Backlisted - Bert Fegg's Nasty Book for Boys & Girls by Terry Jones and Michael Palin

Episode Date: May 16, 2016

Jason Hazeley and Joel Morris, the creators of the Grown Up Ladybird series of picture books, join Andy Miller and Mathew Clayton to discuss Bert Fegg's Nasty Book for Boys and Girls by Michael Palin and Terry Jones.Timings: (may differ due to adverts)7'37 - Bert Fegg's Nasty Book for Boys & Girls by Terry Jones and Michael Palin* To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm*If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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See in-store for details. I was up a glacier and I was looking out of the tundra at the snow. It's completely silent up the glacier. Oh, this is completely true. And up up the glacier when i was attempting to commune with nature we'd seen the northern lights the night before right it was it was totally amazing trip anyway so we're up we're up the glacier we've seen a volcano we've seen a geyser at the top of the glacier no sound nothing all i could think and this is true is bloody hell mat Matthew Clayton slagged off Bring on the Empty Horses by David Niven on the last podcast and I didn't challenge him on it. And I resented having to think about Bring on the Empty Horses.

And then when I got back to Britain, still bubbling away in my mind, Matthew, I switched on the telly and there was a there was one of those clip compilations of appearances by famous hollywood stars on chat shows which we freelancers often enjoy and it was a niven episode right niven did 15 minutes material from bring on the empty horses let me tell you would kill for 15 minutes material that good. It was fantastic! That's because it's the second autobiography. And the second autobiography is always a collection of anecdotes.

They've told the life story. Now what you roll out for the second book is you roll out the funny stories you tell over dinner. And that's what that book is. That's what the second book is. It's a collection of Hollywood stories. You've been in publishing too long. You refuse to recognise the

essential joie de vivre that Niven brings to the table. Well, name someone whose second autobiography has been better than their first. Good luck, sir. We're all thinking of you. It's Rooney, isn't it? Katie Price.

Paul O'Grady. Oh, yeah, it? It's Cotey Price. Yeah, always Cotey Price. Paul O'Grady. Oh, yeah, it's quite a good one, actually. Although I'd argue... The first one is the warm-up for the second one. But I'd argue that those books are... I mean, he split his autobiography into three parts, didn't he? He did. Because actually...

So I'm going to challenge you on that one. They only go up to a certain point in his life. They don't tell the whole life story, do they? So you could change the three-part autobiography. When Paul O'Grady sold his autobiography as it was then rather than series of autobiographies he offered it to his agent offered it to all the publishers in london as you would yes rather than invite all publishers in separately to meet paul which is what would normally happen all publishers were invited to meet with

Paul in one room at the same time. A fight? Yeah. It was one of the most awkward meetings of all time. Basically, people in pockets from HarperCollins and Penguin and everyone else who'd been asked, with Paul being led from group to group. What did Transworld do then? What did they do to win

the auction? I don't know. Something financial. Could you guess? Has it a guess? You know, I just, I wouldn't like to say. Eat the others? Hello everyone, welcome to Backlisted, the podcast that gives new life to old books as usual. We're gathered around the kitchen table in the luxurious offices of our sponsors Unbound, the publishers who bring authors and readers together. I'm Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reading Dangerously. And I am Matthew Clayton, the principal of the Free University of Glastonbury and the head of publishing at Unbound. You might notice that I'm

not John Mitchinson. I repeat that I'm not John Mitchinson. Don't worry, he'll be back in the next episode. We don't know where he is. We don't know what he's doing. I suspect it's because today's choice of book could not be linked in any way to either William Maxwell or dry stone walling. The two things that John Mitchinson is interested in. But, and here's why. Because joining us today at That Listed

are two, literally two, of Britain's best-selling authors. Not something we get to say. They're master storytellers, everybody. They are up there with Archer and all the best-selling authors. They're beyond Archer. They are, and what we're going to do is, because there's two of them, that we're going to introduce them separately by name and we're going to try to keep using their names throughout so that you listeners are clear who is talking at any one time.

Like in a bad sitcom. Like in a bad sitcom, Jason. No, Joel! They're all ready. You'll know the difference in our voices because he sounds alright, whereas I sound like a sort of goose with a sinus problem. The anodyne, croaky one is me.

I can also, if required, adopt a sort of high-reedy, geordie accent. We tried this yesterday. We tried your Sarah Millican yesterday. I could do that for the whole thing. If you talk like that for an hour, that won't be at all irritating, will it? Sounds wonderful. We're joined today by Jason Haisley. Hello, Jason. Hello.

And Joel Morris. Hello. Would you care to explain why, for any listeners who may not have heard of your work, why you are two of Britain's best-selling authors? Because we published some hardback books that were considerably cheaper than other hardback books. And no-one in publishing had thought of this before. And smaller, so that lots of them could fit on one table in a bookshop. Yeah, we did the Ladybug books for grown-ups,

which did very well at Christmas. They did do... Well, the thing is, they're brilliant, they're really funny, they did really well at Christmas, and then you bust every conceivable publishing model The thing is, they're brilliant, they're really funny, they did really well at Christmas, and then you bust every conceivable publishing model because they did really well in January, and then they did really well in February and March. Well, the nice thing for us, in terms of doing what I hope is a nice thing and a good thing,

because I like comedy books, and we're talking about comedy books today, is that I used to work in a bookshop, and the first thing that used to happen in January is you packed all your humour books back into a box and sent them back. How true. Which meant if you ran the humour section, you had three books in it for the rest of the year.

And the really nice thing, because lots of our friends write humour books and so do we, is that that table full of humour books is still there in the shops now. And I think it's quite a gloomy time and people keep dying, and it would be nice if you went to a bookshop and there was something that would cheer you up and that humour table which I always loved

when I was a kid in bookshops only turned up once a year it's like I don't know it used to be the Argos catalogue only had toys in it

at Christmas and now it's in there all the time which is nicer so the toys are out all year now what were the humour I'm trying to remember

because I used to run the humour section in a bookshop of course Dilbert it was mainly Dilbert Farside some Calvin and Hobbes for a bit something by Miles King. Dilbert. It was mainly Dilbert, Farside, some Calvin and Hobbes for a bit.

Something by Miles Kingston. Wicked Willie. It was that. The other thing that you did, though, which some would say was slightly greedy, was you published eight of them. Yeah, well, that's the Lady Bird model. When Lady Bird did... Is that the thinking I didn't realise?

They didn't do the Lady Bird Book of Birds and then six years later, the Lady Bird Book of Magnets. If birds did well. Yeah, they would do it to cover all interests. So the model was Lady Bird were publishing a book every three weeks. Right, for 40 years. For 40 years.

So the idea is Lady Bird is volume and breadth. Right. Okay, and that was Joel Morris speaking. And so the book that you've chosen for us to talk about today is unlike any book we've discussed before on Backlisted, but we really, as Joel just said, we wanted to talk about this book and the art of comedy books in general.

What is the book, Jason, that you have chosen? The book, it has two titles. Its original title was Bert Fegg's Nasty Book for Boys and Girls. And it's by Terry Jones and Michael Palin, one third of Monty Python. It was published in 1974 and then republished ten years later as Dr Fegg's Encyclopedia of All World Knowledge.

And it's very much one of those comedy books, a bit like Monty Python books or goodies books, which are just a kind of grab bag of bits and pieces um quite a lot of pastiche a lot of lists which i have to say as a comedy writer they are great fun to write lists they really are everyone loves lists before we get on to that i'm also going to apologize to listeners and say that in the wake of an episode that we did a couple of episodes ago about a book called all the devils are here by david seabrook we did a couple of episodes ago about a book called All the Devils Are Here by David Seabrook, we did such a good job on convincing people what a great book that was

that it drove the second-hand price right up, and you now can't buy a copy for much under £30. Really? Yeah, it's true. The point is that Burt Fegg's nasty book for boys and girls in its hardback iteration will set you back about a little short of £50 at the moment. Wow. But, if not more,

Dr Fegg's encyclopedia of all world knowledge, the paperback, the heavily revised paperback... And bigger. ..will set you back, you know... £12, doesn't it? £12 or less. It's just been republished. Yes.

This is the republication that we... I bought my copy recently because I didn't have a copy of this as a kid. It was in the library. So this is my first copy. Wow! I got it out of the library again and again and again, which is why I liked it.

There's a special value to something which you read in the library and kept getting out. Yeah. In a way that it's like, I don't know, if you didn't have Big Track as a kid and a mate of yours had Big Track, you envy it, and then as an adult you can buy Big Track. I suddenly realised recently

I could buy my own copy of Fet. I'm over-excited. Have I ever told you about my mum and the library? So my mum... No. So our local library, I'm not going to name it, my mum can't really get out of the house much, so my dad goes and gets her books out of the library.

And so that he can keep a note of what she's read, he puts a little pencil mark in there and he gets out maybe 10 books at a time he's been doing it for about 15 years so it's a really small library so actually within the library about 30 percent of the books like at one point she decided she was just going to read autobiographies and she started at a and oh that's good really unambitious alton and halloween is, that's exactly what it is. Matthew, I think there's a memoir in that. There is, there's a book in it.

Has she been told off? No, and hopefully she never will be. She's 86 years old. She won't be put in prison or whatever terrible thing happened to her. OK, so before we get on to FEG and related matters, Matthew, what have you been reading this week? So I've been reading Cormac McCarthy's The Crossing. I've had a life-changing experience about six months ago

when I discovered, much to my surprise, that I really loved Western books. I wasn't expecting it to happen. I'm a middle-aged man. I don't like cowboy movies, but I got lent a copy of Lonesome Dove. Have you ever read Lonesome Dove? Yeah, Larry... Larry Drinan, a Murtry book. And I absolutely adored it of Lonesome Dove. Have you ever read Lonesome Dove? Yeah, Larry... Larry

Murtry book and I absolutely adored it. It was wonderful. It was really really long. Not much happens. There's lots of descriptions of the sun going down or the sun coming up. And from there I've got into the Border Trilogy of Cormac McCarthy. So I've been reading that this week and

I've been absolutely loving it. It's fantastic. How many Cormac McCarthy's have you read before? This is my second, so I read All the Pretty Horses before that. But I think it's funny as well. It's funny because he has these little tics, prose tics, doesn't he? Yeah. So he uses the word and all the time. He's constantly using the word and.

And he's structured his sentence like that. So I've just got one. Yeah, yeah, go on. I want to read you a sentence of his. So this sentence of his uses the word and. And he's structured his sentence like that. So I've just got one. Yeah, yeah, go on. I want to read you a sentence of his. So this sentence of his, it uses the word and eight times. OK. So he goes like this. He goes,

Then he took the pig and string from his mouth and dropped the loop of it over the muzzle and jerked it tight and seized her by one ear and made three turns of the cord about her jaws faster than the eye could follow and half hitched it and fell upon her, kneeling with the living wolf gasping between his legs and sucking air and her tongue working within the teeth, all stuck with dirt and debris. Now, that's a classic Cormac McCarthy sentence.

There's eight ands in it. See me, McCarthy. And it's just about animals. Punctuation. Yeah, very little punctuation. Lots of fragments and an incredible amount of stuff that's in Spanish. So most of the conversation in the book's in Spanish. I've absolutely no idea what's going on when anyone starts talking.

And lots of it's about horses. It's about knots and a whole load of language about horses. I just completely don't understand. Is it the sequel to All the Pretty Horses? It's not the sequel, it's the next in the trilogy. And do you think the publisher went to him and said, well, you've had a hit with All the Pretty Horses, now we need a follow-up book which is like Horse Anecdotes?

You're not going to let us run that, are you? No, I'm not, no. All the Empty Horses. Yeah, yeah. Exactly, yeah. So, yeah, that's what I've been reading. I've discovered Westerns. That's very good.

Do you think you might head off into the territory of Zane Grey? I don't know who Zane Grey is. He's the great architect of the West. Wasn't he the most... One of those people who's the most taken-out-of-library author? They sort of surprise people. Incredibly big library author. So I met an editor last week who was a big Westerns fan

and kind of bought in with that same story and he said that the last dedicated western editor got made redundant two years ago in America. God, which is rather like

an elegiac western in itself. It is. Do you think he picked up his stuff and walked out? Yeah. He did, yeah. And this guy, Michael Rowley, kind of interesting sci-fi editor and he said that up his stuff and walked out. Yeah. He did, yeah. And this guy, Michael Rowley,

kind of interesting sci-fi editor, and he said that he used to work at Waddesdons and he said when he started there, there was always a bunch of westerns. You always had westerns, but you don't find them anymore. I'm not sure I've ever read a western. I've watched lots of westerns, of course, but I don't think I've ever read one.

It would change your life for the better. Oh, thank you. Who was the guy that wrote Jackie Brown, the book? I can't think I've ever read one. It would change your life for the better. My mind's gone blank. Who was the guy that wrote Jackie Brown's book? I can't remember. Sorry? No. Elmore Leonard. He wrote loads of westerns as well.

Did he? Yeah. I had a block with that. I used to review books on the radio, and we did a lot of crime books, and before then I had no interest in crime. I read some Sherlock Holmes. I'd never read any crime books.

I had a prejudice about them, and we read loads of crime books at the end of it, and I thought, what an idiot. I've seen so many crime movies and never thought of them as not for me. I said, really, now more than anything, I went, oh God, this is like, I read The Hot Rockers, and I went, oh, if that was a movie, I wouldn't even think twice about watching it. And Westerns,

you watch a Western, but if someone said, would you want to read a Western, you'd go, I don't really read Westerns. Exactly, so that's what's been, it's so unexpected, I didn't think I'd enjoy it, but I've loved it. So Andy, what have you been reading this week? Okay, I'm going to go through these as quickly as I can. Is it going to be, because when we get to this point, it's all, you always slightly show off,

can I say that, by saying about 15 books. It is, it is. So we recorded, the last episode, coming out in a slightly different order, but I had been recommended shortly before my trip to Iceland a load of books about Iceland. I have now read all those books about Iceland. Really? How many?

Seven. Oh, my God. And I was in a Jeep on the way down from the aforementioned glacier. And the guy driving the Jeep said, OK, we're going to take you past the house owned by a writer. You probably won't have heard of him called Haldor Laxness. And I said, I have heard of him. I've just finished one of his books. Actually, I really loved it.

I've just read one of his books, The Fish Are Singing. And our guide said, you are the first tourist I have had in 20 years who has heard of Haldor Laxness, let alone read anything by him. He won the Nobel Prize in 1955. He's Iceland's national laureate, basically. And I said, oh, God, I'm so proud.

I'm so proud. And he said, no, I'm so proud. Oh. It was really great. That's a lovely moment. It made a man happy. Yeah, and then we stopped and looked at Haldor Laxness's swimming pool. It was great.

And so, anyway, so this guy, this Icelander driving the Jeep said, have you heard of a book called Salka Valka? The name of the character is Salka Valka. I said, no, I haven't heard of it unless they changed the English translation title. And so I looked it up when we got back to the hotel, and Salka Valka has been translated into English, but it hasn't been available for 50 years. I put a thing on Twitter saying,

has anybody got a copy of this? Because the cheapest copy online was hundreds of pounds. And within two minutes, the brilliant Orkney Library... Orkney Library came through, right? ..had said, yeah, we've got one here, here it is, and sent me a photo of it. So it's on its way to me from Orkney Library. Orkney Library came through, right? Had said, yeah, we've got one here. Here it is. And sent me a photo of it. So it's on its way to me from Orkney.

Wow. On an interlibrary lending loan for like three quid. Right. Isn't that amazing? It's amazing. Libraries and Twitter. Absolutely brilliant. So there was that.

I was at the All Tomorrow's Party Festival. The Prestatyn in Wales. So you were. So you were. I ran the, they compared the literary salon. Oh, a salon. A salon, it was a salon. In a holiday camp.

Is that what it was? The first time that the word salon and pontins. I was surprised to see it on the programme when I arrived. And so I was joined by the comedian and author, Bridget Christie. Yeah. And the author, Dan Rhodes. Yeah. And the author Dan Rhodes. Yeah. The brilliant Dan Rhodes.

Bridget read from her book and Dan read from some of his stuff. And Dan also read a bit from Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, which was very funny. And then I read a short story by my now beloved Elizabeth Taylor called The Fly Paper, which is a short, short story, really quite creepy, and it really worked. It really worked. The thing about The Fly Paper is that it was made into a Tales of the Unexpected. It's one of the only non-doll Tales of the Unexpected, right?

Really? Wow. So I read the story, and then on the way down, this is how sharp we were, on the way downstairs, the story and then on the way down this is how sharp we were on the way downstairs dan rose went oh i've just realized that you and i have read separate stories by burton and taylor we didn't even we didn't even notice it until it was too late so i'm enshrining that here and the last thing i want to mention is i am 50 pages into a book called eternal troubadour i like the title of that the improbable life of tiny tim no tiny by justin martell which i will talk about more next time because there are only 50 pages into it is absolutely sensational really it's one of those one is such a wonderful book it's such a wonderful before we move on what's the one ice icelandic book that we should all read

i'll tell you what actually it was recommended by this sounds like crawling but it's true Before we move on, what's the one Icelandic book that we should all read? I'll tell you what, actually. It was recommended by... This sounds like crawling, but it's true. It was recommended to me by somebody here at Unbound, Zander, I think, called Letters from Iceland by W.H. Auden and Louis MacNeice, which is the most ramshackle collection of bits and pieces that they wrote on a trip to Iceland.

Some poetry, some travel writing, some ranting, a series of letters to one another where they adopt the persona of schoolgirls. It's a fairly peculiar collection, and yet at the end of it, it's a bit like All the Devils Are Here, you know, in as much as it doesn't quite... Is it Bert Fink meets All the Devils Are Here?

Yeah, it doesn't quite hang together, and yet it layers up into something that is really evocative of the whole experience of travelling somewhere like that. It's mind-altering, isn't it? Yeah, yeah. It really is. Apart from anything else, the oddity... I was out there for about three days a couple of years ago on a work thing.

And just the fact that it was, I was sitting in the restaurant finishing some food at the hotel and I thought, it must be getting late, mustn't it? It must be about ten o'clock or something. And the answer was no, it was half midnight, but the sun was still out. So obviously then I went to bed and it got dark around half past two for about an hour and a half and then the sun came up again so just having that experience of having your body clock completely hijacked by by the the you know by the by the length of daylight out there that's odd enough before you even get round to the fact that there's no trees and it's been raining for 400 years but we like we arrived the day after 20 000 people had massed in the square underneath our hotel window one tenth of the electorate yes

one tenth of the electorate had turned out to overthrow the government now they were coming for you and you they were a day well you know We arrive, we arrive, we get in the hotel, our lovely peaceful break, there's people banging drums, you know, it's really noisy. And I went down and said, look, we might have to move rooms because I respect your right to protest, but I'm not going to sleep. They went, don't worry, everyone will go home at 8 o'clock.

It's true. In Britain, that would end when the riot police were called. In Reykjavik, 8 o'clock, you see them all look at one another and go, OK, we're done now the riot police were called. In Reykjavik, eight o'clock, you could see them all look at one another and go, okay, we're done now. They all went home. Five minutes later, they picked up their litter with them. So brilliant. Such a civilised and wonderful

people. Anyway, so yeah, letters from Eisenhower. Or Haldor Laxness. Haldor Laxness. If you get it. Actually, there are other Haldor Laxness titles are can get it actually there are other Haldor Laxness other Haldor Laxness titles are available so let's move on to

Bert Fegg but before we talk about Bert Fegg I'd really like to talk a little bit about the Lady Bert books now you have both

worked on several comedy books over the years haven't you which books have you have you worked on between you well we did

the first thing we got the first thing we did that sort of got us up and about and noticed was a thing called The Framley Examiner, which started as a website, it's a parody local newspaper, and we put that up in about 2001, a little bit after September 11th,

and we put it up, and within two weeks we had two book deals for it, and we published that with Penguin, and then we did A Historic Framley which is the museum for the town after that then we did Bollocks to Orton Towers and another one of those which was Guys to Little Tourist Trash. We should just say

Bollocks to Orton Towers is not really a comedy book is it? It was a comic travel writer. And that was a big best seller as well. Yeah, that was the number one travel book of that year I think because Bill Bryson took a year off. We sort of slid in because Palin was away. But then we've done sort of ghostwritten or assembled stuff for people

and helped with comedy books of this sort. We did the Mrs Brown's Boys Ones and things like that. I just remember today, our first job straight out of school was doing the Russ Abbott comedy. Phone book. Yeah. It was, as I recall, neither of those things. But I did a weird job on that,

which was they got the cheapest artists they could get to do it, which at the time included all the guys who did 2000 AD, all the Judge Dredd artists, because they were Spanish and were really cheap. So one of my first jobs was to tip-ex over cultural errors in Carlos Esquerra's pictures of Russ Abba. So I was sort of changing his baseball outfit into a cricket outfit. And I was sitting there as a 19-year-old 2018 nerd going,

I can't believe I'm tip-exing over the man who created Judge Dredd to make, I don't know, Basildon Bond look more like a British secret agent. So yeah, we've done this. And we come from a background of doing these parody books and pastiche books and we do pastiche. We write for television as well doing pastiche. And I should also declare an interest

in my career as an editor. I've worked in this area quite a lot and I've worked on so we all have experience. We're going to come on to talking about what it's like working on one of those books which have cost the publisher a lot of money and which when you're dealing with

celebrities who may or may not be involved with the writing of the book. Let's pick this up again, Sean. When you're working out at Planet Fitness, it's a judgment-free zone so you can really step up your workout. That's why we've got treadmills. And our team members are here to help so you can be carefree with the free weights.

There are also balance balls, bikes, cables, kettlebells, and TRX equipment. But, like, no pressure. Get started for $1 enrollment and then only $15 a month. Hurry this $1 enrollment sale of Planet Fitness end July 18th. $49 annual fee applies. See Home Club for details. Lee. But let's talk a bit about the Lady Bird books.

So you've got a track record of working on these books. How did the Lady Bird books come about? Did you approach them or did they approach you? We approached them. We noticed that we were laughing and saying, who would we like to have a book published by, whether it be Faber or someone. And then we laughed and said, wouldn't it be great,

on your CV to say you'd written a ladybird book because we're huge ladybird fans we collect them and we have prints on our walls and things like that and it suddenly struck us that there weren't any ladybird books anymore they'd stop publishing them they'd do them for the brands that exist but they weren't ladybird books as we knew them they were different and then we noticed they'd done reproductions of some of the 60s ones that were selling in boxes or eight of them would come out as a reproduction set of in a big store and shopping with mum and things. And our brain suddenly went, oh, hang on. There's a factory that makes Ladybug books that smell like Ladybug books and look like Ladybug books.

And they've worked out a way of budgeting it that you can publish a colour children's book that is a Ladybug book. And so we just, we came up with the idea of the central conceit would be that Lady Bird hadn't stopped making Lady Bird books. And the audience had grown up with them, a bit like they make a Star Wars movie for 46-year-olds now. The idea being they would still be addressing that audience in the same voice, but the audience would have grown up and would need to know that different things. So we came up with the idea of Lady Bird books for grown-ups. We sent an email to our publisher. And just to refresh people's memories, the titles of some of the first tranche of books are There's the Lady Bird Book of the Hipster

There's the Lady Bird Book of the Midlife Crisis. The Lady Bird Book of the Hangover. Shed. The Lady Bird Book of the Shed. Dating. How it works the husband, how it works the wife we've just done how it works the mum. Yeah, the mum was a big hit in our house. On Mother's Day surprisingly.

Dad is coming out for Father's Day, unsurprisingly, also. Yeah, it's common experiences, but look through the eye of that ladybird certainty, that voice. And using the original artwork, which we also realised it was impossible financially to hire commercial illustrators of that calibre anymore, because they don't exist. And they were all put off by me tip-exing over their artwork

in the early, late 80s. But also, what a much bigger undertaking it would be to commission eight books worth of original artwork people come to us

and sort of say who did the artwork and you do understand that A that's impossible too expensive and also that wouldn't be as funny the joke was

that we were repurposing the original artwork you'd recognise it and the rule was we wouldn't paint in iPods and beer cans to get the joke we would just crop a picture slightly differently if we needed to we wouldn't paint in iPods and beer cans to get the joke, we would just crop a picture slightly differently

if we needed to we wouldn't touch them, they would remain as they were so the joke is you recognise that this isn't a picture of a hipster cafe, it's something from the gingerbread man so the audience were in on the joke So what did you do, did you just go through your old Lady Bird books and pick, find artwork that you liked

and then scanned it in? We sent an email to a friend of ours at Penguin and said, we've had this idea, Ladybird books for grown-ups, we think it's a bit of a no-brainer. What do you reckon? And he said, hang on a minute. That was roughly the point at which I got on a flight to New York. And by the time I landed, we had an email back back from him saying here are the keys to the archive, go and they've basically given us access to an online

archive of 11, it's now 12,000 images from Lady Bird books because a very clever soul called Ronnie Fairweather at Lady Bird a couple of years ago said we need to scan all this artwork and tag it so that it's searchable.

And pretty much the rest of the building turned around and went, no we don't! What? What do we want to do that for? And so turns out she was right. She was very pleased when we started doing these books because she said, you've made me look sane again! They all thought I was mad! Also, Lady Bird had

Penguin bought Lady Bird, didn't they, in the 80s? Is that right? I think so, yeah. And they had... Lots of the original artwork has gone because it got sold off. Yes. And they've bought some of it back.

So what you're working from is actually an attempt to reconstitute the whole archive, right? They were going to trash it. It was going to go in skips and it got saved. The V&A was offered it and they turned it down and it's ended up at university. But it was touch and go for a bit because it had no use they didn't know but oddly that's that feeling that people do when people wipe television programs yeah the people who made it don't appreciate that for a generation it was very very redolent and and and beautiful so they've

kept it and now we've kind of and we didn't intend to do this we've kind of brought we have a funny thing because we we live in the past a lot, because we've passed T-shirts, so we sort of look at old programmes and old telly and old films and things. We're obsessed by the texture of things. So we loved Lady Bird, and Lady Bird is something we thought about most days.

I don't know, it's part of us. But when we remembered Lady Bird, the public's reaction was, oh, I remember that. And you went, oh, had you forgotten it? But oddly, I think even Lady Bird had forgotten it or even Penguin had forgotten about Lady Bird

and they suddenly were shocked by the fondness I mean Ronnie had been fighting for it saying let's do more merchandise let's keep this brand alive

I've said to them I can't believe that those fairy tales aren't available as a box set and they went oh we hadn't thought of that and you think

God you don't realise how loved this brand was so the first wave of approval for us bringing Lady Bird back to do comedy books with it was good. We're glad to get them back.

The other thing that I think was the idea that made this work is that we'd seen Ladybug pastiche she's done before on the internet, and the earliest one we found was from 1959. They date back years and years and years. And the usual joke is that you swear. It's a basic juxtaposition gag it's the rapping granny joke from most American comedies you're not expecting the granny to swear

so usually there'll be rude words and Peter and Jane next to each other that was what most, and we said we're going to be Lady Bird authors so if we write them as if we've been employed by Lady Bird which we have, we have to abide by the same rules as Vera Southgate did when she wrote the fairy stories or whoever wrote the them before you have to write it in that key and i think that means that kids can pick them up and grown-ups liked

that joke that they were being talked to well i remember you telling me about this last year this series i think you'd done the first lot and you were telling me i remember you saying to me even once you set your own rules it's actually really quite tricky to get the jokes to play yeah so it isn't just as simple as slapping a bit of text onto a slightly silly picture like you might find on a greetings card yeah do you want to make it really funny you have to take time to balance out the exact rhythm of words it's a kid's book. The funny thing about it is it's a comedy book, which is quite hard, and it's a kid's book,

which is quite hard because you're writing haikus or song lyrics, you're writing at a very short distance, and if you get it slightly wrong, it just isn't funny. Yeah. It's about getting its syllable perfect because comedy is music. All the notes have to be right our favourite comic book

is The Meaning of Lift by Douglas Adams and John Lloyd and that is an absolutely astonishing masterpiece of comedy, every one of those capsule descriptions in it is very short and if you remove one word one syllable they fall apart they're perfectly written

the thing about The Meaning of Lift is I love the Meaning of Life and I don't quote it very often. Because unless I've got the book in my hand, it's not funny. I need to read it. I can learn some of them, but if I get a word in the wrong place, it dies. It absolutely dies. That was a very influential book

for us growing up, Guy. It had the same values as the Ladybug books. They're short descriptions. The first thing you do is you think of an observation and then you spend eight weeks phrasing it. Until it's funny. Until it lands, right? Yeah. So, Jason, here's one.

Look. Yukon. One who possesses an unseemly collection of marmite. It's on the mite. You can't improve that. So how do you go about, Jason, how do you go about jason how do you go about putting one of the ladybird books together well once we arrived at we approached them and we said look why don't we do the ladybird book of a hipster this sounds like fun

and they said yeah can you do eight so we so we decided along with them on the titles and then there are two kind of parallel tracks that we follow. One is to think about and write about the subject matter, whatever it is, and research it in some cases as well. And the other is to look at the pictures and write things next to them. So sometimes the words come first, sometimes the pictures come first. So we can think about,

we think about something about a midlife crisis and identify some area to write about and then go, which image would go to that? Or you can go through the archive and you can type in, if you're writing a book about hangover, you can type in bacon and have a look at it. Or tired man. Tired man.

Sad woman. The cover of the hangover book in particular is wonderful. Yeah, that was a very happy accident. I should be careful about how I word this because it is a picture of a man being talked off a ledge by a policeman. It's a wonderful painting. It's a 1970 illustration

by Robert Ayton from a book called Danger Men. But it's an interesting example of how very straightforward Ladybug could be sometimes. They could put in a kid's book an illustration of a man who might be about to end his own life. He isn't in this case, but it looks like he might be about to,

but I don't know whether he survives. I haven't actually read the original book, but it's very, very alarming. But when you look at that and you think, wow, that is a bad hangover, isn't it? It just falls into your lap. A lot of people sort of said, oh, it's amazing, you've taken Ladybug books and you've made them grown up

and you want to go, they always were. The great thing about Ladybug books, they're about grown- up subjects, whether it's King John, I read the one on the Magna Carta I didn't know any of that information a grown up could learn from them there's that possibly apocryphal story about the ministry of

buying the book of the computer and giving it to all their staff because it's the best introduction to basic computing. So they were adult, they were adults talking to children but not in a sort of talking-down-to-them way. Yeah, not in a sing-song way. Well, speaking of adults talking to children, it strikes me that the book that we're talking about today,

Bert Fegg's Nice Little Boys and Girls, is a terrible corruption of that idea. Now, what we normally do on Backlisted is we normally offer a little biographical picture, but I am assuming that most people listening to this know who terry jones and michael palin are as you said earlier why don't we assume one third i'm just going to read this little thing that um michael palin uh wrote about burt fegg's nasty book for girls because boys and girls because it will tell people what what the book is if they're

not familiar with it here this is what he says in 1974 terry jones came up with a drawing of a strange rather dangerous looking character with an axe called burt feg terry and i liked him very much and we wrote a book around him called the nasty book for boys and girls it was successful enough for us to return to him 10 years later in 1984 when we updated burt feg to Dr. Bertram S. Fegg GBH, Parkhurst, and created a new book around him called Dr. Fegg's Encyclopedia, misspell,

of all underlined world knowledge. Though it was Terry whose drawing brought Dr. Fegg into existence, most of the other illustrations in the book are the work of Martin Hunnisett, a fine and distinctive cartoon into existence, most of the other illustrations in the book are the work of Martin Hunnisett, fine and distinctive cartoonist. The idea of the book was that it was an educational work

that had been mysteriously given to the most unsuitable man in the world to edit. And this enabled us to fill it with all sorts of silly things, like Aladdin and his terrible problem, a new pantomime, as well as animals like the Patagonian shoe-cleaning rat and the West Bromley fighting haddock,

and new religions like Feggism, the wonder technique that will increase your memory and, well, what was the other thing? The extracts I read from Dr Fegg's encyclopedia in various stage appearances went down so well that we decided to make the encyclopaedia available again. We'll keep you posted to news of its second coming. Meanwhile, here are a few tasters.

And indeed, this edition that's out now, is it back in print again? So how did you two encounter this book? Presumably when you were children. I've just suddenly thought of something, by the way. One of the people we write for, we write Philomena Kunk for Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe. And the joke there is she is the worst person

to have been entrusted with a documentary series. Which is always one of my favourite jokes, is that you should see behind the character to which idiot employed this person. And that's a joke probably from Bert Fogel. Which idiot gave him this joke? I found one in the library is where I found mine.

I love Python, and so I'd pick up anything that was Python books were really magical because you didn't have videotapes they're records but I think I got them from the library a bit when I was a bit older but the books were in the house my dad had a copy of the Monty Python's

Bok, the hardback version of the Bok when it had tits and bums a weekly look at church architecture hidden under the cover which was dirty the two great things about my dad's copy of the Bok, one was it used to have fingerprints on the cover but he lent it to a friend who was a plumber

who cleaned it before returning it so mine was the only copy with no fingerprints on the front cover and it was also kept on a high shelf in the house and I wasn't supposed to look at it until I was 13. You know what? So I climbed up onto chairs when my dad was out, and I would read it illicitly.

So there's a forbidden knowledge about Python books, and I saw this in a library. I knew it was Terry Jones and Michael Palin who I liked, and so I used to take it out of the library a lot. I must say, re-reading this for what must be the gabillionth time, the first as an adult for some years, I really reminded me, it was really evocative to me, about how rude and shocking Monty Python was considered to be.

All sorts of things are forgotten about Monty Python, and that's one of them. One of the books, I think the book, the second one, there was some obscenity. It was because of the prosecution about it. I'm sure Graham Chapman in the new Masturbation the Difficult one. Yeah, it's just...

Yeah, but Feg was in the library and it was more Python. And anything that's more Python. In the same way, I was really excited when Time Bandits came out. It was more free Python. This was published with a sticker on the front. I am told that the sticker on the front cover of the first edition for Christmas 1974 was a Monty Python educational product. Oh, right.

So clearly the publisher was trying to draw you right. What about you, Jason? Where did you find this book? Well, basically, once I'd latched onto Python, which was kind of in the early to mid-'80s, and realised that there was a book, the PapaBok, bought that, then saw there was the big red box as well and bought that, and then basically went on a sort of collecting spree

of trying to collect anything in print that was related to Python. So even down to the script of Eric Idle's play Hello Sailor and stuff like that. I remember that, yeah. So I had a... And this was just obviously one of the things, one of the better things as well, I suppose I have to say. I mean, I think the Python books, in terms of this genre of book,

these are obviously incredibly important to this genre of book. They're the Beatles of these. When they're done first, and they're inventing it, and they do it best, and the production's brilliant and everything, they are just amazing. Once you've done it, everyone else is doing it again, and all they do is remind you of how good the Python books were, even

when they're brilliant. The amount of work in those books as well, the Python books, just the design, it's absolutely astonishing. I was reading up about this. So they're edited, they're driven mostly by Eric Idle, the Python books, but they are...

The big red book, which is the first one, which sells like a quarter of a million copies, is a huge bestseller. The graphic design on it is by Derek Birdsell and somebody called Kate Hepburn. And the Papa, no, the Bok, later the Papa Bok, which is the following year, that's just Kate Hepburn. But considering they were made analogue rather than digital in the mid-'70s,

again, I don't know if people are familiar with them. They are full of design tricks and paper engineering and what we call tip-ins, little books that have been inserted inside them. And indeed, there's one at the front of FEG. The best... This is genuine. The reason you can trust FEG is you open it up, and one of my favourite jokes, apart from Spot the Deliverer at Mestale, which is from FEG, and I think of that joke probably every day,

the opening of FEeg opens with two little sort of tip-ins. One is Erratum, this is the wrong book which is brilliant and then the other one is congratulations you have won Barnsley Town Hall go to Barnsley and ask them to wrap it up for you.

It's just, you know you're in safe hands and those are both the kind of jokes they did on their records and in the TV show. And they're done, the erratum slip is inserted like a real erratum slip. The Barnsley Town Hall looks like a Reader's Digest offer. They look like the things they're pastiching. And we got asked this with Framley a lot and with Lady Bird. The only way you can ever make something look like the thing you're pastiching

is to seize the means of production and use the... People say, how do you make Framley look like a local newspaper? It's designed on the same software as a local newspaper. It takes as long to design as a local newspaper. The reason the day-to-day

is the best news satire television's ever done is they use the actual graphic department that do news things. And you light it. Like, the pilot of the day-to-day is lit like a comedy show and it's not funny. When it's lit like Newsnight, it's funny. And the joy of the Python books is-day is lit like a comedy show and it's not funny when it's lit like

news night it's funny and the joy of the python books is they use the right typefaces the right paper stock the right graphics the photo manipulation is as good as a real advert or we're looking at real the thing is they are real uh and labors of love isn't quite the right term but they are the the amount of time and care and attention that must have gone into making those books I mean I thought it when I read them when I was a kid but now I've actually been involved with making books like this

they're so tricky to get right there's a funny thing with data, with time as well I remember looking at these obviously I was older I was from a later time than Python python not long after but when you watch python on television television didn't look like python only when you watch archive television you notice that python did look exactly like when they did a roundtable debate with politicians and you watch the real election

74 they've got it spot on but as a kid it looked like python because television didn't look like anymore but advertising and books and graphics and magazines you are still surrounded by and they don't date quite as quickly so when i looked at a python book i knew that was exactly what a sunday supplement looked like and a penguin book looked like so i got the joke we were talking about with with victoria wood having died and how carefully she made her documentaries and things and tv look exactly like the real ones and how much that blew my mind when i was a kid and then when the day-to-day came out when spinal tap came out it looked exactly the same and the trick is you work as hard on the pastiche as they do on the real one when we did touch of cloth with with charlie brooker for sky

the detective uh parody we did the rule with that is we got a real people the people who make endeavor and wire in the Blood to make a detective parody and shoot it the same way. And every time we went for a shot, the director would go, quick, quick, everyone's serious. We're going to win a BAFTA. We're making Red Riding and everyone did it straight. And the Python books and FEG,

when they do a pastiche or a parody, it looks like the real thing. They don't break the frame, right? No, and the other thing they do, and FEG is a great example of this, so is Touch of Cloth, actually, and it's something that we do, which some people, some editors in TV don't like this,

but it's much easier to do in a book, which is to get a gag in everywhere you possibly can. Right, you don't leave any area untouched. So the prelims page of Dr FEG has got has got other books by Dr. Fegg. The Bournemouth Killings, an explanation. The Bournemouth Toenailings, what really happened. Where I was on the night of the 26th. Why I have never even been to Bournemouth, and so on and so on.

And at the bottom of the page, you've got the... Hang on, hang on, you missed the best bit. For children, I spy the police. And this is one of these books where we've done this. We've always done this. We did it with Framley and we've done it with Touch of Cloth and we've done it with the Ladybird books. On the back of the Ladybird books,

there are other books in the series included and there's just five ridiculous titles, you know. Because the idea is you've got to try... We try and get a gag in everywhere you possibly can. They've done the same thing here, Paley and Jones. They've just stuffed the thing full of gags. I think it's to do with the way you write. We were talking about this for humour books.

There are two different ways you can do it, like a Christmas tie-in toilet book. And one is to think of an idea, like 101 uses for a dead cat, and do that idea again and again and again and again, as well as you can. So basically it's a book of cartoons or a book of jokes, or one thing, that's your joke the other one is the throw absolutely every idea you've ever had at this and fill all the corners of this book yeah like a rag mag it's every single joke you can think of and

that as an art form i mean i think the ladybirds are sort of halfway between the two of them because they're sort of they are one idea but we literally have put every single idea we've ever had about the midlife crisis into them. We've filled them as far as we can. But these, as an art form, when you look at the not-annuals that were done... Yeah, they were tie-ins for not the 9 o'clock news. Yeah, and they did them as desk calendars,

they're parody desk calendars, and they're 365 pages long with a joke, at least one joke on each side, so 760 or whatever the next one is. They are called Not 1982 and Not 1983. We were talking about them earlier. They were published by Faber and Faber. They are at the tail end of the popularity of Not the 9 o'clock News.

Not the 9 o'clock News is already on the way out by the time those books are published. They're edited by John Lloyd. And the list of contributors to those books, Douglas Adams, Richard Curtis Andy Hamilton Helen Fielding, Kim Fuller etc, etc, etc you know they are the absolute

best British comedy writers who are around. As people who really appreciate it we ended up talking for bizarre reasons to Richard Curtis not too long ago and I happen to mention because obviously despite what Richard Curtis is known for now to me he's the guy from Not An Alcott court news who one of my sort of writing heroes as a kid and so i just said god i mentioned a couple of my favorite sketches did you did you write those and

he did so very happy and i said and the books and he went i remember john lloyd saying right we've got to do 720 pages of jokes um right go and just send them out and he said it was one they said one of those things john lloyd tells you to do and then you send them out and he said it was one of those things john lloyd tells you to do and then you go oh god and he said his solution because i imagine he's of a certain class he went to a friend's house uh and they had a library or what i'll call it in my in my world a bookshelf uh so he went to someone's house and locked himself in the room with the bookshelf in and said he started at the top left of the bookshelf and pulled off what was at the top and it was like a bird watching book he said right i will do some funny

jokes about bird watching when he'd done that put that up next one was a bond wow right i'll do some parodies of bonds super the highway code and that is how you write one of these things you look at every book you've ever seen and you pastiche them you you you take in the same way you would do if you were doing a news satire and you look at the newspaper and do a satire about one of those stories, you can do it from a bookshelf. And the joy about these books as parody books, if you liked books as a kid, is that they are about the love of books

and they are parodies of every sort of book you've ever seen. So they are basically... Someone said it about Parklife by Blur. It's their record collection just done as an album. And this is every book you've ever seen. So a Desert Island book should be one of these sort of portmanteau books you should take this away and this is all booked it is all world knowledge, it's not even a joke

I was thinking this the other day I was listening to the White album again and thinking why is this my favourite Beatles album and the answer is because it's got so much pastiche on it it's got a bit of everything it's a bit like, it's like Feg's book, because Feg's book has comic strips in it, it has a famous five-story, it's got cookery pages,

it's got make-and-mend stuff, it's got bits of everything. Nothing in it is longer than a good, solid poo. You take it to the toilet and you will not get red legs reading a bit of Bert Feg. It'll be over. I think it's my... Because we have a thing. One of the things that's terrible, we work in TV a lot,

and the hardest thing in TV at the moment is that no-one makes broken comedy anymore. They make a lot of sitcoms, and occasionally you'll get sketch shows. But my favourite form of comedy of all is the big chocolate box full of a bit of this and a bit of that that is the day-to-day. I love that. And no-one makes broken comedy. It's very rare to get it and we get to do it with brooker sometimes

because we get to do a sketch and then a lot of news yeah yeah i like stuff where i don't know what's coming next and i've got no chance to get yeah i've got a butterfly mind and these books if you're a comedy fan they're yeah there's they're all the different it's like the white album there's a jazz song and a rock song and i think the thing that's so interesting about Burt Fegg is that... So this is written... This is published late 74, right? It's all written by Palin and Jones,

who in the same year have written most of Series 4 of Monty Python, have written their contributions to the script of Holy Grail as well, presumably. They've also turned out an album. They've also contributed presumably to a Python book. But they've got enough to write a book that's full of stuff. The other. They're just warming up for ripping yarns.

So basically their idea is brewing at the same time. All writers have got this this is the joy the real joy of being asked to do one of these books is there's a phrase called bottom drawer if you're a writer and people always say they sort of say oh you're going to come and contribute to this sketch show whatever don't don't want anything from your bottom drawer and i love our bottom drawer it's full of ideas no one's bought yet and i didn't put them in the bottom drawer because they're rubbish i put them in the bottom drawer when someone said no to them yeah not because i didn't love them because I didn't put them in the bottom drawer because they're rubbish. I put them in the bottom drawer when someone said no to them. Not because I didn't love them. They were because they didn't sell.

And our bottom drawer's full of stuff. And whenever we get a chance to write a big, put everything in there, you go through your bottom drawer and find all your favourite abandoned, orphan, ugly children no one else likes. And they're your favourite ones. So what are your favourite bits from the book? What are the standout passages

for you? There are several. bits from the book? What are the standout passages? Jason, what's your... There are several. One is the recipe for everything pie, which I'm going to have to put my reading glasses on for this because it's very small print, readers. The recipe for everything pie, which basically... Simply get a pie dish and a pastry crust and fill it with everything.

Dish water, Ajax, scouring powder, bleach, soap, steel wool. There's a long list which ends with, and finally, the key ingredient that makes the whole thing blend into one of the world's truly great dishes, the Prime Minister of Malta. Again, comedy is music. There you go.

Worded perfectly. The other thing, the other one I like is that there's a lovely review of Bert Fegg's symphony in J-flat. Dr. Fegg's nasty symphony in J-flat received its first performance behind London's Festival Hall last night. One word. It was an extraordinary occasion. Dr. Fegg, the composer, claims to have had no formal musical training, and there were few there last night who would dispute this

as he put the cello to his lips for the so-called first movement. The sharp sound of splintering wood against teeth as Dr Fegg took the first bite of the beautiful 200-year-old instruments counterpointed with the low groans of the 200-year-old cellist from the Royal Philharmonic lying bound and gagged behind the dustbins and now coming round for the first time. And it carries on like that. I'm a big fan of...

I think we've borrowed this... We keep spotting things where you go, oh, God, that's where I got the idea. We bumped into Palin actually recently and went up to him and said, do you know what, we might have borrowed some stuff from Feg subconsciously along the way. Sorry about that, but he was very nice about it. Yeah, as in you absorb this stuff and then spit spit it out and yourself but there's a there's a great joke structure which

is learn to speak french in four minutes is an advert and it basically is now but down the left hand column it's no heavy books no long lists of words no tedious vocabulary no writing no reading there is no learning at all and then the right hand column it's got people's uh testimonials and it says i have recovered much more quickly than I would have thought possible. The marks are all gone. I am able to lead a perfectly normal life. I am well on the way to recovery. And what's missing is any description of the French course.

I love that. My other favourite joke, which is really simple because we love this shape of a joke, there's a cutaway diagram, a beautiful cutaway diagram, of the new safety aeroplane. And at the front, tagged in the image, is number three, 56 pilots. It's all of them sitting patiently in the front in case one of them falls over. Paine and Jones love that gag. They love too much of something. Too much is always funny.

We were at a voice record this morning. Someone is recording, for reasons we won't talk about. Some of the text from the Lady Bird books. And there's a thing in there we realise, oh, we do this gag a lot. We love too much and too little. And there's a thing about dating in the future. And it says here in the year 4,000 million.

It's obviously so far ahead that it becomes completely absurd and we love that we love that the number of joke shapes that we have borrowed or were taught it's not even borrowed

you are taught by these books these books are basically a primer they're like doing scales they're lessons in how to play

the comedy piano and at the end of it if you study these books all of them the goodies books you will understand how to do parody pastiche and the shape of jokes.

They're just brilliant primers. The thing I found going back to this, as I say, having worked on quite a few of these books, is there's a moment, I think, where basically the publisher who's commissioned this is coming off the back of two massive Monty Python hits and they're basically

saying well you can do what you want, just get it in on time and we won't mess about with it and what I've found with designers particularly when you work on it, if you work with a good designer on one of these books they love working on them

because they are almost like creating 96 or 128-page portfolios of different styles that they can tackle. You know, I know... It's showing off, isn't it? There's a designer called Tony Lyons who you might have worked with. I think he's done at least one of your covers. He did the

first League of Gentlemen book with me and then he did the League of Gentlemen scripts book. And he did the LNG book as well. Yeah. All those books. You know, it took him months of overnight work to get the

gags out of their heads onto the page in a way that played. When we did Framley, because we did the same as we did with the Ladybirds, we designed them to the page. We send them finished artwork. No one designs the books for us. When we did, even when we did Bullets, Tort and Towns, I put the page numbers in by hand.

We send them finished artwork. When we did the Framley books, which are parodies and pastiches, they're these sort of books, the job of turning what was a series of notes into a finished book which i did the lion's share with my brother for you go insane doing it every idea that took two minutes to think up takes an hour to design a mock 1920s railway poster and you put that that effort in because you know that's the only way to make the joke work i remember about two months into doing framley that i a bit like if you go to Tokyo, I imagine,

and you can't speak Japanese, all the ambient noise of the advertising, you can't hear it. But when you could speak Japanese, all the signage would suddenly come. I found that with fonts. Two months into designing one of these books, I could hear the names of fonts I was walking past.

So if I walked up a tube carriage, every advert would go garamond news gothic because i'd learn to recognize them for distance so i could do a pastiche of an atari catalog because i'd learned that's hammer fat i know what it is we're very lucky today because steve colgan who is sitting on a sofa over there and a wave at steve there we go i brought in a carrier bag of some books which I feel we have to mention he's brought in like some of the Python books and he's brought

in the utterly, utterly merry comic relief Christmas book which I remember very well, the not books, the goodies books as well, you were saying earlier Joel that the goodies books are still funny in a way that perhaps the goodies TV show hasn't quite survived.

If you want to understand how funny the goodies were, the books are the way to do it. Because, again, I think the way that television dates, you are unfamiliar with the language of a 1970s gang show. So you watch it and you go, this is a bit old-fashioned. It looks like Pompeii. You don't realise how radical it was. Whereas if you look at the books, you go,

well, I know what an old furniture catalogue looks like. I've seen them before. and it's much easier to read what they're pastiching. David Quantick and I were sitting... Ah, former guest at Batlist. Quoting, in the goodies books, there's a fake, like, an Argos catalogue or a Kay's catalogue from the time.

And we could just do all of it verbatim, from remembering it from when we were kids. There's a number 16 in the catalogue. Green thing to hang from the ceiling will provoke hours of entertaining conversation, a number 16 in the catalogue green thing to hang from the ceiling will provoke hours of entertaining conversation eg please take that green thing off the ceiling comes complete with red thing and the thing that we were fascinated by is number 20 in the catalogue and you can't find it in the pictures number 20 incredibly realistic working model of two nubile young french people at it like knives and both of us went i don't people, at it like knives. And both of us went, I don't know what at it like knives means.

It might be on a theatrical slang, but you went, that's the right word for what they're doing. And I'm seven, I don't know what at it like knives means. I will probably say this inappropriately at dinner at some point. It's taught me a rude word.

And it always had knockers in them as well, which was important as a young person. They were always dirtier pictures in comedy books than you were allowed to see. Always on a quest for those. It seems as good a point at any at which to stop. They're works of art and they've got nudity

in them. That's right. Thank you. Shower cubicle pages of... Thank you, Jason, who was speaking then. Thank you, Andy. And thank you, Joel. Hello, me.

Thank you, Matthew Clayton. Thank you. OK, very good. Thank you to producer Matt Hall, and thanks once again to our sponsors, Unbound. You can get in touch with us on Twitter at Backlisted Pods. And at our page on the Unbound site,bound.co.uk thanks for listening we'll be back with another show in a fortnight until then goodbye happy birthday rachel

you can choose to listen to backlisted with or without adverts. If you prefer to listen to it without adverts, you can join us on our Patreon at patreon.com forward slash backlisted, where you also get bonus content of two episodes of Locklisted, the podcast where we talk about the books and films and music that we've been listening to over the last couple of weeks.