GRANNY'S EXPLODING TOILET, by Saviour Pirotta

Funny how things turn out!

When I emigrated to the UK in October 1981, I joined a group of artists working at the now long-defunct Commonwealth Institute in London. Authors, poets, dancers and actors, we visited schools all around the UK, introducing children to cultures from the commonwealth. I used to do an illustrated talk with slides called A Day in the Life of A Maltese child. This featured mostly my youngest brother Michael, who I photographed doing various tasks around the home and the village. It also featured my maternal grandmother, although I had no slides of her to show, because she resolutely refused to be photographed. (Actually, there is a grainy black and white snap of her in existence, and you can tell by her rebellious expression that she had been made to sit for the photographer.)

My grandmother was an irascible character. Married to a Maltese soldier in the British army, she moved house with every pay rise, although she stayed in the same street all her life. She was known to blow an entire week's pension on Sunday treats for her grandchildren. I remember with fondness sharing pan con olio on her roof terrace, eating out of a gigantic chipped enamel dish and watching red admirals sunbathing on her backyard wall.  We would pick mint and rosemary to put on the bread, which we rubbed with her homemade sundried tomatoes. Hers was a cheery smile in a childhood filled with austere faces. Grandma would let me dance around the terrace. She listened to my stories and blew eggs to make heads for my hand puppets.

The anecdotes about her soon started taking over my talks. The slideshow abandoned, I started creating narratives based on my granny and her coterie of female friends. Even when I started getting published, I continued telling her stories, although by now they were more fiction than fact.

Soon I had enough stories for a book. It was bought by Kingfisher, who had published two of my most successful folktale anthologies. But as my gran used to say, 'the devil has no milk but still manages to make cheese', meaning mischief happens when you least expect it.

Before I'd finished my first draft of the granny story, now called Gruesome Gran, Kingfisher was bought out by Macmillan, who dropped the entire fiction list. My agent at the time had just passed away and I never had the chance to sort out the ms for another publisher. I continued telling my granny stories in school, though, until one day -

'Sir, is your gran Gangsta Granny?'

It was the first time I'd heard of a certain celebrity's book but it was by no means the last. I couldn't believe my bad luck. The best idea I'd ever had and I'd let someone pip me to the post. Not that mine would have sold so many copies, of course. But still...

In disgust, I decided not to pursue the Granny project any longer. Gran seemed to have other plans, though. Last year I started doing storymaking workshops in Scarborough schools. They are part of an outreach programme organised by the Stephen Joseph Theatre. Hoping to write a play for the SJT, I asked for a meeting and spent a long weekend thinking up of stories that would make great plays for a family audience.  I needn't have given up that weekend. The children's feedback forms from the afterschool clubs were full of Granny stories. That's what the SJT wanted the play to be about.

So here we are a few months later, with a brand new story for the stage. Granny is taking to the boards in the autumn half term. With nine songs, the show is almost a full-blown musical. The booking opens at the end of July but there have been people asking for tickets at the box office already. Who'd have thought it?

And what's the moral of this rather long-winded rant, I hear you ask?  As Granny would say, 'the devil might make cheese but you don't have to eat if you don't want to.' Which means don't take defeat lying down. If you have a good idea, fight to make it become a reality.

Best words my nan never said, ever.


GRANNY'S EXPLODING TOILET premieres at the SJT on the 29th of October. Tickets will be available here. Saviour Pirotta's historical novel for 9 - 12s, MARK OF THE CYCLOPS, won the North Somerset Teachers' Book Awards 2018 in the Quality Fiction category. His new series from Maverick, The Wolfsong Series, launches with The Stolen Spear in August.  Follow Saviour on Twitter @spirotta.

Funny's Funny - Ciaran Murtagh

Last year I spent a good few months writing an unashamedly British TV show - Danny and Mick. It's currently going out on CBBC and will be on the iplayer forever. I wrote ten episodes and script edited ten more and it makes a virtue of it's constraints in a way that you don't see too often.

Usually, in kids TV, we are being asked to write for the widest possible market. PJ Masks has to play as well in Doha as it does in Dudley. The budgets and costs reflect that, but so too do the editorial and creative choices. Danny and Mick is a live action TV show, so the costs are less. It's also been designed to do one thing and one thing only - make children from the UK laugh. That means, for the first time in quite some time, I was free to focus on one audience.

Danny and Mick shares a great debt to classic British kids TV staples - gunge, slapstick, pantomime. But it had two great assets in it's stars. Danny and Mick really are brothers and they have spent a life time in the circus. Their Dad is Clive Webb - formerly of Tiswas -  and they know what makes kids roar with laughter. They also had buckets of routines they could pull out to enhance any script.

With live action TV the thing that usually gets squeezed is rehearsal time. It means that there isn't time to work out a complicated sequence and often you have to cheat it when it comes to filming. These guys had classic routines in their DNA. Watching them work was like watching a ballet or a wrestling match, they knew how to respond to each other's movements to build something special. It was who they were and was something they've been doing all their lives.

Sometimes we would ask what routines or props they had lying around and build a story around that set piece. Sometimes we would script an idea and they would suggest a routine they knew would work. It's rare for scripting to be so symbiotic, but we all knew we only had one thing to do - make kids laugh.

Take a look at the show, and if you get the chance to see them live then grab it. I'm moving onto write Crackerjack with Sam and Mark next. It seems like great British humour is making a come back, and this Irishman couldn't be happier!

Poo bum willy - John Dougherty

Forgive the entirely crude title to this piece, but - inspired by the post my friend Tamsyn Murray put up on Wednesday - I've been moved (if I can say that in this context) to pen a few words about toilet humour.

As Tamsyn observed, if you're a children's author there are those who will advise you to put toilet jokes into your books. There are even those who think that this is all you really need to make your book a success.

Are they right? Well - probably not. There's a lot more to writing a children's book than repeatedly shoehorning the word 'poo' into your prose. Otherwise, the top-selling titles would all be books like Pooey McPooface and the Enormous Poo. Which, actually, would get a bit of a laugh.

Once.

But probably only once. Taboo-breaking humour is funny precisely because it pushes at the boundaries of a taboo. But the more you break a taboo the less, well, tabooey it feels. Someone walking naked down your local high street would provoke a reaction - perhaps shock, perhaps laughter, perhaps both. But if you could guarantee the sight of a streaker every time you wandered into town, then - even if the prohibition on public nudity remained, and even if the police were to respond with an arrest every time - the effect on passers-by would diminish rapidly. After a few weeks, a passing exhibitionist would be lucky to get an eye-roll.

So am I saying that you shouldn't bother using toilet humour at all? Well, no. But I am saying that it's not an easy option. Writing a good toilet joke - or a good willy joke for that matter, or indeed any joke that pushes at the boundaries - is no easier than writing any other kind of joke. Or, put another way a poo joke has to contain a joke as well as poo.

This is on my mind at the moment partly because my latest book Stinkbomb & Ketchup-Face and the Great Big Story Nickers, contains a poo joke. In fact, if I can say this without being misunderstood, it contains a running poo joke.

And, actually, it might appear to the casual reader that the joke is simply about the repetition of the word 'poo'. But I'd like to think it's a bit cleverer than that. The first time the joke appears, one of the badgers - the villains of the piece - has defaced a copy of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, writing the words 'And then she did a poo' at the end of a paragraph. So for the young reader, there are two taboos being pushed against here: the 'toilet talk' taboo, and the prohibition against writing in books. The scene continues with some of the other badgers getting very silly and giggly about this piece of vandalism, and another getting cross about it even though he secretly thinks it's a bit funny as well - so now the joke is not about the word 'poo' itself, but about how people react to it.

As the story progresses, the badgers get hold of a copy of Stinkbomb & Ketchup-Face and the Great Big Story Nickers itself, and discover that by - among other things - writing in the book, they can change things to their advantage. But one of them doesn't quite get what's going on, and keeps suggesting that they write 'And then she did a poo'. So now the joke is about comprehension, and incongruity, and context, and focusing on the trivial at the expense of the bigger picture.

Yes, all right, and it says 'poo' as well.

But - seriously - writing humour isn't the piece of cake it's sometimes seen as. And that goes for writing poo jokes as much as any other kind.

______________________________________________________________________________________________

Stinkbomb & Ketchup-Face and the Great Big Story Nickers, illustrated by David Tazzyman and published by OUP, is the latest in John's Stinkbomb & Ketchup-Face series.

His other new books in 2016 will include the sixth Stinkbomb & Ketchup-Face title, his first poetry collection - Dinosaurs & Dinner-Ladies, illustrated by Tom Morgan-Jones and published by Otter-Barry Books  - and several readers for schools.

First Draft, the author band featuring John, Jo Cotterill and Paul and Helen Stickland, will next be performing at the Wychwood Festival in early June.

Just for a Laugh - Heather Dyer

© Peter Bailey

from The Boy in the Biscuit Tin by Heather Dyer

I think I know the precise moment that I moved from being a reader to a writer. It was a joke that did it. My snort of laughter jolted me clean out of the story and back onto the velour footstool in my parents’ front room. I sat there for a moment, staring at the book lying open in my lap. I could hardly believe that the rows of printed letters on the page had physically moved me. A book could be that powerful.

I thumbed through the whole book looking at all those individual words – page after page of them – each one different from the one beside it. Someone had actually chosen each one! That was when I first began to appreciate the author behind the story, and realized that if wanted the stories to continue, I could choose more words, myself. I could bring the marionettes back on stage, and continue their adventures . 

Humour is powerful in many ways: it jolts us out of one closed perspective; it helps brings villains down to size; it releases tension; it puts things in perspective. Humour is good for us. It just a shame that humour is not rated more highly by critics and readers. ‘Funny’ books tend to seen as light and not literary. In Ricky Gervaise’s comedy series Extras, Kate Winslet jokes that she’s doing a holocaust film because it’s the only way she’ll win an Oscar. And the irony was that – in real life – this is exactly what happened with her film The Reader. Humour always loses out to gravity. But can’t we have both?

Sometimes, children tell me that my books are funny. I don’t try to be funny, but somehow humour always surfaces. And when it does it feels like the whole point.

Why is humour so powerful and so gratifying? Perhaps it's because it jolts us out of our narrow mindsets into a wide, free space that liberates us. Humour, like metaphor and haiku and Zen koan, momentarily disorients us by putting us between two opposing images or ideas at the same time. And in that moment – just for a second – we are free.

Heather Dyer - children's author and Royal Literary Fund Consultant Fellow

• For enquiries about creative writing workshops for children or adults, or editorial services, go to www.heatherdyer.co.uk

• For enquiries about academic writing workshops, go to:  http://rlfconsultants.com/consultants/heather-dyer/

The best bums in children’s fiction – or, why so many kid’s books about bottoms? – Emma Barnes

A favourite bottom book!

And another!

I’ve jumped onto the bottom bandwagon!

I didn’t meant to. I didn’t consciously set out to write a book featuring bottoms. It was only when Penny Dolan wrote that Wild Thing was “much more than a book that gets 8 year-old children laughing because they enjoy reading about rude words” that I realized what I’d done. I, too, had written a book featuring children's fascination with their nether regions.

 It’s not exactly an untapped theme in children’s literature. (In modern times, anyway – you won’t find Jo March, Anne of Green Gables or even Just William having much to say about posteriors.) But whether it’s Nicholas Allen’s delightful Cinderella’s Bum or the famously scatological The Little Mole Who Thought It Was None Of His Business, there’s a whole branch of kids’ books about rear ends and what comes out of them. In fact when I (rather bravely) did some googling, I was stunned to find out just how many titles there were.

I suppose the whole bottom thing can be seen as a cynical ploy. If you want to get children laughing, then “rude words” as Penny implies, are a good way to do it. This wasn’t really on my mind, though. The truth is, having spent the last several years in close contact with young children, I’ve been forcibly reminded how fascinating all things bum and poo –related are to them. I’ve walked behind four year olds whose only obsession is with spotting possible dog poo – and not to avoid standing in it, but out of pure fascination with the subject. “No, that’s only a dead leaf,” I’ve said wearily, more times than I can  remember.

So it’s not surprising the theme cropped up in Wild Thing, which is at heart a realistic, family story. The subject first arises when an inadvertent slip of the tongue by Gran allows five year old Wild Thing to get going on a favourite subject.


“Gran said bottom!” 
“No, she didn’t.” 
“Yes, she did.” Wild Thing grinned. “A butt is a bottom.You’ve got a big butt!” She pointed at me. “And Gran’s got a wrinkly one!” 
Then she danced off across the garden, shouting, “BUTT! BEHIND! BOTTOM! BUM!” at the top of her voice. She almost crashed into a tree. 

Wild Thing waggles her bum (Jamie Littler illustrator)

The incident leads to a wild chase and the invention of the Bite the Bottom game – yet another source of daily embarrassment for poor older sister Kate! When I’ve read the passage aloud in schools, the effect has been electrifying. On the occasion where I had a staff member “signing” the bottom-biting scene (and giving a fine theatrical performance of the bottom-chomping incident) I thought everyone was going to be reduced to a dangerous level of hysteria.

It’s true, folks. Rude bits really do make them laugh.

In school...the arrow fittingly pointing at a certain place!

Grown-ups can be a bit sniffy, I suppose, and feel that the whole bottom thing is crude, overdone, and playing to the crowd. But then children feel much the same about adult interests. Remember The Princess Bride and the little boy recoiling from the sloppy bits – “Yuk kissing!” Anyone who has watched TV with a child will recognize that response. (It’s also beautifully captured in Judith Viorst’s classic picture book, Alexander’s Terrible Horrible No Good Very Bad Day – where the kissing on TV is almost as bad as the lima beans for dinner.)

So let’s allow children their interests, just as adults are allowed theirs. After all, for the average five year old, toilet training and bed wetting are still very immediate issues, and getting oneself to the toilet on time can be a source of pride (or sometimes an embarrassing failure). Adults take all this for granted – although actually, of course, many adults, especially in later life, don’t. Sadly, it often becomes a source of shame and embarrassment again, with many incontinent adults suffering in silence. So if children can openly laugh and celebrate all things rear-end, then let’s embrace that! Humour, as a recent ABBA poster pointed out, is also a way of dealing with things that trouble us.

So Bottoms Up, folks! And why not nominate your own favourite rude title?
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Emma's new book, Wild Thing,  about the naughtiest little sister ever (and her bottom-biting ways), is out now from Scholastic. It is the first of a series for readers 8+.
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