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Creative Types with Virginia Trioli - Season 3 - Episode 05: Andy Griffiths
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00:06Andy hello hi Virginia well there wouldn't be a child in Australia who hasn't read or
00:12heard of one of your books yeah I feel like I've transmitted my love of reading as a child to
00:19the
00:19next generation so very satisfied about that so how did you come to speak fluent kid this
00:25may surprise you but I was a kid for quite a long time and that window just stayed open for
00:32me that
00:33feeling of like anything can happen an infinite possibility I can access that at any time well
00:42you've just published your 41st book and you're taking it on the road can I come along absolutely
00:47see you there great I'll see you in Melbourne bye I'm Virginia Trioli and I've spent my life paying
00:57attention to creative Australians and wondering what is going on in that wild mind of theirs
01:05in this series I'll showcase artists and performers at the peak of their powers and tell the story of
01:11their triumphs their stumbles and why they make the glorious work we love so much Andy Griffiths is
01:22one of Australia's most successful authors he's the punk pied piper of children's reading luring kids
01:29to books all around the world you forgot to tell me about the page his treehouse just and bad books
01:37have been international sensations selling more than 20 million copies and Andy's popularity with kids
01:44has earned him rock star status
01:53I'm thrilled to be unashamedly celebrating the art of making because we are a country of so many brilliant creative
02:01types
02:15love Andy hello it's great to see you well I wanted to take us to a quiet space for a
02:21quiet little chat yes yes
02:23it is quiet but it's going to get pretty loud very soon there's a lot of kids out there waiting
02:28to be very noisy
02:29200 of your fans for your new book.
02:32Yeah, yeah.
02:32And they get very excited.
02:34Should I have brought earplugs?
02:36You should have.
02:36You didn't get the memo.
02:37I didn't get the memo.
02:39All right.
02:40Never mind.
02:50Are you ready to hear from Andy Griffiths?
02:52Yeah!
03:00What are you normally studying on a Wednesday morning?
03:04Math.
03:05All right, would you like me to teach you some math?
03:10I can count to ten, 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.
03:23He's really tapped into what sort of makes kids excited,
03:27what kind of, like, sparks their imagination
03:29and what kind of drives them crazy as well.
03:32He loves that almost kind of combative relationship with his audience.
03:37This was my best climb ever.
03:43It is.
03:47I'll tell you the truth.
03:48If that is me, but I didn't make the climb,
03:51I fell, and I fell many hundreds of metres until I died.
04:01They realise quite early that this contract of responsible adult and child
04:05has been broken at the start,
04:08and they think,
04:08OK, I've got to screw with this guy now.
04:11He can't finish it.
04:12Does anyone want to finish the banana?
04:16I'll throw it up in the air.
04:21There's this complicated paradox with Andy.
04:29He is both a chaos agent
04:31and a sort of a maestro,
04:35an orchestra conductor in a way.
04:37He knows how to make those two things work together.
04:41There's quite a lot of you.
04:43I've only got one book.
04:45I'll give you each a page from the book.
04:48Would that be fair?
04:52Who's happy for me to rip up the book
04:54and give you, uh...
04:58I think we actually found a few hundred lost books
05:03and with this wonderful magic trick...
05:11That's the hero moment when the books were revealed.
05:14You're all getting a book.
05:15It was like Oprah Winfrey.
05:17Yeah, yeah.
05:19What do you get out of this?
05:20The joy of the kids,
05:22their inquisitiveness,
05:24their challenging me.
05:25We're just celebrating reading stories,
05:30uh, silliness.
05:31Yes.
05:32And, uh, yeah,
05:33and that all feeds into positive,
05:36pleasurable associations with books.
05:38And farts.
05:39That's what it's about.
05:40Oh, there's always a fart or two, yes.
05:42Nice.
05:43Nice.
05:44Nice.
05:55In order to write, Andy needs to play.
05:58So, at the bottom of his garden,
06:00he's built himself a playroom
06:02to ensure that window to his childhood
06:05stays wide open.
06:07This is the treehouse.
06:09Yes.
06:09It's where all the hard work gets done.
06:16After you.
06:18Oh, wow.
06:22Andy, the 10-year-old in you has never left you.
06:25No, he didn't.
06:27He left me in charge.
06:29Is this a lot of your stuff from your childhood?
06:32Yeah, many items have been retrieved
06:35from the, uh, shoe box I used to keep under my bed.
06:39It evokes play for me.
06:42I've got a direct window to that 10-year-old.
06:45And so, once he's excited,
06:47then I'm, I'm getting ideas to write.
06:54Oh, I love these things.
06:55Oh, they're cool, aren't they?
06:57I have one.
06:58So, you've got to make one move and the other stay.
07:01You're really good.
07:02You're a professional.
07:03I spent hours on my grandmother's little donkey doing that.
07:06And I love, there's no batteries in them.
07:08No, exactly.
07:09Yes, it's finger control only.
07:11One of my favourites is this little guy.
07:13He's got an eyeball head.
07:16And if we hold it like that,
07:18he's got a little lever at the back.
07:19Uh-oh.
07:21Got it.
07:23The other thing in here is books.
07:26How many books?
07:27Lots of books and some of the most important ones
07:30that have had an influence on me as a writer.
07:33And from childhood as well?
07:35Absolutely.
07:35This was one of the first books I ever had was Streville Peter.
07:40I know this book.
07:41I had this book too.
07:42It's called Merry Stories and Funny Pictures.
07:45There's not a single laugh in this book.
07:47Not really.
07:48Well, there's a laugh of surprise.
07:50The poor old little sucker thumb.
07:52Yes, this is the one, the red-legged scissor man.
07:54Yeah, his mother goes out and says,
07:56don't suck your thumb while I'm out
07:58or a man with long red legs and a big pair of scissors
08:01will come in and cut them off.
08:02And then bang.
08:03And sure enough, mother is right.
08:06Poor old Conrad gets his thumbs cut off
08:09and at the end he's just showing his thumbless hands
08:13and Mama comes home.
08:15Ah, said Mama, I knew he'd come to naughty little sucker thumb.
08:19Just when you want your mother to protect you and love you.
08:22No sympathy.
08:22She told you.
08:24So even as a five-year-old,
08:26I realised there was something a little absurd about this.
08:29And there was some connection between horror and humour.
08:33Yeah.
08:33Humour helps you digest the horror.
08:36Right.
08:36And stand it in a way.
08:38So you need to build tension in your audience.
08:41But then I'll make them slip on a banana skin
08:45and suddenly the tension is released as a laugh
08:48rather than further nail-biting.
08:52Show me another one.
08:53What's another book that's really important to you?
08:54Oh, Dr Seuss was pretty important very early on.
08:59This was a great book because he starts telling you
09:03about all the different fish there are,
09:05that there's blue fish and old fish and new fish
09:08and some are bad.
09:10And then he just abandons it
09:12and just starts telling silly stories about anything
09:16and mind-blowing imaginative scenarios.
09:21Yes.
09:21A sing-songy, surrealistic landscape,
09:26which I just loved.
09:27And I put that on my hand as a sort of...
09:30Well, my arm.
09:31As a reminder, that's Mount Everest.
09:34That's the pinnacle of what you could achieve,
09:37a nonsensical book that you just fall in love with.
09:41And so that's what I've always been trying to write.
09:43Don't start getting designs on yourself, Buster.
09:47You know it's Seuss there.
09:49You're still not there.
09:50You set your sights high.
09:52Yeah.
09:58The origins of Andy's rebellious spirit
10:01can be found in his listening room.
10:03It's a space filled with some truly impressive audio tech
10:07dedicated to his other great love,
10:09a deep and wild collection of music.
10:16How many years of collecting is this?
10:19Since I was 10 years old.
10:21And how many do you think you've got all up?
10:23I don't know.
10:24Maybe 1,000?
10:26Well, this one's for me,
10:27because that's the models, isn't it?
10:29Absolutely.
10:29And the boys next door on the other side.
10:31Yeah.
10:31Perfect.
10:32Pick one for you.
10:34How can you go past Cosmic Psychos?
10:36Love it.
10:37Punk rock at its finest.
10:39What did punk give you?
10:41Because punk's been really important in your life.
10:43Yeah, it's an energy that makes you feel alive.
10:46And that's what I try to get into the fiction.
10:52Andy loved and lived punk.
10:55As a young man, he fronted his own punk band
10:58called Gothic Farmyard.
11:03It's a rock hole.
11:05It's a rock hole.
11:06It's a rock hole.
11:09Did you love being in the band?
11:11Yeah, absolutely loved it.
11:13Because music has been important to me right from the beginning.
11:16We can tell.
11:17And when I'm writing, it's a form of music.
11:20I'm listening to the words and do they sound good
11:23and do they have a nice rhythm.
11:25So there's a continuum there.
11:27Absolutely.
11:27And when I hear a song that excites me, it's like, oh, I'm so excited.
11:33I want to grab that energy and transmit it through my fiction to my audience
11:38because I wanted my stories to be like that.
11:42Well, that's so interesting because this is your youthful, anarchic punk stage.
11:46But that's a heck of a pivot from what I understand, was a very stable, very happy childhood.
11:53Absolutely.
11:54Yeah, it was free ranging all around Dandenong Creek and the bush all around that area in
12:01the eastern suburbs and lots of books to read at night.
12:05So surrounded by literature from a young age.
12:08Yeah.
12:08And my mother ran a second-hand bookstall for the school fete.
12:13And every year, our spare room would fill up with all the neighbourhood's unwanted books.
12:19Did you get first choice?
12:20Absolutely.
12:20I'd spent hours in there going through books on psychology and philosophy, potboiler adult
12:27thrillers that I shouldn't have been reading, but all grist to a growing reader's mill.
12:33We had a lot of kids in our neighbourhood and we were all out on the streets all the time
12:38and they gravitated towards me and I couldn't help telling them tall tales of things that
12:46I'd apparently done that were completely impossible.
12:49And the more they doubted me, the more I would invent supporting detail as to why this absolutely
12:55was true.
12:56And it was like a game we were playing for no reason other than the enjoyment of it.
13:03In his late 20s, Andy qualified as a high school teacher and worked in country Victoria.
13:09His writing life began with the challenge of trying to get the kids to read.
13:14The kids didn't like reading or writing.
13:17They said, that's, you know, for losers and who would go to the library?
13:22And by that stage, late 80s, children's literature appeared to be becoming safer and more messagey.
13:31And the sort of books I loved were the anarchy, chaos books that were just there for the sheer
13:38enjoyment of reading.
13:39And so I started doing the same for my students.
13:42So that was the beginning of you thinking, I can write stories?
13:46I didn't know that I could write stories, but I knew these kids needed something that
13:53was a little bit more modern, a little bit more punk rock.
13:56And I'd been watching The Young Ones.
13:59It was about the only television I watched in the 80s.
14:03But that punk rock energy of The Young Ones, I wanted to capture that in fiction.
14:09And so that's what I applied myself to do.
14:13And he matched that energy with a steely discipline.
14:16For 10 years, he banked half his annual teaching salary and then gave himself two years off to
14:24see 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.
14:35It didn't actually get me up top.
14:37But it certainly taught me I had a comedic gift when I wrote.
14:42So I was like, ah, so I'm not Shakespeare.
14:45I'm not Raymond Carver.
14:48I'm this clown.
14:50My life will take a different path.
14:52Yeah.
14:52And in fact, I couldn't get myself out of the books.
14:56Andy was always the main character.
14:58This is happening to me.
15:00I tried.
15:01But then I saw Seinfeld and I thought, well, he's a character in his own sitcom.
15:06I can be a character in my own book.
15:08So that was a real breakthrough.
15:10But I didn't think I would be accepted as a proper writer if I'm doing this.
15:16But in the end, that's all I could do was submit to the voice that came through.
15:21And that's, I guess, what resulted in the first series of books, the just books.
15:24Yeah, they were about me as a kid playing jokes on people.
15:30And they were horrendous jokes.
15:32But Andy always suffered more than anybody else in the end.
15:36He never got away with it.
15:38And that's what a book is to me.
15:40It's a form of play.
15:43And you might as well play hard rather than play safe.
15:49Andy was never going to play it safe.
15:52Graduating from short stories to his first full-length novel, Andy wrote,
15:56The Day My Bum Went Psycho.
15:59And his mission to get kids to read by any means allowable was underway.
16:04It became an instant bestseller.
16:06May your bum be with you.
16:10The Day My Bum Went Psycho was the stupidest title I could think for a story.
16:15And it would also help to loosen up what I felt was an overly precious approach to literature for children,
16:23which there was always this idea it should have some moral uplifting or send some message.
16:29Yeah.
16:29So I wanted this to be like a Trojan horse, to get everyone to say bum so often that they
16:36would just relax.
16:38Was it 1,200?
16:41273 times.
16:43Somebody counted up the amount of times I said bum in a 50,000-word novel.
16:49It was the beginning of what we might call your controversy period,
16:52because there was a big controversy about this book.
16:55I think it came from educational bureaucrats who got their bum in a twist.
16:59About a particular poster.
17:00Yeah, we had a picture of a baby's bottom on the cover.
17:04It was like it was terrorising an entire city.
17:07Yes.
17:08And they said, oh, some people might get offended by the sight of a baby's bottom.
17:12Then it was on page three of The Age the next day, and I was having a ball.
17:18It would have been a moment, I guess, where you got to decide, okay, what am I fighting for?
17:22Yeah, I need to be able to entertain these kids in the most powerful way I know how.
17:29Whatever you write is not going to please someone.
17:32I learnt that very early.
17:34So I thought I have to please myself, and I have to please my audience.
17:38And the gatekeepers certainly have to be negotiated.
17:42Yes.
17:42But 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.
17:58And it's as bad as you can get.
18:00It's one of my favourites.
18:02And this takes us right back to Seuss and to Grimm and everything, but in the most concise little form.
18:08It's Bad Little Betty.
18:09Bad Little Betty wouldn't get out of bed.
18:12Was she being lazy?
18:14No.
18:15She was dead.
18:17I love that.
18:18Poor Little Betty.
18:19But also, perfect.
18:21Yeah.
18:21And then, you know, most children are not traumatised by that because they realise how stupid that is.
18:29That freaked a whole lot of people out, that book, didn't it?
18:32Yeah.
18:32Once again, they thought, oh, kids will be traumatised by this or they'll go and do bad things.
18:38And I said, no, this is a thought experiment.
18:41They understand that if you call a book The Bad Book, it's not really that bad.
18:47It's a wink.
18:48It's a wink.
18:49But there was an obnoxious element in this which I think was a key learning moment for you about how
18:55far you can go and the jokes that you can't tell in a book for kids.
18:59Yeah.
18:59There's a strain of dark, you know, humour in Australian culture called the Little Willie rhymes.
19:08And it was like, Little Willie in his best of sashes fell in the fire and was burned to ashes.
19:13By and by the wind grew chilly, but nobody liked to poke poor Willie.
19:18And there are many such variations of these Willie poems from the 30s and 40s.
19:23So I made my own.
19:25Little Willie took a match and set fire to the cat, said Little Willie as it burnt, I bet the
19:30cat hates that.
19:31And then he takes a match and sets fire to his bum, said Little Willie as it burnt, gee, that
19:37was pretty dumb.
19:38Little Willie took a match and set fire to his head, said Little Willie as it burnt, soon I will
19:43be dead.
19:44Now, no one minded him setting fire to his own bum or his head, but the cat got me into
19:51a lot of trouble.
19:55The pylon was immediate.
19:57Educators, commentators and librarians scolded Andy.
20:01In 2004, the bad book was removed from libraries and bookstores around the country.
20:07It was a lesson he's never forgotten.
20:12I realised I'd transgressed the unwritten moral laws of fiction.
20:17If someone does something bad, they need to be punished in some way at some point.
20:24OK.
20:25So I took it out.
20:26I've had him set fire to his knee and he said, ouch, that's hurting me.
20:30And there was never any more complaints.
20:33So what is Too Far?
20:35And do you instinctively know or is that just trial and error?
20:38What's odd about writing comedy is that you have to walk up to the line and then not cross over
20:45it.
20:45And then the line changes, especially if you've got a long running series like I do.
20:51I'm on book 20 now.
20:52Now, if you showed me my writing in books one through five right now, I might cringe a little.
20:58I might not have written those jokes in the same way.
21:00And so I think that that's a really tricky territory.
21:03I think that humour doesn't always age well.
21:07Once we expunged all this obnoxious stuff, we were able to find other types of humour.
21:15Hi, my name's Andy.
21:17This is my friend Terry.
21:19We live in a tree.
21:21But it was the Treehouse series with illustrator Terry Denton that cemented Andy's reputation
21:26as the undisputed king of children's books.
21:30He's got a bowling alley, a see-through swimming pool, a tank full of man-eating sharks.
21:37Terry then drew this 13-storey wonderland.
21:41And I recognised it instantly as a place I would want to live, and any child and their
21:48parents would also want to live in this place.
21:51So I said, right, here's the book.
21:54You and me and Jill, my wife and editor, we're all living in the tree, trying to write a book,
22:02but we're distracted by all the wonderful stuff that's going on.
22:05And that's why we can't write the book.
22:07And so that just took off in a way we hadn't even expected around, both in Australia and
22:15around the world.
22:17The Treehouse series engaged readers around the world and was published in more than 35
22:22countries.
22:25What struck me really quickly was that we were on the same wavelength.
22:29I'd been doing a lot of kids' books, but I had never met anyone with a sense of humour
22:34that could, you know, drive me and bring out of me the stuff I wanted to do.
22:39But somehow I was able to go into Andy-land as much as he was able to go into Terry
22:44-land.
22:54Andy has another great passion, one that gives him access to his creative state of mind.
23:01Running has always come very easily to me.
23:05I enjoy the repetitive, rhythmic motion of it.
23:11I go into a different thought process.
23:14You're just in a more broad, open state of mind, where ideas are coming and going like
23:21clouds.
23:22And that can be really useful, the big picture of what you're doing, when you come back to
23:29nail it down into words.
23:33Well, when you were learning to write, you decided to apply your running regime to your
23:38writing.
23:38Talk me through that.
23:40Yeah, I thought, gee, if I applied a similar kind of discipline to writing practice as my
23:47running, perhaps I would improve writing.
23:50So, yeah, I started a writing practice which consisted of timed writing.
23:55Three minutes on the clock, put your pen down and start writing and do not stop.
24:01So, I was downloading my subconscious in three-minute bursts, which eventually grew to ten minutes
24:07to half an hour to one hour.
24:09So, free running is almost parallel to free writing?
24:14Yes, yeah.
24:15You're not trying to control anything.
24:17We have a free expression part of ourselves and we have an editor part of ourselves.
24:24And you need to disable the editor for long enough to get the thoughts on the page and
24:30then you can make decisions about how much and how honest you want to be.
24:35But get it down first.
24:39Andy's new partnership with illustrator Bill Hope marks his next chapter in encouraging
24:44another generation of readers.
24:47I love the one where he's sitting on his throne there.
24:50Can you go back to that one?
24:52This one?
24:54Yeah, show me the middle one.
24:57That's beautiful.
24:59You've created a new partnership with Andy now after so many years of him working with
25:04Terry Denton.
25:05Is it hard to create that new rapport?
25:08It was surprising, I think, to everybody involved, including me, how well Andy and I got on.
25:14I mean, there's a 30-year age difference between us, but at the same time, we have a lot of
25:19the same kind of cultural references and a very similar kind of slightly chaotic, silly
25:25sense of humour.
25:27So, are you young enough to have actually grown up with Andy's books?
25:30Yes, yeah, yeah.
25:32I remember being in year six class and getting a copy of Just Kidding or Just Joking.
25:38I can't remember which one it was.
25:39And I remember there was a drawing of a half decomposing fish on the front that had a finger
25:45poking out of it.
25:46And it was one of those things that just like scratched a little bit of my brain that was
25:50like, this is weird.
25:51This is edgy kind of stuff.
25:53I wonder why the squid is mad with us.
25:56It could have some, I don't know, magical ink.
25:58We could be trying to steal the ink off the squid.
26:01Working with Bill is just a joy.
26:05I can say something or a silly idea.
26:08He's already sketched it before I've finished the sentence.
26:12And that then suggests new avenues for me to expand on the story.
26:19So, things are developing very quickly with Bill.
26:23Yeah.
26:23Or it can just be an evil squid.
26:25Could it just be an evil squid?
26:27I'll put some evil eyebrows on him so we know who we're talking about.
26:31So, it just allows me to go to different places with Bill.
26:35And 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.
26:46I saw that he wanted to keep going and he had a new idea.
26:49And he was really excited about it.
26:52Andy's mind is so pliable that I don't think he'll ever stop writing.
26:56And I think that's a good thing for readers all over the world.
26:59Have bad books and naughty books and anarchic books had their day for kids?
27:03No, they will be with us till the end of time or to whenever people finally stop reading books.
27:12An anarchic, joyful, clowning kind of spirit is something that's innate to human existence.
27:21We need that comic perspective.
27:23Well, when I see kids literally screaming at the sight of you and the sight of your books,
27:28they're clearly not done with you.
27:30No, unfortunately.
27:33You've got to keep working.
27:35I've got to keep going.
27:36What colour is the stick?
27:38Brown.
27:39Brown.
27:40Brown.
27:41Correct.
27:42What shape?
27:42It's just like such a fun game to play with kids.
27:46Shaped like a stick.
27:47Shaped like a stick.
27:49Let's pretend what I'm about to say is perfectly reasonable when it's anything but.
27:55So, it's just one long game of let's pretend with an enormous audience of readers.
27:59Absolutely, yes.
28:01So, thank you very much for coming along today.
28:05Andy Griffiths, everyone.
28:07Big round of applause.
28:08Woo!
28:13And the monkey.
28:15Big round of applause.
28:16Big round of applause.
28:18Big round of applause.
28:19Big round of applause.
28:21Big round of applause.
28:21Big round of applause.
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