When I was a child, I devoured every book I could get my hands on.
I loved losing myself in colourful and dramatic stories
and my absolute favourite was this -
Charlie And The Chocolate Factory.
Everything about it electrified me.
And when I re-read Dahl's books as an adult,
they surprised me. There was nothing prescriptive
or predictable about them, with little sense of narrative rules,
and they're nearly all perfect.
'Boy pie might be better bird pie,' he went on,
grinning horribly. 'More meat, and not so many tiny little bones.'
Mr Twit is a very evil man, isn't he? ALL: Yeah.
The Twits, Charlie And The Chocolate Factory,
Matilda, Fantastic Mr Fox,
legendary books that take Roald Dahl's sales
to 100 million worldwide.
He is one of the bestselling fiction authors of all time.
I think Dahl is possibly the first modern children's author.
He was the first one who broke the rules, as it were,
and sided so utterly with the child.
Children's books are often seen as the poor relation of literature.
But children are just as demanding as adult readers,
if not, more so.
I should know, I'm a children's writer myself
yet I will never be as good as Dahl.
In this film, I want to try and understand
where Dahl's magic touch came from.
When I was growing up in the 1970s and '80s,
Dahl was a regular on television.
As a child, I was quite scared of him.
If a bucket of paint falls on a man's head,
that's funny.
If the bucket fractured his skull the same time and kills him,
that's not funny, it's tragic.
He was unfeasibly tall, and bald,
and dressed like a mad professor.
He came across like an eccentric and cantankerous uncle.
He was an outsider who sat alone all day,
dreaming up wicked stories.
His persona was so strong
that people even parodied him.
By the end of his life, it was like he had become one of his characters.
He was tall, he was distinguished, he was marvellous to look at,
a marvellous looking man.
Rather like the North Pole,
or whatever it is that attracts the solar wind from the sun,
he would magnetise you
and then in some way rebuff you at the same time.
He wasn't the sort of person who you'd run up
and throw your arms around. I wouldn't, anyway.
I would have liked to.
I've come to his home in Buckinghamshire
where he spent 30 years writing stories for both children and adults.
His widow Liccy Dahl still lives at the house.
(DOORBELL)
Hello! Hello, Liccy!
Welcome to Gipsy House. Thank you so much for having us, thank you.
Thank you. Not at all. Come on in. Can I take you coat?
Ah, thank you. Thank you very much.
Wow! That's one bookcase!
Yes, isn't wonderful?
So this is the Chinese Charlie And The Chocolate Factory? That was the first... Yes.
The first of Roald's books to me printed in China.
It's kind of horrible cover as well.
Printed on lavatory paper. It's absolutely horrible. (LAUGHS)
Thank you.
Beautiful house.
It's rather fun. Yes.
Was he very private about his work?
Very. Yes.
He would sort of suddenly say, 'I've got a little idea for my new book.
You know, I think - a little boy who's able to move objects around.'
And you'd say fine. And that would be about it.
And then he'd go off into his hut and...
..you wouldn't hear any more
until he'd got a first draft more or less ready.
Would he let you read the first draft? No, he'd read it to me.
Oh. And he'd read it to me in bed, and sometimes I fell asleep.
And that was...erm...not very good.
Did he have any negative feelings
about writing for children rather than adults?
No. I think he probably had more fun.
Because his adult stories are quite dark.
When he started to write for children -
I think that's part of the charm -
he points out how badly adults do behave,
and, of course, children love that.
But, no, I think he got far more fun out of writing for children.
There were moments that the establishment rejected him
or he felt they rejected him because he was a children's writer.
You know, that was not...the thing to be.
And I think that upset him quite a bit.
Every day, Roald Dahl walked to his writing hut in the garden.
This was the womb that gave birth to all his stories.
Despite the gorgeous view, Dahl chose to seal himself off with curtains.
He closed himself away like Willy Wonka in his factory.
Here's the hut.
Not quite as I imagined it.
I was thinking it was going to be a shed for some reason
but it's a brick building.
But I love this walkway.
Feels like he would have had a real routine,
come out the house, taking this walk, whatever the weather.
It's quite a long way from the house as well,
he definitely wanted to be isolated.
To better understand where Dahl's extraordinary imagination came from,
I've come to Cardiff, which was one of Britain's largest ports
in the early 20th century.
Through its maritime trading with Norway,
it became home to a large Norwegian community,
including Dahl's parents.
Born in 1916, Dahl's childhood was overshadowed by tragedy.
At just three years old,
he lost both his elder sister and his father to illness.
He formed a very close relationship with his mother.
I think Sofia Hesselberg Dahl
was an extraordinary, forceful, strong woman.
She was a mystic. She read people's fortunes. She was a tough old bird,
as he might have said.
Roald's mother read him Norwegian fairy tales as he was growing up.
To find out how these stories may have influenced the young Dahl,
I've come to the Norwegian church in Cardiff,
where he was baptised.
I'm meeting with Giles Abbott,
and expert in storytelling with an interest in Norwegian myths.
So, Giles, what's distinctive about Norwegian fairy tales?
They have a very distinctive context -
the isolated, snowbound land, and mountains of Norway.
They have distinctive flavour as well. There's a humour,
there's darkness, and there's trolls.
And what is a troll?
Trolls are usually stupid. They can be outwitted by clever human beings.
Could be me you're describing here. Could it be? I don't know.
I think they often take on qualities of nature
so a troll can have a rock-like aspect
or sometimes when the sun comes up, they turn into rocks.
If you've seen rocks and you can sort of see a face - Yeah.
You can imagine how that would happen.
Wow. So there's kind of threat everywhere in these stories.
Yes. Nature even can't be trusted.
Well, nature can't. In particularly, in a land as challenging as Norway.
There's threat and danger everywhere in those dark forests,
in those great lakes, behind those great mountains.
I have a friend who grew up in Norway in the 1940s,
and she says that the trolls would be things like
if you see a tree covered in snow,
it can take on a humanoid shape, but it's massive.
And whenever her family met with other branches of her family,
the first thing they would do is sit down
and the older people would tell troll stories to the children.
You can imagine the young Dahl asking for the most macabre stories.
Oh, yeah. And asking his mother to hear them over and over again.
In The Witches, the boy hero is told stories by his grandmother
and this what Roald writes.
My grandmother was Norwegian. The Norwegians know all about witches.
For Norway, with its black forests and icy mountains,
is where the first witches came from.
Oh... Fantastic, but amazing that he connect Norway...
And the landscape. Yeah. To witches, to horrifying things.
'Vitches of Inkland!', shouted the Grand High Witch.
She herself, I noticed,
had not taken off either her wig or her gloves, or her shoes.
'Vitches of Inkland,' she yelled.
The audience stirred uneasily and sat up straighter in their chairs.
'Miserrable vitches,' she yelled. 'Useless, lazy vitches.
Feeble, frrribling vitches.
You are heap of idle good-for-nothing vurms!'
Dahl's widowed mother took him
to the mountains and fjords of Norway every summer.
Decades later, as he settled in Buckinghamshire,
nature was still important to him.
Coming here has made me realise just how much Dahl must have loved nature.
He chose to live surrounded by fields and trees
and I know he was a great lover of country walks.
It really gives you time to think.
For me, I like to think when I'm swimming,
but he probably liked to think while he was walking across these fields.
Dahl's Norwegian background also made him an outsider.
With an outsider's ability to see the world differently.
His first children's book came from him sitting in his hut,
and thinking, 'Why do fruits stop growing?
Why don't they just go on growing
and getting bigger and bigger and bigger.'
And he didn't feel that science provided all the answers.
I mean, science provided some of the answers
but his mind was always open to the idea that we don't know
that trees aren't screaming when you saw a branch off.
We don't know that grass doesn't feel pain when you mow the lawn.
He was always looking beyond the surface for something
and so magic very, very quickly came into his life.
It is a sign of a master.
He sets a rule. It's his world.
Everything happens the way he says it's going to happen
and you don't argue with it. You go with it.
Wherever that peach goes, however high it flies,
even when it ends up spiked on top of the Empire State Building,
it's there because he says so. That is the pleasure
of reading the books. You never question Dahl. You just go with him.
Every year, at Dahl's old school,
the Cathedral School in Llandaff, Cardiff,
the children bring to life one of Dahl's stories
that subverts the laws of nature.
Golden Gloss Shampoo?
ALL: Yes. Toothpaste? Yes.
Superfoam Shaving Foam. Yes.
'In George's Marvellous Medicine,
George is fed up with his grumpy grandmother,
and thinks he can cure her with his own special medicine.'
Granary seeds. Yes.
'The original ingredients are so disgusting and foul,
we've made a few substitutions.'
Horseradish sauce? Yes.
OK, let's do it. Find the engine oil, pour a little bit in. Oops.
No, that's good. Pour it all in.
What shall we go with next? Let's all grind up these horse pills.
Smash them in the bowls.
Just get them a good old smash. More, more, more.
Just give it a stir.
OK.
Would you eat that? Maybe not.
Come on. (CHUCKLES)
Wow, looks lovely, doesn't it?
Next, I think, is curry powder.
ALL: Errrgh! (SCREAMING)
Shall I try it? Shall I see what it tastes like? Shall I?
No? (LAUGHS)
It's more fun than normal lessons, isn't it?
Push it in!
George stood in his bedroom, gazing at the shambles.
There was a big hole in the floor,
and another in the ceiling. And sticking up like a post
between the two was the middle part of grandma.
Her legs were in the room below,
her head in the attic.
'I'm still going!' came the old screechy voice from up above.
'Give me another dose, my boy, and let's go through the roof!'
'No, Grandma, no.' George called back.
'You're busting up the whole house!'
'To heck with the house!' She shouted.
'I want some fresh air. I haven't been outside for 20 years.
With a heigh-nonny-no and up we go!' She shouted.
'Just watch me grow!'
Imagine if the headmaster did actually eat it?
He probably won't. If we put it in his coffee, he probably would.
(LAUGHING) However wacky the inventions,
however ridiculous the events, all Dahl's stories are believable.
They may not be realistic
but they are believable.
Dahl has this amazing understanding of what makes kids tick,
so he can create worlds that they believe in.
He has the most extraordinary ability to see the world
as he did when he was a child.
Oh, Daddy, we'll never find it.
We must keep looking.
Roald Dahl didn't just write legendary children's books,
he co-wrote the screenplay for Chitty Chitty Bang Bang,
stamping on it his unique storytelling.
He created the infamous child-catcher,
who wasn't in the book.
I can smell them!
'I think the child-catcher's one of Dahl's greatest creations
and I think it's possibly the greatest villain in cinema.
It really kind of speaks to what's brilliant about Dahl.'
A lot of people are quite dismissive about him
because he does use beautiful description,
he's not psychologically subtle.
There's not a lot of sort of the finer arts
of writing evident in Dahl.
But he's got this thing that very very few people have got
where he can just go straight to the nerve.
I mean, the child catcher, it just seems to be speaking
to your nervous system. It's like that injection of adrenaline
in Pulp Fiction that just thumps into your chest.
And he just seems to bypass all your cognitive abilities
and really rattle you in a visceral way.
And that's a very, very, very rare gift.
Here we are, children.
Come and get your lollipops.
Lollipops!
Dahl's fascination with extreme characters
can be seen right from his years at school.
On Llandaff High Street, Dahl visited his local sweet shop.
In his autobiography, he recalled it as being owned by a Mrs Pratchett.
Today, it's a Chinese takeaway.
Dahl described Mrs Pratchett as a small, skinny, old hag
with goat's legs and black fingernails.
Her blouse had bits of breakfast all over it -
toast crumbs and tea stains, and splotches of dried egg.
She would say things like, 'I'm watching you,
so keep your thieving fingers off them chocolates.'
You do wonder if Mrs Pratchett inspired many
of Dahl's darkest creations.
So fired up was the young Roald
that he masterminded the perfect revenge on Mrs Pratchett,
leaving a dead mouse in one of the sweet jars.
Found out, Dahl was sent to the headmaster for punishment.
(CANE WHIPS)
Dahl remembered, 'It felt, I promise you, as though someone had laid
a red-hot poker against my flesh, and was pressing down on it hard.'
But despite these experiences,
he never lost his anarchic spirit.
This is a letter Dahl wrote to his mother in 1930 when he was 13.
You seem to have been doing a lot of painting,
but when you paint the loo, don't paint the seat,
leaving it wet and sticky or some unfortunate person
who has not noticed it will adhere to it and unless his bottom is cut off,
unless he chooses to go about with the seat sticking behind him always,
he will be doomed to stay where he is
and do nothing but shit for the rest of his life.
Now already you can see Dahl is inviting the reader
enter a world of his dark and surreal humour.
It's really, really fascinating
that he kind of gets an idea and he runs with it.
He's visualising it already. He's visualising someone
with a seat stuck to their arse.
It's funny. Quite inappropriate really
for a letter to your mother aged 13.
Especially the use of the word 'shit' in 1930
but...this is the birth of a genius.
Everything I heard from people who remember the Dahl household
leaves me think that it was a pretty chaotic, riotous place.
I mean, his school friends said to me,
'Gosh, to go and stay at the Dahl's, it was like staying in a madhouse.'
Some of them found it quite shocking
because all the kids swore like troopers
and Sofia Magdalene didn't seem to give a damn.
And I think that was very important him
because he was used to a home environment that had no rules
and he really...he really kicked against rules,
anybody telling him what to do most of his life.
I think, not to put too fine a point upon it, he hated school.
I think he really really had a bad time there.
Adults are like....
(GRUMBLES) 'You have to do this, you have to do that.'
Yeah.
Matilda, one of his last books, is a story of a brilliant child,
her beastly parents and nasty headmistress - Miss Trunchbull.
'What's she look like? Nasty little worm, I'll be bound.
I have discovered, Miss Honey, during my long career as a teacher
that a bad girl is a far more dangerous creature than a bad boy.
What's more they're much harder to squash.
Squashing a bad girl is like trying to squash a bluebottle.
You bang down on it and the darn thing isn't there.
Nasty, dirty things, little girls are.
Glad I never was one.'
Hmmm. So that's Miss Trunchbull.
She's got to be the most evil teacher in the world. ALL: Yeah.
Roald Dahl was physically and mentally hurt
by the way in which he was treated at school.
There's no question of it.
You can see in the way he writes about beatings and so on.
So he's poured all this in to Miss Trunchbull
and then by exaggerating it, in a way, you make it safe,
psychologically, from his point of view.
If you exaggerate something, you end up laughing at it.
Dahl's extreme characters have been brought to life
through the illustrations of Quentin Blake.
I think Matilda.... I think that got the most...
I seem to remember there's 100 drawings in that.
It's of the longest of his books. He was very pleased.
It would be interesting to look at the process
of he describes Miss Trunchbull and then how you drew her.
Yes. She's one of your most sympathetic characters, isn't she?
Yes. I'm very close to her. Yes.
She was, above all, a most formidable female.
She had once been a famous athlete
and even now the muscles were still clearly in evidence.
You could see them in the bull neck, in the big shoulders
and the thick arms, in the sinewy wrists and the powerful legs.
Look at her, you got the feeling this was someone who could bend iron bars
and tear telephone directories in half.
This was another moment where we changed it a bit,
or Roald changed it, because when he described her,
she was like a... I think she had a collar and tie,
and...
Well, I did a slight moustache but I'm not sure whether
that was in the text or whether I made that up.
I don't think you'd be that cruel, Quentin,
I think that must have been Roald's.
He bought out another side in me.
But...
So that the presentation was very masculine
and I think that when we saw Roald said,
'She's got to be terrible, but has got to be a woman.'
So, yes, that's right, we gave her...
She actually does have a feminine hairstyle.
And then Roald found a photograph of someone wearing the sort of costume
that she is wearing, with this rather...
I invented that nasty buckle on the belt actually
which is sort of...
Quite contains her, doesn't it, really? Yes, that's right and then...
She bursting out even if...
Yes, that's right. And then the cuffs and the...
Great big hands.
Is it more fun drawing the monstrous characters
or the sort of larger-than-life characters than the kids?
It's different. I mean, you need that roughage in your diet,
I think, really. It's interesting. You can modify the dose as it were.
They are caricatures, you know, frightening caricatures.
But they're slightly less frightening
because they're caricatures in a way.
Is it hard selecting which bits to illustrate
or is it very natural on your first read?
No, it takes quite a lot of thought, I think.
It's an important bit of the job, actually.
There's an example I've quoted in the past
where the boy eats the whole chocolate cake, you know,
and Miss Trunchbull is so annoyed about that,
that she picks up the empty plate, bashes it over his head.
And of course, he's kind of anaesthetised
with the chocolate cake so it's all right, you know.
But I thought I don't want to draw that,
I'll just draw her lifting the plate.
So we all have the pleasure of anticipation.
I know what you mean. You don't want to see that illustration
of the plate connecting before you've read that passage, no.
That's right.
Matilda was written in the mission control for Dahl's creativity -
his famous hut.
The interior has recently been relocated to the Roald Dahl museum.
What really strikes me about this writing hut is how ramshackle it is.
There's an electric heater hanging from two wires on the ceiling.
An angle-poised lamp that's broken so Dahl's attached a golf ball
with some sellotape to it to weight it.
There's fossils, part of his hip bone, shavings from his spine.
And of course, he's got his special yellow American legal notepaper,
and his pencils.
It actually speaks of someone who doesn't necessarily find it
that easy to write. It's all very ritualistic.
It's almost like he's saying, 'I can't create magic,
unless I have all these things around me.'
Dahl wrote to a daily schedule,
gambling on horses in the afternoon.
But in his hut, he was a disciplined, great craftsman.
The simplest stories can be the hardest to write,
and Dahl's books could take many drafts.
Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, one of Dahl's first books,
took two years to write.
It's like treasure, isn't it? I know.
As you can see, it's originally called Charlie's Chocolate Boy.
Well, I think he was right to change the title, wasn't he?
Well, he changed the whole plot as well.
So is it very different from in...
Yes, very, very different. So how do the drafts change over time?
Well, in this version,
there are ten children and then in the next draft it goes down
to seven, and then in the final, published version
there are five children including Charlie.
You'll like this one.
So this is technically the third draft.
OK. You can see it's down to seven children and he's writ them all out.
Charlie Bucket - a nice boy. Augustus Gloop - a greedy boy.
Marvin Prune - a conceited boy.
Herpes Trout - a television crazy boy.
He changed the name from Herpes...
Yes. I think quite sensibly as it's a children's story.
So how radical was this book at the time?
It's totally different from anything that anybody else had ever written
and that the reading public had ever seen before.
The themes were considered too adult for children
but the fact that the main characters are children
ruled it out as an adult book, an obvious adult book.
And also, just the way... His writing style,
it just seemed terribly rude and shocking if you come across it.
It's very blunt, isn't it? Yes.
The way all the children just keep disappearing and where they've gone to is never explained.
That's the bit I love the most. Well, actually, I think you see them
at the end sort of...they're all sort of misshapen and then they come back
into the factory but I think, as it happens,
you do think they've all been killed
which is why children like it so much of course
and that's why a publisher's gonna be scared initially.
Yes. This is as it was published apart from a last-minute change
when Roald Dahl goes through all the manuscript
and crosses out all these Whipple-Scrumpets.
Whipple-Scrumpets become Oompa-Loompas. Yeah.
And they were so nearly Whipple-Scrumpets.
Yeah, that's so much better. It's interesting.
Just the last minute. Exactly. But when you think, he was still
on the case, still thinking of improvements.
How he can make it better. Even when he was ostensibly satisfied.
Yeah, it's great, isn't it?
He's just crossed it out and written Oompa-Loompas. I know.
He was just obviously sitting in his hut and goes, 'Oompa-Loompas!'.
'Finally!' But it's great he got there before the book was published
cos sometimes, having written a few children's books,
you sometimes deliver them and then you go, 'Oh, I should have done that.'
I know, it's... Then it's too late.
Not only did Dahl have difficulty
in publishing Charlie And The Chocolate Factory,
but when it came out in the early 1960s,
many librarians refused to stock it,
thinking it crude and unsophisticated.
I love chocolate. I could have some right now.
Like five chocolate right now.
The squirrels pulled Veruca to the ground,
and started carrying her across the floor.
'My goodness, she is a bad nut after all.' said Mr Wonka.
'Her head must have sounded quite hollow.'
Veruca kicked and screamed but it was no use,
the tiny, strong paws held her tightly and she couldn't escape.
'Where are they taking her?' shrieked Mrs Salt.
'She's going where all the other bad nuts go,' said Mr Willy Wonka,
'down the rubbish chute.'
Do think that's cruel that Veruca gets put down the rubbish chute?
ALL: Yeah. But she's a bad child, isn't she?
But she's not a nut! She's not a nut. She's not a nut, no. She's not.
There's a fine line and you just have to try to find it.
You never describe any horrors...happening,
you just say that they do happen.
You can not let evil triumph.
For children seeking a moral compass,
it is right there amidst Willy Wonka's chocolate temptations.
Isn't that what grown-ups are dreaming of?
In our Western society, all we can think about, it seems to me,
is how you can get more money and get more things.
And how, in Charlie And The Chocolate Factory
or Willy Wonka And The Chocolate Factory,
how you can see how this can go badly wrong.
How some of the children who won those golden tickets
had a dreadful time.
As with Charlie's golden ticket,
everything can change in a moment in Roald Dahl's stories.
The same was true in his life. Roald narrowly avoided death
from a crash landing when he was a RAF pilot.
In an article, he claimed to have been shot down,
but the reality was he'd run out of fuel.
What mattered was what's the best story? And for him,
definitely being shot down was a better story.
He wrote it, he improved it, he changed little details,
but he wasn't going to change the being shot down
to 'I crashed my plane in the desert.'
The accident left Dahl struggling with pain for the rest of his life.
As can be seen in this replica of his writing art.
Dahl had his chair specially adapted
because he was in so much pain due to his flying accident.
He had a blanket wrapped over his legs.
It's a bit like being strapped into the cockpit of a fighter plane.
Maybe Dahl was flying away,
flying away like Charlie in the Great Glass Elevator,
flying away from tragedy, and flying into his imagination.
Dahl's son Theo would also have a near-death accident.
In response, the ever-creative Dahl co-invented a device -
this valve, which has since saved thousands of lives of sick children.
Within a few years of his son's accident,
Dahl was creating the bizarre machines in Willy Wonka's factory.
Theo survived, but then at seven years of age,
his daughter Olivia caught measles.
Dahl's handwritten account of the doctor's struggle to save her
was found after his death in a drawer in his hut.
Called Phillip Evans, he called the hospital.
Called me back. 'Shall I come?' 'Yes, please.'
I said, 'I'd tell hospital he was coming.'
I called. Doc thought I was Evans.
He said, 'I'm afraid she's worse.'
I got in car, drove to hospital,
walked in, two doctors advanced on me from waiting room.
'How bad is she?'
'I'm afraid it's too late.'
I went into the room. Sheet was over her.
Doctor said to nurse, 'Go out. Leave him alone.'
I kissed her. She was warm.
I went out. 'She's warm.' I said to the doctor in the hall.
'Why is she warm?'
'Of course,' he said. I left.
That's a really harrowing account, isn't it?
I think the economy of it is what's so ghastly.
That he couldn't handle...trying to fictionalise it any way.
He just had to tell it as it was.
So Olivia died, she was seven. She died in 1962.
Yes. How do you think her death affected him and his writing?
Tragedy had been part of his childhood too
so he had... I feel all his writing displays a strong sense
of the importance of family,
and how blessed you are when that's going well.
And I think that... His sister died when she was very young.
And of course he lost his father when he was very young as well.
He lost his father, exactly.
Tragedy and difficulty had been part of his upbringing.
He knew bad things happened
and he could countenance in fiction them happening to bad people.
He thought the world wasn't a fair place.
So the books themselves perhaps occupied more of a moral universe
than they would have done if he hadn't had those tragedies
because he thought why should awful people get away with things?
Why should they? Was he judgemental in real life?
He was quick to make judgements, yeah.
He was quick. People were either good or bad.
There weren't many shades of grey with Roald.
After Olivia's death, Dahl's first wife Patricia Neal almost died
after having three strokes while pregnant.
Mr Fox looked at the four small foxes and smiled.
What fine children I have, he thought.
They're starving to death and they haven't had a drink for three days
but they're still undefeated.
I must not let them down.
'I...suppose we could give it a try.' he said.
'Let's go, Dad. Tell us what you want us to do!'
Slowly, Mrs Fox got to her feet.
She was suffering more than any
of them from the lack of food and water.
She was very weak.
'I'm so sorry,' she said,
'but I don't think I'm going to be much help.'
'You stay right where you are, my darling.' said Mr Fox.
'We can handle this by ourselves.'
Dahl the patriarch led his family through this terribly tragic time.
Like any parent, he had his faults,
but family was very important to him.
Soon after this time, he wrote Danny, The Champion Of The World.
This gypsy caravan in his garden features heavily in the story
and soon after that came Fantastic Mr Fox.
Both are about heroic fathers
leading their families through adversity.
I think without doubt you can say
that every child is torn
about all sorts of feelings about their parents.
Every page in Danny, The Champion Of The World
talks really about a love for a man who has problems
and the son, in a sense, is able to help his dad
or go along with his dad and so on.
It's an incredibly caring, loving book about someone in difficulty,
namely the dad more so than the boy.
He really digs in to a relationship there and set of actions
that you won't find in many books. Powerful stuff.
Dahl's books resonate with their emotive and moral worlds
and they are always, always wickedly funny.
(CHUCKLES)
When Roald Dahl started writing for children,
he broke all the rules.
Let's see Red Riding Hood splattered over the wall.
Let's have Cinderella with her head on the floor,
because actually we're fed up hearing their tedious stories,
year after year in pantomime and everywhere else.
And finally here's a writer who took them
and gave them what they deserved.
Delightfully subversive, deliciously disgusting,
mildly malevolent, you name it. He was all those things, yes.
As a comedian, I've spent a lot of time trying to work out
how to say things that if said in a serious way
would be completely unacceptable.
And I haven't always gotten away with it.
In Dahl's world, a grandma can be poisoned by her grandson.
Parents can be eaten by a rhinoceros and yet, somehow,
it's acceptable.
It takes a true genius to pull that off.
You are the Axis of Evil.
You ought to be in prison.
You a rotting lump of pure wrong.
You are the dark heart of all that is unholy in this land.
A black hole wrong-headedness.
Dahl's book Matilda, about a spirited girl
facing the evil headmistress Miss Trunchbull,
has now been adapted as an award winning West End musical
by musician Tim Minchin and writer Dennis Kelly.
# This school of late has started reeking
# Quiet, maggots, when I'm speaking
# Reeking with a most disturbing scent
# Only the finest nostrils smell it
# But I know it oh-to-well
# It is the odour of rebellion, It's the bouquet of dissent
# And you may bet your britches
# This headmistress finds this foul odiferousness
# Wholly olfactorily insulting
# And so to stop the stench's spread
# I find a session of phys ed
# Sorts the merely rank from the revolting #
Very good. (CLAPS)
That is fantastic and that does seem like pure Dahl.
What do you think are the key ingredients to a Dahl story?
He'll go somewhere quiet dark,
and then think, 'I'm gonna go a bit further.'
And he sort of takes it a little bit further
and I really like that about it.
If you look at The Twits or something where they end up dead.
They end up in their own shoes.
There's quite a lot of death in his books.
It's very dark and in Matilda, you sort of think,
the superpower thing, did he sort of get there and think,
'I'm gonna give her a su...' And there's a nice sort of sense really.
Someone once said to me that the thing about Dahl is
that he relishes things, and that really stuck with me for this.
He relishes... He likes worms and burps and things.
He relishes that sort of stuff and in a way, you do as a kid as well.
You like that sort of stuff.
For me, lyrically and even musically, the sort of idea
of living in this onomatopoeic world where everything rustles
and shrivels and squirrels and squaggles.
That's what it was for me. Even when you're describing him there going...
Your face goes... Errgh, he likes this, he likes this
and he likes going, 'Errrgh'.
How important is humour to telling this story?
Humour is... It sort of doesn't work without it, you know?
It's sort of... You need it to sort of let you do all the dark stuff.
Yeah. They sort of work side by side.
And actually, there's a moment in it where Matilda's telling a story
to Mrs Phelps and she gets really caught up in the story
and the story gets really dark, really, really dark.
And you see that Mrs Phelps is really offended, really upset by it,
the entire audience is like that. And the Matilda turns around
and goes, 'And then it got worse.'
(LAUGHS) The audience does exactly that. They all crack up.
Dahl says at the beginning of the book that...
He gets Matilda saying that children's books should always have humour in, doesn't he?
All his books have humour in them.
It's really important. Yeah, and you can't have a despot like Trunchbull
and not have her also be funny otherwise she's just Hitler.
There's a song which I can't remember
because I wrote it very quickly one day
but there's a chant in it that goes -
# There's a place you are sent if haven't been good
# And it's made of spikes and wood and it isn't big enough to sit
# Even if you could, there are spikes on the bottom
# So you'd wish you'd stood #
And it's just fire and brimstone but it's totally like, 'Ahh!',
and it's completely silly and over-the-top.
But it's... Without the jokes, it's child abuse, you know?
(LAUGHS) Without the jokes, this is a story about adults
being terribly abusive parents and terribly abusive teachers
who throw children out windows by their hair.
It's such an incredibly balancing act. Yeah.
It's got to be exciting. It's got to be fast.
It's got to have a good plot but it's got to be funny.
It's got to be funny.
It is only such finely-tuned dark comedy
that can stand the test of time.
It's interesting to see the kind of connection
between Roald Dahl's writing and Dickens' writing
which is also fantastically funny.
These stories are laced with sadness, tragedy, loss, death,
extreme fear, darkness, and hysterically funny observations.
And I think that this is the essence of great storytelling.
For young people certainly but also for older people,
for grown-up people. So the sooner you can start reading it,
I think you might start with Dahl and move very easily on to Dickens,
maybe start with Dickens and slip over into Dahl.
It is easy to underestimate the challenge of writing for children.
As Dahl sealed himself away in his hut,
he became a magician, carefully crafting worlds full of fantasy,
humour, and morality.
He was a master writer
who threw off the constraining rules of the adult world.
Just like a child.
I think there are two types of people on this planet. Two types of adult.
The ones who remember being a child and still dream like a child,
and have ideas like a child and enjoy things like a child,
and the one's who have forgotten all that and are just adults.
And I know which ones I prefer.
The second category are probably politicians or bankers.
Children love to daydream.
And sometimes, adults do too.
Who hasn't thought about running wild and defying rules and authority?
And maybe that's why Dahl has such an enduring appeal
and such a mass appeal,
because he understands there's a dreamer and a child...in us all.
'He looked as though he'd been blown up by a powerful pump.'
It's so horrible.
'Great, flabby folds of fat bulged out from every part of his body.
and his face was like a monstrous ball of dough
with two small greedy currenty eyes peering out upon the world.'
(CHUCKLES)
Outrageous.
No wonder children like them.
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