliant book. Well, listen, thank you so much for spending an hour with us. It was wonderful. Talking through some of these books. It's really fantastic. Thank you, much for spending an hour with us. It was wonderful. Talking through some of these books. It's really fantastic.

Thank you. Thank you. And listeners, we'll put all these up on the website with links to. We will. And we put them in the backlisted bookshop on bookshop.org as well. So thank you, Frank. Thank you to Nikki, who's breaking into her sabbatical to pull this special episode together. Thanks, Nick.

We'll be back in April. But in the meantime, there's nothing to stop you downloading all 176 previous episodes. What? Plus follow links, clips and suggestions for further reading by visiting our website, backlisted.fm. We're always pleased if you contact us on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram. And you can support us directly by supporting our Patreon at www.patreon.com forward slash backlisted. For a modest sum, patrons get to hear backlisted episodes early and ad-free. And all those who subscribe to the LotListener level get two extra podcasts a month called LotListed,

which features the three of us talking over the books, films and music we've enjoyed in the previous fortnight. And we're still making those throughout our sabbatical. Once again, our sabbatical is a failed sabbatical. We're trying. We're trying. That's all, folks. Frank, is there anything you would like to add?

You can have a bonus choice if you want. You can have a bonus choice. One more book. Go on. One more book. Actually, King of the Copper Mountain, Paul Bagel, absolutely amazing book. Okay.

There you go. We'll put that up on the website as well. Thanks very much everyone and we'll see you next month for another Backlisted Special. Thank you. Bye. © BF-WATCH TV 2021