We have got an extra special Christmas treat for you today. And I know what you're thinking. It's a little bit early for Christmas, but we've made a very important announcement on the mothership this morning because every year we let a gang of guest editors gang posse squad group collective crew. Anyway, we let a collective of guest editors take the editorial reins of the today program
And they work with our fantastic team to make a program about the stories and issues that they are most interested in. And this morning, we announced this year's lineup of six guest editors. They are Baroness Floella Benjamin. She's now a liberal Democrat peer, but of course, spent nearly 50 years on television. Dame Laura Kenny, Britain's most decorated female Olympian.
Dwayne Fields, he's the explorer who was appointed a few months back as the Chief Scout. Professor Irene Tracy, she's the Vice Chancellor of the University of Oxford. Frank Cottrell Boyce, Screenwriter, Children's Author and UK Children's Laureate. And Sir Sajid Javed, former Conservative Chancellor, who did some very powerful reporting for the Today program.
a couple of years back on Male Suicide. You can catch all those special editions of today between Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve on BBC Radio 4 and BBC Sounds. And in this special Christmas themed episode of the Today podcast, we thought we'd take you behind the scenes a little bit and find out what one of those guest editors, Frank Cottrell Boyce, plans to do with his guest edit of the Today program. And indeed, how it all works. I'm really
looking forward to this because Frank is a remarkable guy as you're about to hear. Okay, let's do it.
Hello, it's Emol in the Today podcast studio and I'm joined now. Very excited about this because I'm joined by Frank Cottrell Boyce, a screenwriter, the UK's children's laureate, and now today program guest editor of all the gigs you've had, Frank. This must be the most exciting yet.
Yes, you know, honestly, it feels very much part of Christmas. These guys said it, so very excited to be doing one. Yeah, we've, I feel that you and I have sort of connected in the ether. I feel like I've spoken to you many times in the today program and by watching your prolific social media output after you're on, there is no question you are a proper today program at Fissi Nardo. It is part of your life, isn't it? Oh, definitely, absolutely. It's kind of this is how we wake up, this is how I set my mental agenda for the day. Yeah, I'm a massive fan.
So when they called you up and said, you know what, you know, you've had a few jobs in your time. You've met with some success. You sold a few books, you've written some films that went quite well, Olympic opening ceremony, which we might come to. And they said, do you fancy being guest editor? What sort of went through your mind? Nothing went through my mind. Just said, yes. It was like, there's this and writing Doctor Who, those two things have like, do you want to? Yeah, yep, yep.
So what is the process? Did you just get a call out of the blue? Yeah, got a call out of the blue from the producer from Louisa. Yeah. Fantastic. And when you've listened in the past to guest editors, have you ever thought to yourself, how come James May gets to bang on about tea and cars? I quite, I quite fancy ever going to go doing that myself. No, no, he's really liked it. I love the way you pull it off that cool of like, it's still the today program, but it's got
a signature, you know, and somebody's obsession. And there's some kind of amazing moments in the past, you know. Yeah. And some amazing guest editors, whose club you are now joining, which is hugely exciting. Look, we don't want to give away everything that's in your program because we want people to listen on the days. Obviously, they will. But just give us a sense of what your sort of as you approach this
Incredible privilege and by the way, you're gonna get to work. I don't know you've worked with some top teams But you know the today program producers are absolutely They work harder. They work longer They're smarter and they're kinder than almost any people you could ever come across in this industry and that's saying something and they're now at your disposal, which is an amazing education and how creative they are. Yeah, come up with solutions
and as you said, kind and gracious and yeah, grace under pressure. That's who they are. It's amazing to be with them. So have you got one or two broad areas? We're getting to specifics and I've actually, I mean, I've not run this by you and I've not run it by the team either. So I'm going to get in trouble because I've got a couple of ideas to put to you. But have you got kind of broad themes that you want to hit?
Yeah, I am the UK children's laureate and my focus for this period, this two years that I've got is very early years. I think what a lot of time when people talk about books and reading, it's always about skills and libraries and I'm much more concerned about being read to when you're very young. Like 50% of our kids come to school without having been read to, which is obviously a huge educational disadvantage, but I think it's an emotional disadvantage.
is I think being read to such a market of love, it's such a sharing moment between a parent or a carer and a child. It's typically in a bed. So if you're missing out on that, you're missing out on something essential. Isn't that really right? 50%? 50%. And obviously, you know who's in that 50%. The 50% who most need it are in that 50%. From an educational point of view.
You know, we're talking about, I think we're in the middle of like a happiness recession that's a phrase that I keep about children. And I think, you know, education is very important, but happiness is more important. And it's, you know, on a very, very easy route to happiness and something that anchors happiness really deeply in you. I mean, when I say deeply, I think this is something we've been doing since the Ice Age telling each other stories.
Isn't it? Absolutely. And the thing that I'd, as a slightly exhausted and exhilarated parent of four is, I mean, I know this sounds so banal, but the reason that children's books sell, the reason that we've got that part of our culture is because children love stories. They get them intuitively. They create joy. And as I'm sure you're going to explore, if you can give children the power of emotional narrative and of words and of literacy, you make them powerful, don't you? In the world, they can go forth.
Yeah, completely. I've got this phrase that keep going back to building the apparatus of happiness. And it's not the content of the book. I mean, like some books are amazingly brilliant, but it's the moment of sharing. I think it's the most important thing. And I think, you know, maybe I'm worried that parents of some parents don't have the confidence to compete with screens or don't really know how a book works. I keep saying this thing, you know, book is
But a picture book is not a meal, it's a recipe. You open a picture book and you play, you make the sounds. I can make Deezoo last for about an hour and a half.
It's fantastic. It's brilliant. I'll do it over and over again. I think people need that confidence. It's fine to read the same book a million times. It's fine to do the same voices. They love that. It's the moment of sharing. It's not the cultural capital of having read the latest unit on us. There is a real thing, isn't there, in this sector? I know people in publishing, people in bookshops, authors that you must meet to a lot feel sensitive about this. I'm conscious of
trampling on those sensitivities but there are a few big authors that everyone reads and i'm one of those people by the way you know i've read every julia donelson book i've read them many times my many children then you graduate from that to maybe roll dial and then you got jk rolling and so on and so forth and actually there is a universe of fantastic books that are just itching,
to be discovered. But it seems that because of the mechanics of commerce in the sector, it's only a tiny sliver that we actually find. So maybe one of the things you could do is champion those other brilliant voices. Oh, definitely. You know, and actually the today program has really played its part in that. You know, you've got clubs over the summer, it's brilliant.
Yeah, I mean, you say mechanical, it is mechanical, partly because there's only so much shelf space allowed to children's books in a bookshop. You know, if you go to buy an adult book, there'll be the crime section, the sci-fi section, the romance section, the classic section. And then there's the children's section, which has to accommodate all the classics. You know, so if you look at the children's section, there's going to be a shelf of Roald Dahl, there's going to be a couple of shelves of David Williams. There's going to be a shelf of classics.
So it's like a tiny little half of a shelf left for everything that's going on. Yeah. And it's really important because like one size doesn't fit all. You know, you've got to find the book that your child will love and it may not be the same book that you love or that everybody is supposed to love. And you hated Royal Doll as a kid. I just couldn't cope with Royal Doll as a kid at all, you know. And I needed to look around and find something else. But where and when did you fall in love with words?
There's a couple of stories about that, but one thing that I keep coming back to during these last few months is that when we were very little, my mum and dad and my brother and I lived in a tea bedroom flat with my ground who had one of the bedrooms, which I now think, God, that must have been such a terrible way to start that batch.
But we spent a lot of time in the library and I now realized that was my mum escaping to somewhere that had a bit of space and it was safe and it was just across the road and all that stuff. So I have a very, very, very happy memory with my childhood, which now I'm grown up and reflect upon. I owe partly to the fact that my mum chose the library as the place to escape to from what must have been very difficult set of circumstances. And I keep this year coming across people in incredibly difficult circumstances and think,
What a basic solution there is. It's so remarkable that should be what you rely on at, because the normal process of these things, because you're an editor of the Today program now, and the normal process, by the way, is that the presenters sometimes have ideas and they ring up the editor, usually at half past nine in the evening.
or at 4.30 in the morning and suggest things. And I've got a couple of very humble suggestions I want to make to you. And you're absolutely with, you're the boss, you're within your rights to say, bugger off. I'm not going to search a university challenge vibe at this point. Oh my God, I'm going to make two just broad area thoughts for you to consider. And you don't have to do this at all. Okay. The first one is,
I would really, really love as a listener, and indeed as your presenter, to hear some voices from a place called Rainhill in Merseyside, which is where you, I think, were born and grew up, at least to begin with, and which I've completely, honestly, I've never been to myself, but I'd like to hear from people there. And I have a specific interest, as we've discussed before, actually, I think, Frank, in what is broadly known as social mobility and to slightly strange term for something.
improper. But of a very specific interest in social mobility, which is that I think that we get a lot of it very wrong because we have this narrative of how you have to leave to achieve and the way that you can get on in life is usually by leaving where you're from, leaving places like Rainhill. And often I would do it through cognitive brilliance, through academic success. And you went to a grammar school, you went on to
at Oxford University, you are super bright and clever person. And in the end, as we'll come on to, you did leave to achieve. And I just wonder if there's some way of tapping into the sentiment of people who are born in Rainhill today and how if they want to get on in life,
Do they have to, what's Rainhill got for them? Do they have to leave to achieve? If they want to escape, where do they do it? Do they find a local library like your mum did? Or can they find what they want in Rainhill? Or do you have to leave to it? As someone who's like most of my children, I live in Stiller and Liverpool and most of my children move to London. And I feel that kind of fight is there.
Do you have to leave to achieve as they're always to achieve? But most social mobility is not people from the bottom of the ladder getting to the top. It's people around about the middle rungs who just want to go up a few rungs of the ladder. That's what they want. That's what they want. And I think you've, I don't want to cast a misrepresent you, but you've had such success. I know you still live in Liverpool. You've had such success. And what about the people in Rainhill who just want an incrementally better life
That's one thought. The second thought I've got, which is again, totally selfish. I would love to hear the inside story of the Olympics opening ceremony and specifically why the word pandemonium
came to mean so much to you and Danny Boyle, because I am a bit of a Milton nut. I'm obsessed with Paradise Lost. I can quote quite significant parts of it verbatim. Pandemonium is a word that comes from Book 1 of Paradise Lost, line 754 to 756, where he talks about a solemn council forthwith to be held at Pandemonium, the high capital of Satan and his peers. So I want to know why Pandemonium was part of your thinking.
This is quite a long story. Have you got a couple of them? Yeah, of course. It's a podcast, man. Over hours. So Humphrey Jennings, the great filmmaker, the great British filmmaker of the war, he spent these propaganda films, but they're really beautiful and they're amazing. But fires were started.
And he made one called The Silent Village. And The Silent Village came after, there's a village in Poland called Lidichy. That was raised in the Czech Republic called Lidichy, which was raised to the ground in revenge for the murder of Hydrich. So Jennings made a film in response to that called The Silent Village, in which he imagined it happening in a Welsh mining town. And he went to this mining town called, is it Kama Man?
I can't remember. You'll get letters in. Anyway, he went and stayed there for weeks on end. And as a kind of thank you for the hospitality he gave lectures on the coming of the Industrial Revolution.
And he wanted to, so out of those lectures, he built a book called Pandemonium. And it's cut, it's subtitled by witnesses to the coming of the industrial revolution. And it's an amazing book. It's absolutely astonishing. It's got no narrative. It's just texts cut up. So it's diary entries, newspaper cuttings, literally bills, you know, things like this. And it's like, this is what it felt like when the machine was coming. Wow.
Honestly, you hold this book in your hand and you can feel gears. I know that sounds like it feels like it. And it was out of Prince. And I got a copy for Danny. Nothing to do at the Olympics for Frankenstein. Right. And it's so clear to me because it was out of print. I thought, I'll get that as a present for when he starts doing Frankenstein.
And because it was at a printed custom 45 quid. So I gave it to him and I said, oh, thanks very much. And I went, no, it was 45 quid. You have to read it. And that's how it kind of leaked into our imagination. Right. Wow. Yeah. And it's breathtaking book. And one of the things that Jenny does with you, if you watch those films, like Vice was started, Silent Village, they're all collages. So they, apart from the content of the industrial revolution, they have this thing of like,
You can tell lots of different stories at the same time, or you can put lots of different things next to each other, and there'll be sparks flying between them. But you don't have to decide which is the most important. And it seems to me that that sunk really deep into us. That's what Britain is like. You know, it's like a monarchy and it's posh, but it's also punk rock. You know, there's two versions of God Save the Queen, and sparks fly if you put them next to each other. So it was there in the DNA, I think, as well as this sort of content. It was just there in the DNA of it.
So a little village in the 30s, in the end, in the 1940s, in South Wales, that's where it came from. I did not expect that. I'll tell you why. Your quote that you've got, that's the epigraph to Jennings's book. Really? Wow. Well, I'm going to search it out. I'm going to search it out and I'll search it out. You've got to 45 quid anymore because after the Olympics, it was back in print.
Ah, so that's a little blow that you struck for a little freedom. When the team contacted you, I know that you said, because they passed this on, you said, I want to put babies already for his flagship news program. What did you mean by that? Is that about the early years? Well, because of the early years thing, you know, I think that early years are very, I think everything about the early years is obviously very important. And the one place that I've got is storytelling. So we've been going to settings where people are doing it. You know, so we've been to a wonderful kind of family hub.
in Southport, you know, which we did like just a couple of weeks after that terrible riot. So we've got we've got baby's voices on the today program, which is really exciting. Google's Google Gaga kind of vibes. You know, you forget, it's one of the great pleasures of phone. Who doesn't it? It's like this is phones when they're experimenting with language. Yeah. And it's not we baby's like e-commings for a few weeks or a few months.
And you forget to write them down and you forget them all, but I kind of want those voices there, you know. I'm definitely going to get in trouble for saying this, but I've got a one and a half year old. He's the youngest of my children. And I'm fairly sure in imitating her older siblings, the other day we said, say, Daddy, she went, Daddy, say, Mommy, say, Mommy. And then just off her own volition out of nowhere, she just went butt cheek.
which is the way we roll the family home. Anyway, one of the other things I've got to ask you about is a recommendation because children's books is this huge universe and it is crowded out and my heaving shelves at home
are crowded up by some of the big names. Try it very, very hard to support smaller, lesser-known authors. It's anyone that you'd recommend. So I've got eight, five, three, and one-year-old. And at any end of that spectrum, tell me, I mean, the eight-year-old's really into things like Beast Quest and starting to get into manga, which is a bit concerning. But for the younger, the younger posse, what would you suggest? OK, well, I'm going to say for the eight-year-old.
John class in the school, I read it too. I visit frequently as community special school from very emotionally needy children who could be quite difficult. And I read them the school and honestly, I had them in the parliament and for the only time. I usually really, really prep for this. And I just read them the story and they were, it was a real lesson, just the power of storytelling. It's very scary.
and john class is the guy who wrote i want my hat back which is one of the great picture books okay yes that's great five-year-old i honestly you can't i think nadia shireen's grim wood books they're very heavily illustrated and they're like
I've said before, they're like kind of like a punk rock wind in the wellows. They're about animals, but they're about, what listen to this? Two urban foxes who end up in the countryside, so that animals in the countryside, they're like, they can't get their minds wrapped out terrible, the countryside. OK, OK, that sounds great. I've taken a lot from it. And then maybe if it's something for even younger, three-year-old or one-year-old,
Oh, do you know, and I'm going to say a classic, because I've just done it with, by very new granddaughter. Congratulations. She's won. So, Peepo by Alan Alber. Of course, I've known about that. Peepo. Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. No, I said you'd do the same again and again. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I mean, I do. This last time reading it. It's the first time I clocked. Oh, this is about the war. There's all kinds of stuff in the background that you don't pick up. And it's like, oh, it's so rich. And it's so much him and her, you know, two of them, Janet and Al and Al. Oh, I thought it was more about putting out the laundry, man.
Maybe I've not read it closely now. Look in the background. It's what I read about the riches of it. We did a Judith Kerwin. So I said, is the tiger who came to tea really a sort of allegory about this sort of triumph of liberty over various totalitarian issues? Like, no, no, it's just literally about a tiger.
I'm so so excited. This is wonderful themes. It's fantastic that you're doing it and I can hear and feel your love of the today program. So we're hugely excited. Thank you so much. And it sounds like you've got some editing to get on with. So we'll leave you to it. But thank you so much. Thank you.
Well, that was the absolutely magnificent Frank Cottrell voice. What a pleasure and privilege chatting to him actually. I spoke to him a lot on the Today program, but there's a different feel when you get to have a bit of time with someone on the podcast. And I'm very, very excited for his program and grateful for his recommendations, which I'm going to pursue. Thank you to him. Nick and I are going to be back.
with our regular weekly episode on Thursday when we're going to take a step back as we always do to look at the big story of the week. Please do just head to BBC Sounds. You can search for the today podcast, hit subscribe. And if you do that, you turn on your push notifications for BBC Sounds on your phone, you'll get an alert every time we release a new episode and life will just get better and better and better with each passing week. Thank you so much for listening. And for now, goodbye.
Hello, this is Marion Keys and this is Tara Flynn. We host a podcast you might like for BBC Radio 4 and BBC Sounds called Now You're Asking. Each week we take real listeners questions about life, love, lingerie, cats, dogs, dentists, pockets, or the lack of, anything really, and to play our worldly wisdom in a way which we hope will help, but also hopefully entertain. Join us for don't you. Search up Now You're Asking on BBC Sounds. Thank you.
