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00:06Andy hello hi Virginia well there wouldn't be a child in Australia who hasn't read or heard of
00:13one of your books yeah I feel like I've transmitted my love of reading as a child
00:18to the next generation so very satisfied about that so how did you come to speak fluent kid
00:25this may surprise you but I was a kid for quite a long time and that window just stayed open
00:31for me
00:32that feeling of like anything can happen an infinite possibility I can access that at any
00:41time well you've just published your 41st book and you're taking it on the road can I come along
00:46absolutely see you there great I'll see you in Melbourne bye I'm Virginia Trioli and I've spent
00:57my life paying attention to creative Australians and wondering what is going on in that wild mind of
01:02theirs in this series I'll showcase artists and performers at the peak of their powers and tell
01:11the story of their triumphs their stumbles and why they make the glorious work we love so much
01:20Andy Griffiths is one of Australia's most successful authors he's the punk pied piper of children's
01:27reading luring kids to books all around the world you forgot to tell me about the page his treehouse
01:35just and bad books have been international sensations selling more than 20 million copies and Andy's
01:43popularity with kids has earned him rock star status I'm thrilled to be unashamedly celebrating the art of
01:56making because we are a country of so many brilliant creative types
02:15hello Andy hello how great to see you well I wanted to take us to a quiet space for a
02:21quiet little chat
02:22yes yes yes it's quiet but it's going to get pretty loud very soon there's a lot of kids out
02:27there
02:27waiting to be very noisy 200 of your fans for your new book yeah yeah and they get very excited
02:34should I have brought earplugs you should have you didn't get the memo
02:49are you ready to hear from Andy Griffiths
02:56thank you
03:00what are you normally studying on a Wednesday morning
03:03math all right would you like me to teach you some math
03:10I can count to 10 but I just can't always do it in the right order
03:19Andy he never has that distance that some author might get from their audience he's really tapped
03:24into what sort of makes kids excited what kind of like sparks their imagination and what kind of drives
03:31them crazy as well he loves that almost kind of combative relationship with his audience this is
03:38my best climb ever it is I'll tell you the truth that is me but I didn't make the climb
03:51I fell and I
03:53fell many hundreds of meters until I died
04:01they realize quite early that this contract of responsible adult and child has been broken at the
04:07start and they think okay I gotta screw with this guy now he can't finish it does anyone want to
04:13finish the
04:13banana I'll throw it up in the air
04:20there's this complicated paradox with Andy
04:28he is both a chaos agent and sort of a maestro an orchestra conductor in a way he he knows
04:38how to make those two
04:40things work together there's quite a lot of you I've only got one book I'll give you a
04:46each a page from the book would that be fair who's happy for me to rip up the book and
04:55give you
04:58I think we actually found a few hundred lost books and with this wonderful magic
05:11that's the hero moment when the books were revealed you're all getting a book it was like
05:16Oprah Winfrey what do you get out of this the joy of the kids their their inquisitiveness they're
05:24challenging me we're just celebrating reading stories uh silliness yes and uh yeah and that all feeds
05:34into positive pleasurable associations with books and that's what it's about oh there's always a fart or two
05:55yes in order to write Andy needs to play so at the bottom of his garden he's built himself a
06:01playroom
06:02to ensure that window to his childhood stays wide open this is the tree house yes where all the hard
06:11work gets done after you oh wow and the ten-year-old in you has never left you no he
06:26didn't he left me
06:27in charge is this a lot of your stuff from your childhood yeah many items have been retrieved from
06:35the shoe box I used to keep under my bed it evokes play for me I've got a direct window
06:43to that ten-year-old
06:44and so once he's excited then I'm I'm getting ideas to write
06:54oh I love these things oh they're cool aren't they I have one so you're going to make one
06:59my move in the other stay you're really good you're a professional I spent hours on my grandmother's
07:05little donkey and I love there's no batteries in them no exactly yes it's just one of my favorites
07:12is this little guy he's got an eyeball head and if we hold it like that he's got a little
07:18lever at the
07:19back oh and got it yes the other thing in here is books how many books lots of books and
07:28some of
07:29the most important ones that have had an influence on me as a writer and from childhood as well
07:34absolutely this was one of the first books I ever had was struggle Peter I know this book I had
07:41this
07:41book to Mary it's called Mary stories and funny pictures there's not a single life in this book
07:47not really well there's a laugh of surprise the poor old little sucker thumb yes this is the one
07:53the red-legged scissor man yeah yeah his mother goes out says don't if don't suck your thumb while
07:58I'm out or a man with long red legs and a big pair of scissors will come in and cut
08:02them off
08:02and bang sure enough mother is right um poor old Conrad gets his thumbs cut off and at the end
08:10he's
08:11just showing his thumbless hands and mama comes home ah said mama I knew he'd come
08:17to naughty little sucker thumb just when you want your mother to protect you and love sympathy told
08:23you so even as a five-year-old I realized there was something a little absurd about this and there's
08:30some connection between horror and humor yeah humor helps you digest the horror right and stand it in a
08:38way so you need to build tension in your audience but then I'll like make them slip on a banana
08:44skin
08:45and suddenly the the tension is released as a laugh rather than further nail biting and show me another
08:53what's another book that's really important to you oh um dr seuss was pretty important very early on
08:59this was a great book because he starts telling you about the all the different fish there are that
09:06there's blue fish and old fish and new fish and some are bad and then he just abandons it and
09:13just
09:13starts telling silly stories about anything and mind-blowing imaginative scenarios yes um a sing-songy
09:24surrealistic landscape which I just loved and I put that on my hand as a sort of or my arm
09:31as a as a
09:32reminder that's mount everest that's the pinnacle of what you could achieve a nonsensical book that
09:39you just fall in love with and so that's what I've always been trying to write don't start getting
09:44designs on yourself faster you know it's soos there that's you're still not there so it's high yeah
09:58the origins of andy's rebellious spirit can be found in his listening room it's a space filled
10:04with some truly impressive audio tech dedicated to his other great love a deep and wild collection of music
10:16how many years of collecting is this uh since i was 10 years old and how many do you think
10:22you've got
10:22all up don't know maybe a thousand well this one's for me because that's the models isn't it absolutely
10:29and the boys next door on the other side yeah perfect pick one for you uh oh how can you
10:35go
10:35past cosmic psychos love it punk rock at its finest what did punk give you because punk's been really
10:42important in your life yeah it's an energy that makes you feel alive and uh and that's what i try
10:48to get into the fiction and he loved and lived punk as a young man he fronted his own punk
10:57band called
10:58gothic farmyard did you love being in the band yeah absolutely loved it because music has been
11:14important to me right from the beginning we can tell and um and when i'm writing it's a form of
11:20music
11:20i'm listening to the the words and do they sound good and the nice rhythm and so there's a continuum
11:26there absolutely and when i hear a song that excites me it's like oh so i'm so excited i want
11:33to grab
11:34that energy and transmit it through my fiction to my audience because i wanted my stories to be like
11:41that well that's so interesting because this is your youthful anarchic punk stage but that's a
11:47heck of a pivot from what i understand was a very stable very happy childhood absolutely yeah it was uh
11:55free ranging all around dandenong creek and um the the bush all around that area in the eastern suburbs
12:03and and lots of books to read at night so surrounded by literature from a young age yeah and my
12:09mother
12:09ran a second-hand book stall for the school fate and every year our spare room would fill up with
12:16all
12:17the neighborhood's unwanted books did you get first first choice absolutely i'd spent hours in there going
12:22through books on psychology and philosophy potboiler adult thrillers that i shouldn't have been reading
12:29but all grist to a growing readers mill we had a lot of kids in our neighborhood and they're all
12:36we're
12:37all out on the streets all the time and they gravitated towards me and i couldn't help telling
12:43them tall tales of things that i'd apparently done that were completely impossible and the more they
12:50doubted me the more i would invent supporting detail as to why this absolutely was true and it was like
12:57a game we were playing um for no reason other than the enjoyment of it in his late 20s andy
13:05qualified as
13:06a high school teacher and worked in country victoria his writing life began with the challenge of trying
13:12to get the kids to read the kids didn't like reading or writing they said that's you know for losers
13:19and
13:20who would go to the library and by that stage late 80s children's literature appeared to be becoming safer
13:28and more messagey and the sort of books i loved were the anarchy chaos books that were just there for
13:37the sheer enjoyment of reading and so i started doing the same for my students so that was the
13:43the beginning of you thinking i can write stories i didn't know that i could write stories but i knew
13:50these kids needed something that was a little bit more modern a little bit more punk rock and i'd been
13:57watching the young ones um it was about the only television i watched in the 80s but that punk rock
14:05energy of the young ones i wanted to capture that in fiction and so that's what i applied myself to
14:12do
14:13andy matched that energy with a steely discipline for 10 years he banked half his annual teaching
14:20salary and then gave himself two years off to see if he could make it as a writer
14:26the words poured out of him and he discovered that he had an unexpected talent
14:31two years got me to the foothills of everest it didn't actually get me up top but it certainly
14:38taught me i had a comedic gift when i wrote so i was like ah so i'm not shakespeare i'm
14:46not raymond
14:46carver uh i'm this clown and i was like my life will take a different path yeah and and in
14:53fact i couldn't
14:54get myself out of the books um andy was always the main character this is happening to me
15:00i tried but then i saw seinfeld and i thought well he's a character in his own sitcom i can
15:06be a
15:07character in my own book so that was a real breakthrough but i didn't think i would be accepted
15:11as a proper writer if i'm doing this but in the end that's all i could do was submit to
15:19the voice that
15:20came through and and that's i guess what resulted in the first series of books the just books yeah
15:25they were about me as a kid playing jokes on people and they were horrendous jokes but andy always
15:34suffered more than anybody else in the end he never got away with it and that's what a book is
15:40to me
15:40it's a form of play and you might as well play hard rather than play safe yeah andy was never
15:50going
15:51to play it safe graduating from short stories to his first full-length novel andy wrote the day my
15:57bum went psycho and his mission to get kids to read by any means allowable was underway it became an
16:05instant bestseller the day my bum went psycho was the stupidest title i could think for a story
16:14and it would also help to loosen up what i felt was an overly precious approach to literature for
16:22children with which there was always this idea it should have some moral uplifting or send some
16:28message yeah so i i wanted this to be like a trojan horse to to get everyone to say bum
16:35so often
16:36that they would just relax i was at one thousand two hundred seventy three times somebody counted up
16:44the amount of word times i said bum in a fifty thousand word novel it was the beginning of what
16:51we might call your controversy period because there was a big controversy about this book i think it came
16:56from um educational bureaucrats who got their bum in a twist about a particular poster yeah we had a
17:01picture of a baby's bottom on the cover it was like it was terrorizing an entire city yes and they
17:08said oh some people might get offended by the sight of a baby's bottom then it was on page three
17:15of the
17:15age the next day and i was having a ball it would have been a moment i guess where you've
17:20got to decide
17:20okay what am i fighting for yeah i need i need to be able to entertain these kids in the
17:26most powerful
17:27way i know how whatever you write is is not going to please someone i learned that very early so
17:34i
17:34thought i have to please myself and i have to please my audience and the gatekeepers certainly have to be
17:41negotiated yes but i'm not going to compromise for them
17:47in 2004 andy and his collaborator and illustrator terry denton created another very naughty book
17:55they called it the bad book and it's it's as bad as you can get it's one of my favorites
18:02and this
18:02takes us right back to soos and to grim and everything but in the most concise little form
18:08it's bad little betty bad little betty wouldn't get out of bed was she being lazy no she was dead
18:17i love it poor little betty but also perfect yeah and then yeah most children are not traumatized by
18:25that because they realize how stupid that is you know that freaked a whole lot of people out that book
18:31didn't it yeah once again they thought oh kids will be traumatized by this or they'll go and do bad
18:38things and i said no this is a thought experiment they understand that if you call the book the bad
18:44book it's not really that bad you know it's a wink it's a wink but there was an obnoxious element
18:50in
18:50this which i think was a key learning moment for you about how far you can go and the jokes
18:57that you
18:57can't tell in a book for kids yeah there's a strain of dark you know humor in australian culture
19:05called the little willy rhymes and it was like little willy in his best of sashes fell in the
19:11fire and was burned to ashes by and by the wind grew chilly but nobody liked to poke poor willy
19:18and there are many such variations of these willy poems from the 30s and 40s so i made my own
19:25little
19:25willy took a match and set fire to the cat said little willy as it burnt i bet the cat
19:30hates that
19:32and then he takes a match and sets fire to his bum said little willy as it burnt gee that
19:37was pretty
19:37dumb little willy took a match and set fire to his head said little willy as it burnt soon i
19:43will be
19:43dead and now no one minded him setting fire to his own bum or his head but the cat got
19:50me into a lot of
19:53trouble the pylon was immediate educators commentators and librarians scolded andy in 2004 the bad book was
20:04removed from libraries and bookstores around the country it was a lesson he's never forgotten
20:12i realized i'd transgressed the unwritten moral laws of fiction if someone does something bad
20:19they need to be punished in some way at some point okay um so i took it out i've had
20:27him set fire to
20:27his knee and he said ouch that's hurting me and there was never any more complaints so what is too
20:34far and do you instinctively know or is that just trial and error what's odd about writing comedy is
20:41that you have to walk up to the line and then not cross over it and then the line changes
20:47especially
20:47if you've got a long running series like i do i'm on book 20 now if you showed me my
20:54writing
20:54in books one through five right now i might cringe a little i might not have written those jokes in
20:59the same way and so i think that that's a really tricky territory i think that humor doesn't always
21:05age well once we expunged all this obnoxious stuff we were able to find other um types of humor hi
21:16my
21:16name's andy this is my friend terry we live in a tree but it was the treehouse series with illustrator
21:23terry denton that cemented andy's reputation as the undisputed king of children's books he's got
21:30a bowling alley a see-through swimming pool a tank full of manning sharks terry then drew this 13
21:39story wonderland and i recognized it instantly as a place i would want to live and any child
21:48and their parents would also want to live in this place so i said right here's the book you and
21:55me
21:55and jill my wife and editor uh we're all living in the tree trying to write a book but we're
22:02distracted
22:02by all the wonderful stuff that's going on and that's why we can't write the book and so that just
22:09took off uh in a way we hadn't even expected around both in australia and around the world
22:17the treehouse series engaged readers around the world and was published in more than 35 countries
22:25what struck me really quickly was that we we were on the same wavelength i'd been doing a lot of
22:31kids
22:31books but i had never met anyone with a sense of humor that could you know drive me and and
22:37bring out of
22:38the stuff i wanted to do but somehow i was able to go into into andyland as much as he
22:43was able to go
22:44into terryland andy has another great passion one that gives him access to his creative state of mind
23:01running has always come very easily to me i enjoy the repetitive rhythmic motion of it
23:11i go into a different thought process you're just in a more broad open state of mind where ideas are
23:20coming and going like clouds and that can be really useful the big picture of what you're doing when you
23:28come back to nail it down into words well when you were learning to write you decided to apply your
23:36running regime to your writing talk me through that yeah i thought gee if i applied a similar kind of
23:44discipline to writing practice as my running perhaps i would improve writing so yeah i started a writing
23:52practice which consisted of timed writing three minutes on the clock put your pen down and start
23:59writing and do not stop so i was downloading my subconscious in three minute bursts which eventually
24:06grew to 10 minutes to half an hour to one hour so free running is almost parallel to free writing
24:13uh yes yeah you're not trying to control anything we have a a free expression part of ourselves and we
24:22have an editor part of ourselves and you need to disable the editor for long enough to get the
24:28thoughts on the page and then you can make decisions about how much and how honest you want to be
24:35but get it down first yeah andy's new partnership with illustrator bill hope marks his next chapter in
24:44encouraging another generation of readers i love the one where he's sitting on his throne there can you
24:50go back to that one this one uh yeah show me the middle one that's beautiful you've created a new
25:00partnership with andy now after so many years of him working with terry denton is it hard to create
25:06that new rapport it was surprising i think to everybody involved including me how well andy and
25:13i got on i mean there's a 30 year age difference between us but at the same time um we
25:19have a lot of
25:19the same kind of cultural references and a very similar kind of slightly chaotic silly um sense of humor
25:27so are you young enough to have actually grown up with andy's books yes yeah yeah i remember being
25:32in in year six class and getting a copy of uh just kidding or just joking i can't remember which
25:39one
25:39it was and i remember there was a drawing of a half decomposing fish on the front that had a
25:45finger
25:45poking out of it and it was one of those things that just like scratched a little bit of my
25:49brain
25:49that was like this is this is weird this is edgy kind of stuff i wonder why the squid is
25:55mad with this
25:55he could have some i don't know magical ink we could be trying to steal the ink off the squid
26:02working with bill is just a joy uh i can say something or a silly idea he's already sketched
26:10it before i've finished the sentence and that uh then suggests new avenues for me to expand on the story
26:18so things are developing very quickly with bill yeah or it can just be an evil squid
26:25couldn't just be an evil square i'll put some evil eyebrows on him so we know who we're talking about
26:30so it just allows me to go to different places with bill and it's it's a very vast cinematic universe
26:40i think what's most exciting to me is that andy when he last visited me i saw this spark i
26:46saw that
26:46he wanted to keep going and he had a new idea and he was really excited about it andy's mind
26:52is so
26:53pliable that i don't think he'll ever stop writing and i think that's that's a good thing for readers
26:58all over the world have bad books and naughty books and anarchic books had their day for kids
27:04no they will be with us till the end of time or to whenever people finally stop reading books
27:12an anarchic joyful clowning this kind of spirit is something that's innate to human existence we need
27:21that comic perspective well when i see kids literally screaming at the sight of you and the
27:27sight of your books they're clearly not done with you no unfortunately you've got to keep working i've
27:35got to keep going what color is the stick brown brown correct what shape it's just like such a fun
27:44game to play with kids shaped like a stick shaped like a stick let's pretend what i'm about to say
27:51is perfectly reasonable when it's anything but so it's just one long game of let's pretend with an
27:57enormous audience of readers absolutely yes so thank you very much for coming along today
28:04thank you andy griffiths everyone big round of applause
28:13and the monkey
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