I
watched this last night and it was very interesting
Radio Times
wrote this about it.
David Walliams: The Genius of Dahl
“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.” – David Walliams on Roald
Dahl.
It is perhaps not surprising that David Walliams is a huge fan of Roald Dahl,
when some of his acting creations almost seem like Dahl characters –
exaggerated and extreme, subversive and absurd, capable of cruelty, and
challenging rules with dark humour.
In the latest installment of the Perspectives documentary strand, comedian and
children’s author David Walliams delves into the electrifying, fantastic and
dark world of Roald Dahl. He explores what makes Dahl one of the great
storytellers, why his stories are loved by millions of readers and whether
after many decades, they still stand the test of time.
Along the way, he visits Dahl’s house in Buckinghamshire, his childhood home of
Cardiff, explores his Norwegian family roots and inspects the author’s writing
hut – where his famous tales germinated. Famous fans including Joanna Lumley
and Tim Minchin wax lyrical on the magical world of Dahl, alongside well-known
children’s author Anthony Horowitz and Dahl experts and biographers Michael
Rosen and Donald Sturrock.
Ultimately, in searching for the very essence of Dahl’s storytelling, David
discovers the tragedies which shaped the author’s world view and writing, finds
out how infamous characters such as Miss Trunchbull in Matilda were created,
and even learns that the iconic Oompa Loompas in Charlie and The Chocolate
Factory were very nearly known as something else.
“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 reread Roald Dahl’s books as an adult it surprised me; there’s
nothing prescriptive or predictable about them, with little sense of narrative
rules. And they are nearly all perfect.
“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.”
David starts by visiting Dahl’s home in Great Missenden, where he spent 30
years writing stories for children and adults, and where his widow Liccy Dahl
still lives. She explains to David that once Dahl got inspiration, he would
immediately disappear to his hut to get writing.
“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 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 there was roughly he’d got a first draft ready.”
But she says Dahl felt he never received the recognition he felt he deserved
from his peers, although he derived the most joy from writing children’s books.
“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.”
Fellow children’s author Anthony Horowitz says it was the style of Dahl’s
writing which opened doors for others.
“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.”
Every day 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 shut himself away like Willy Wonka in his
factory. David finds it not quite as he imagined, and some way from his house.
To further understand where his extraordinary imagination came from, David
visits Cardiff, where Dahl grew up with his parents. Born in 1916, Dahl’s
childhood was overshadowed by tragedy. At just 3 years old, he lost both his
elder sister, and his father to illness. He formed a very close relationship
with his mother, who read him Norwegian fairy tales as he was growing up.
Biographer Donald Sturrock said she was one key influence on Dahl’s writing.
“I think Sophia Hesselburg 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 but she was also very spiritual and eccentric.”
David visits the Norwegian Church in Cardiff, where Dahl was baptised, which is
still a focus for Norwegian culture. There he meets Giles Abbott, an expert in
story telling with an interest in Norwegian myths. Abbott tells him there is
something about the Norwegian way of storytelling – with dark tales of trolls
and witches – which is reflected in Dahl’s writing.
“They have a distinctive context – the isolated snowbound and mountainous land
of Norway. There’s a humour, there’s a darkness and there are trolls.”
David learns that being Norwegian also made Dahl an outsider – perhaps feeding
his fertile imagination.
Every year, at Dahl’s old school in Llandaff, Cardiff, the children bring to
life one of Dahl’s stories that subverts the laws of nature. David helps the
youngsters make disgusting potions from horseradish sauce and shaving foam –
something straight from the pages of George’s Marvellous Medicine. This leads
David to a revelation about Dahl’s writing – discovering his fundamental
understanding of what children want to read.
“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 they believe in. He has this most extraordinary ability to see things
just as he did when he was a child.”
David revisits Dahl’s local sweetshop from his boyhood - now a Chinese
takeaway. In Dahl’s autobiography, he recalled it being owned by a Mrs
Pratchett – whom he disliked so much he turned her into the vile Miss
Trunchbull in his book Matilda.
“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
watchin’ you so keep yer thievin’ fingers off them chocolates!’. You do wonder
whether Mrs Pratchett inspired some of Dahl’s darkest creations. He left a dead
mouse in one of her sweet jars, and got the cane from his headteacher as a
result. But despite these experiences, he never lost his anarchic spirit.”
The author Michael Rosen suggests part of that spirit came directly from the
fact he hated school.
“Roald Dahl was physically and mentally hurt by the way in which he was treated
at school. There’s no question of it that you can see in the way he writes
about beatings and so on. So, he’s poured all this into 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.”
But Dahl didn’t just keep the dark characters he dreamed up for his books. He
co-wrote the screenplay for Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, creating the Child
Catcher, who isn’t in the original book. Children’s author and screenwriter
Frank Cottrell Boyce pays tribute to one of Dahl’s darkest creations – who was
undoubtedly frightening to youngsters.
“I think the Child Catcher is one of Dahl’s greatest creations and I think he’s
possibly the greatest villain in cinema, and it really kind of speaks to what’s
brilliant about Dahl because people, a lot of people, are quite dismissive
about him because he doesn’t 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 few people have got where he
can just go straight to the nerve, I mean the Child Catcher seems to be
speaking to your nervous system - it’s like that injection of adrenalin in Pulp
Fiction that 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 rare gift.”
Tracking back to the archives at the Roald Dahl Museum, David reads a letter
from Dahl to his mother, written when he was 13 – which features a story about
a person sticking to a toilet seat and being forced to do nothing but stay
there and defecate for the rest of their lives. David describes this as the
‘birth of a genius’.
David also meets illustrator Quentin Blake, who brought Dahl’s characters to
life. Blake demonstrates the creative process involved in visualising Dahl’s
creations and explains how they are used to create an impression of the
characters within the story – such as the scary Miss Trunchbull, who he
sketches out for David before the cameras.
“You can modify the dose, as it were. They are caricatures but they are
slightly less frightening because they are caricatures, in a way.”
In the interior of Dahl’s ramshackle hut, now transferred to the museum which
celebrates his work, David examines the author’s writing environment, which
includes fossils, shavings of spine and his hipbone – as well as his
specially-modified chair, made to alleviate pain caused by a plane crash during
the Second World War.
“It actually speaks of someone who doesn’t find it that easy to write. It is
all very ritualistic. It is almost like he is saying ‘I can’t create the magic
unless I have all these things around me’.”
Jane Branfield from the museum shows David original manuscripts from books like
Charlie and The Chocolate Factory, which took two years to write, including
many changes – such as the main storyline and the names of key characters. She
explains how ground-breaking the story was at the time and David is fascinated
to find out that the iconic Oompa Loompas were nearly called ‘Whipple
Scrumpets’ until Dahl changed them in the final manuscript.
“It is great, isn’t it, the fact he has just crossed it out. He just obviously
was just sitting in his hut and just goes ‘Oompa Loompas’! But it’s great he
got there before it was published because sometimes, having written a few
children’s books you sometimes having delivered them go ‘I should have done
that’ and it’s too late.”
Dahl’s writing was also influenced by tragic events within his family – David
speaks to Amanda Conquy from the museum, who reads a harrowing manuscript Dahl
wrote describing the death of his daughter Olivia, aged seven. This changed the
way he wrote, leading him to write stories like Danny Champion of The World,
which focused on a father’s role within the family, Amanda says.
“He knew bad things happened and he could countenance that 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.”
Dahl’s son Theo also suffered a near death accident and in response the ever
creative Dahl co-invented a medical device – a valve - which has since saved
thousands of lives of sick children.
Yet alongside his ingenuity and an emerging moral basis for his stories, David
discovers that humour is at the core of Dahl’s work and is key to balancing the
darkness of his outrageous characters. David visits comedian Tim Minchin and
Dennis Kelly, the men behind the Matilda stage show, based on one of Dahl’s
most famous books. Kelly explains how that balance works.
“It sort of doesn’t work without it, you need it to let you do the dark stuff.
They work side by side.”
Minchin explains part of Dahl’s lasting appeal to children also lies in his use
of language.
“For me lyrically and musically, the sort of idea of living in this
onomatopoeic of everything rustles and shrivels and scribbles and squiggles,
that’s what it was for me. Without the jokes it’s just child abuse, without the
jokes this is a story about adults being terribly abusive parents and terribly
abusive teachers who throw children out of windows by their hair.”
Dahl fan and renowned actress and campaigner Joanna Lumley compares Dahl’s work
to that of Charles Dickens.
“It’s interesting to see the kind of connection between Roald Dahl’s writing
and Dickens’s writing, which is also fantastically funny, threaded through with
tragedy and fear and drama.
And all the way through Dickens’ writing, just as in Dahl’s, hugely comedic
writing, clever observations, but the 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.”
These experiences lead David to one final conclusion – that Dahl’s appeal lies
in his imagination, his dark characters, his humour – but also his
unwillingness to obey the rules.
“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 all of us.”
ADDED WEDNESDAY 11 APRIL 2012:
When and how did your interest in Roald Dahl start?
My interest in Roald Dahl started as a child - Charlie and the
Chocolate Factory was one of the first books I collected at
the library. I loved the title, and it seems to me to be the
ultimate children's story ever - it's about chocolate for a start. If
you are a kid and you find one writer you like, you try to collect all
their books, so I sought him out. Also, he was on television a lot
when I was a child, so I watched the stories too. I liked macabre stories like
Tales of the Unexpected, with lots of twists and turns in them.
Dahl is someone you are just aware of - like Alfred Hitchcock. Someone you know
is creative and whose work is very different to that of everyone else.
What did making this film mean to you?
I feel sad that I will never meet Roald Dahl - I spoke to his widow, and the
people who worked in his office, but that opportunity has gone forever. People
think writing a children's book is really easy and something you could do in an
afternoon but it's actually hard, and I never really realised how much effort
he put into his books. You look at Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and it is
a
completely different story to anything else around at the time. It
took two years to write. It's a children's book, but no less effort has
got into it than if it was an adult book. There's something that feels
'Dahlian' about his books - a dark humour. Also, all the books are very
different, he's always moving and never repeating himself, and it is touching
how much humanity is in them. In The Witches, for example, when the child is
turned into a mouse, he knows he will have a short life, and that is very
touching. Dahl was a very, very special talent.
What was your highlight of making the film?
I think being inside Dahl's writing hut was my highlight of making the
film. It has been moved to the Roald Dahl Museum and painstakingly
recreated as it was. I felt very privileged by doing it, because I was
doing things I could never have done unless I was making this film. It
was like being inside his brain. There are hugely successful
children's writers but not so many who have written such varied books.
But with Roald Dahl there are so many different types of book. I feel
like Dahl created half a dozen iconic stories, and a dozen amazing
ones. If you can create one really amazing character, that's enough.
But to create half a dozen, is mind blowing.
Has the work of Roald Dahl and the experience of making this film
about him changed your view of the world and of him as an author and a man?
I think that when you admire someone, it's a mistake to emulate them.
Then you are just copying them, and you are not you any more. I think Dahl is
very interesting if you are a bit naughty, and I came from comedy to writing
children's books and I can see that people like Dahl's books because they are
naughty. At the same time you can't justdo the same things.
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