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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
02:16I wanted to take us to a quiet space for a quiet little chat yes yes it is quiet but
02:24it's going to
02:24get pretty loud very soon there's a lot of kids out there waiting to be very noisy 200 of your
02:30fans for
02:31your new book. Yeah, yeah. And they get
02:33very excited. Should I have brought
02:35earplugs? You should have. You didn't get
02:37the memo? I didn't get the memo.
02:39All right.
02:50Are you ready to hear
02:51from Annie Griffiths?
03:00What are you normally
03:01studying on a Wednesday
03:03morning? Math.
03:05All right. Would you like me to teach you
03:07some math?
03:10I can count
03:11to ten, but I just
03:13can't always do it in the right order.
03:19Andy, he never has that distance
03:21that some author might get from their
03:23audience. He's really tapped into
03:25what sort of makes kids
03:27excited, what kind of like sparks their imagination
03:29and what kind of drives them crazy
03:31as well. He loves that almost
03:33kind of combative
03:34relationship with his audience.
03:37This is my best climb
03:39ever.
03:46I'll tell you the truth. That is me, but I didn't make the climb. I fell, and I fell
03:53many hundreds of metres until I died.
04:01They realise quite
04:02early that this contract of responsible
04:04adult and child has been
04:06broken at the start, and
04:08they think, OK, I've got to screw with this guy
04:10now. He can't finish
04:12it. Does anyone want to finish the banana?
04:16I'll throw it up in the air.
04:21There's this complicated
04:22paradox with Andy.
04:29He is both a chaos agent and
04:32sort of a maestro, an orchestra conductor
04:36in a way. He knows how to make those two things work together.
04:41There's quite a lot of you. I've only got one book. I'll give you each a page from the book.
04:48Would that be fair?
04:52Who's happy for me to rip up
04:54the book and give you...
04:58I think we actually
05:00found a few hundred
05:01lost books, and
05:04with this wonderful magic book...
05:11That's the hero moment, when the books were revealed.
05:14You're all getting a book. It was like
05:16Oprah Winfrey. What do you get out of this?
05:20The joy of the kids,
05:22their inquisitiveness,
05:24their challenging me. We're just
05:26celebrating
05:28reading stories,
05:31silliness, and
05:32that all feeds into
05:34positive,
05:36pleasurable associations with books.
05:38And farts.
05:40There's always a fart or two, yes.
05:42Nice.
05:55In order to write, Andy needs to play, so at the bottom of his garden, he's built himself a playroom
06:02to ensure that window to his childhood stays wide open.
06:07This is the tree house?
06:09Yes. It's where all the hard work gets done.
06:16After you.
06:18Oh, wow.
06:22Andy, the ten-year-old in you has never left you.
06:25No, he didn't.
06:27No, 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 from the shoebox I used to keep under my bed.
06:39It evokes play for me.
06:42I've got a direct window to that ten-year-old.
06:44And so, once he's excited, then I'm getting ideas to write.
06:54Oh, I love these things.
06:55Oh, they're cool, aren't they?
06:57I have one.
06:57Yeah.
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.
07:11It's just you.
07:11One of my favourites is this little guy.
07:13He's got an eyeball head.
07:16And if we hold it like that, he'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 that 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.
07:53The red-legged scissor man.
07:54Yeah.
07:55Yeah.
07:55His mother goes out and says, don't suck your thumb while I'm out or a man with long red
07:59legs and a big pair of scissors will come in and cut them off.
08:02And bang.
08:03And sure enough, mother is right.
08:06Poor old Conrad gets his thumbs cut off and at the end he's just showing his thumbless
08:12hands and Mama comes home.
08:14Ah, 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.
08:22No.
08:23She told you.
08:24So even as a five-year-old I 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 and suddenly the tension is released as a laugh
08:48rather than further nail biting.
08:51Show 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 about all the different fish there are.
09:05That there's blue fish and old fish and new fish and some are bad.
09:10And then he just abandons it and just starts telling silly stories about anything.
09:17And mind-blowing, imaginative scenarios.
09:21Yes.
09:21A sing-songy, surrealistic landscape, which I just loved.
09:27And I put that on my hand as a sort of, or my arm, as a reminder, that's Mount Everest.
09:34That's the pinnacle of what you could achieve.
09:36A 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 can 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.
10:13This week.
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 a thousand?
10:26Well, this one's for me, because 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.
10:39Yeah.
10:39What did punk give you?
10:41Because punk's been really important in your life.
10:43Yeah.
10:43It's an energy that makes you feel alive.
10:46And that's what I try to get into the fiction.
10:52And he loved and lived punk.
10:55As a young man, he fronted his own punk band called Gothic Farmyard.
11:09Did you love being in the band?
11:11Yeah.
11:12Absolutely 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.
11:20Yeah.
11:20I'm listening to the words and do they sound good and the 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.
11:41Well, 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.
11:49It was a very stable, very happy childhood.
11:53Absolutely.
11:54Yeah.
11:54It was free ranging all around Dandenong Creek
11:58and the bush all around that area in the eastern suburbs.
12:03And lots of books to read at night.
12:06So surrounded by literature from a young age.
12:08Yeah.
12:08And my mother ran a second-hand book stall 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,
12:26pot-boiler adult thrillers that I shouldn't have been reading,
12:30but 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.
12:39And they gravitated towards me.
12:41And I couldn't help telling them tall tales of things that I'd apparently done
12:47that were completely impossible.
12:49And the more they doubted me, the more I would invent supporting detail
12:53as to why this absolutely was 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.
13:13The 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
13:36that were just there for the sheer enjoyment 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
13:52that was 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.
14:13Andy matched that energy with a steely discipline.
14:16For 10 years, he banked half his annual teaching salary
14:20and 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.
14:36It didn't actually get me up top.
14:37But it certainly taught me I had a comedic gift when I wrote.
14:41So 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, but 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.
15:25Yeah.
15:25They 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.
16:14And 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.
16:38Is 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 about 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.
18:22And then, you know, most children are not traumatised by that.
18:26No.
18:26Because they realise how stupid that is.
18:28You know.
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.
18:47You know.
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
18:53you about how far 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.
19:07And 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.
19:28Said Little Willie as it burnt.
19:30I bet the cat hates that.
19:31And then he takes a match and sets fire to his bum.
19:35Said Little Willie as it burnt.
19:36Gee, that was pretty dumb.
19:38Little Willie took a match and set fire to his head.
19:40Said Little Willie as it burnt.
19:42Soon I will be dead.
19:44Now, no one minded him setting fire to his own bum or his head.
19:49But the cat got me into a lot of trouble.
19:54The pylon was immediate.
19:58Educators, commentators and librarians scolded Andy.
20:00In 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.
20:52If 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.
21:04I think that humour doesn't always age well.
21:06Once 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.
21:29It'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 and I recognised it instantly as a place I would
21:45want to live and any child and their parents 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.
22:08And so that just took off in a way we hadn't even expected around, both in Australia and around the
22:15world.
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 were on the same wavelength.
22:30I'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
22:44Land.
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 clouds.
23:22And that can be really useful, the big picture of what you're doing,
23:27when you come back to nail it down into words.
23:33Well, when you were learning to write, you decided to apply your running regime to your writing.
23:38Talk me through that.
23:40Yeah, I thought, gee, if I applied a similar kind of discipline to writing practice as my running,
23:47perhaps I would improve writing.
23:49So, 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,
24:05which eventually grew to ten minutes to 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
24:29and then 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
24:43in encouraging another 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 Terry Denton.
25:04Is 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.
25:17But at the same time, we have a lot of the same kind of cultural references
25:21and a very similar kind of slightly chaotic, silly sense of humor.
25:27So are you young enough to have actually grown up with Andy's books?
25:30Yes.
25:31Yeah, yeah.
25:31I 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 poking
25:45out of it.
25:46And it was one of those things that just like scratched a little bit of my brain that was like,
25:50this is weird, this 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.
26:30So 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?
27:04No, they will be with us till the end of time.
27:09Or to whenever people finally stop reading books.
27:12An anarchic, joyful, clowning kind of spirit is something that's innate to human existence.
27:20We need that comic perspective.
27:23Well, when I see kids literally screaming at the sight of you and the sight of your books, they're clearly
27:29not done with you.
27:31No, 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.
27:54So it's just one long game of let's pretend with an enormous audience of readers.
27:59Absolutely.
28:00Yes.
28:00So thank you very much for coming along today.
28:05Andy Griffiths everyone.
28:06Big round of applause.
28:13And the monkey.
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