Frank Cottrell-Boyce doesn’t believe in pessimism. Even being announced as the UK’s brand-new children’s laureate in the week when all eyes are focused on Westminster and the polling booths makes him hopeful that people will turn to a cheerier story in search of relief, meaning he can leap into the classic “and finally” spot on news bulletins. “I’m happy to be that skateboarding duck,” he grins as he chats over Zoom from his home on Merseyside.
But to be chipper is not merely a function of his temperament, as his speech at the acceptance of the title made clear. Quoting William Beveridge, whose groundbreaking report laid the foundations for the modern welfare state, Cottrell-Boyce insisted that “scratch a pessimist and you’ll find a defender of privilege”; and it’s his intention, during his two-year tenure, to demonstrate that making children’s lives better by increasing their access to books, reading and what he calls “the apparatus of happiness” is critical to the prospects of the generations to come – and that the cost of ignoring that is unthinkable.
He is adamant that the research backs him up. “There’s nothing speculative about this. We’ve got the figures – we’ve had the figures for 25 years – on what difference reading for pleasure and reading together makes in the life of a child, particularly in the early years. We know this really well.”
He points to work undertaken by BookTrust, which runs the children’s laureateship, sponsored by bookseller Waterstones, indicating that 95% of parents with children under seven know how crucial reading is, but only one in five read with their children. “It’s just so bald. We’ve got to close that gap. There’s nothing disputable about it – and I think it’s really achievable. It’s not building a bridge to Ireland or a floating airport. It’s not some crazy, incredibly expensive dream.”
Cottrell-Boyce has a pretty good track record when it comes to enchanting film and TV audiences and readers. As a screenwriter, he was responsible for 24 Hour Party People, A Cock and Bull Story and, more recently, The Beautiful Game and Kensuke’s Kingdom, an animated film adapted from Michael Morpurgo’s novel of the same name. He’s also written for Doctor Who. But perhaps his greatest achievement was to write the opening ceremony for the London 2012 Olympics, including that jaw-dropping sight of a parachuting Queen Elizabeth II – a moment of unlikely royal behaviour that was reprised when he and his co-writers sat her down to have tea with Paddington to celebrate her platinum jubilee.
His first children’s book, the Carnegie medal-winning Millions, which imagines a pair of brothers discovering a vast amount of money and then having to dispose of it in the last days before the (imaginary) introduction of the euro in the UK, came out of a film collaboration with Danny Boyle. In the years since that 2004 debut, he has written several more, including three sequels to Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and now firmly sees himself as primarily a writer for children.
So Cottrell-Boyce’s credentials to take on the laureateship are clear. But how does he think he’s going to persuade a new government that it needs to take notice of him in the midst of headline-grabbing emergencies ranging from the cost of living crisis to the climate emergency?
First of all, he says: “Why on earth would you have to argue for the fact that children are the priority? My head explodes at the thought of that. Of course, they should be the priority, and double down on that by the fact that they, uniquely, were put in a very bad position during the pandemic. We asked them, as a society, to step back from all their certainties to cover for us. It’s literally the inverse of what happened in the second world war when the children were sent away to safety and the adults stayed in danger. We put that on its head and said, ‘You children should make sacrifices to protect the rest of us.’ So we owe them that.”
He believes that the language of “catching up” post-pandemic is a code for forgetting that it happened, and that children are not being given the space, time or resources to process their experiences. And it’s not just lockdown that they have to deal with: “Kids are being told that they’re a pre-war generation, they’re growing up aware that their entire biosphere is in danger. They’ve got all these anxieties, and we have something that can alleviate those anxieties. It’s not a magic bullet. It’s not going to cure them. But it is a really simple coping mechanism that plugs you right into the entire history of our culture. This is a chain that goes back to the first fire in the first cave. We know it works. It’s what got us here, and we are in danger of losing it.”
In that acceptance speech in Leeds, Cottrell-Boyce talked of the “invisible privilege” that feeling confident in reading and enjoying books confers, and is acutely aware that its absence often exists in a matrix of other disadvantages. When he visits schools, he can immediately tell by the way children physically handle books if they’re not comfortable with them; often there is also an onsite food bank. “I don’t know how we’ve got to that. But it’s all part of the same thing, that they need to feel that they’re important. And all these things like food banks and reading – it says you are important, you’re valuable. I think that’s the big message we need to give them.”
When Cottrell-Boyce was 12 or so, his father started studying for a degree at the Open University, and his son would get up in the dawn hours to watch TV lectures with him. “Just to have my dad to myself. I wasn’t interested, really, in what he was reading. I was just interested in having a conversation with him. To me, that was like inheriting a country estate, it was such an enormous privilege. And I felt so empowered by it. But that was about sharing, it was about wanting to be with my dad, it wasn’t about wanting to know about the Renaissance.” Now 64, and a father of seven children with his wife Denise, he remains committed to the idea of how emotional and intellectual connections intersect.
One of his first steps as laureate will be to invite “anyone who’s in my little address book that has got any power” to a summit, from teachers and carers to mayors and cabinet ministers. He’s full of praise for the good work that is already being done – for example, by teachers who, in the absence of a school library, curate their own boxes of books to share with students – and keen that it is acknowledged and shared. “I want to reach people who we never really talk about in this context: young carers, young mums, kids in care, looked-after children. They’re the people that it’s really important to reach because they’ve got the lowest life chances, and we can make the biggest impact by bringing life chances to them. And that’s why, even though I’m a middle-grade writer, my emphasis is definitely on early years for this project.”
He recalls working on the film Welcome to Sarajevo with Michael Winterbottom back in the late 1990s and interviewing a Roma woman called Mariella Mehr, who had been imprisoned by the Swiss authorities and had her own child taken into care. He asked her: “How did you know this wasn’t all there was? How did you know that you deserved more? How did you know that life could be better? And she said, ‘I read Heidi.’”
It confirmed something he believes to this day: “There is a book for every child and the child has to be given the opportunity to find that book. It’s not one size fits all – not everybody’s mind is going to be ignited by Roald Dahl or whoever. You need that range and a child needs that opportunity to find their own Heidi, their own stick of dynamite.”
Before he gets his teeth firmly into his new role, however, there’s the small matter of finishing his new book for children, about which he is also characteristically sanguine. Indeed, the only time he sounds anything less than upbeat is when we briefly chat about the football, given England’s shaky start in the Euros. I suggest maybe he needs to infiltrate Gareth Southgate’s team talks and I can just imagine him settling the nerves in Düsseldorf next Saturday with a perky injection of optimism.
