Backlisted - The Compleet Molesworth by Geoffrey Willans & Ronald Searle

Episode Date: November 23, 2020

The Compleet Molesworth (1958) by Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle is the beloved book we're celebrating in this special fifth birthday episode of Backlisted cheers cheers. Joining John and Andy to discuss some of the funniest and most influential fictional creations of the 20th century - Nigel Molesworth, Basil Fotherington-Thomas ect ect ect - are satirical cartoonist and writer Martin Rowson and the novelist Lissa Evans, who as any fule kno was our guest on the very first episode of Backlisted in 2015. Also in this episode John contemplates The Sea View Has Me Again: Uwe Johnson in Sheerness by Patrick Wright and Andy is enchanted by Piranesi, Susanna Clarke's long-delayed second novel, her first being the bestselling Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell.Timings: (may differ due to variable advert length)10'05 - The Sea View has Me Again by Patrick Wright16'36 - Piranesi by Susanna Clarke23'52 - The Compleet Molesworth by Geoffrey Willans & Ronald Searle* 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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And when you get to the main event, skip to the good bit using the card member entrance. Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by card. Other conditions apply. let me ask you lisa where you? What have you been doing? I'm in my bedroom, which I seem to be sick of being in my bedroom. Yeah, I'm in my bedroom where my desk is and I've done no work today whatsoever, apart from Molesworth preparation.

Lissa, I know that you go to the London Library to write, to do your actual writing. How has not being able to get out and go somewhere else affected your ability to produce fine prose? I've used it as a tremendous excuse to be so unproductive over the last few months. I can't even tell you. I despise myself, Andy, for how much I've used it as an excuse. It's pathetic. I cannot write at home. And were you, when the London Library was open, were you running the gauntlet of the bus or what have you? I was the first person in when it reopened and they had to prize me out with a great big crowbar. Yes, I've been in and out of central London all the time. And in fact, that's the last time we were gathered together, wasn't it?

Because it was in the London Library for the Christmas show last year. Not far off a year ago, isn't that? And somebody was reminiscing to me how brilliant the song was, Andy. So they were a tribute to you. Ah, the song. Well, you know, some listeners are resistant to our musical elements. The fools. Martin, where are you?

Well, I am giving a completely false impression of the life I lead because I'm actually in my wife Anna's study where it's nice and it's tidy and it's nicely lit and it's full of learned tones because she's doing a philosophy PhD at Birkbeck at the moment. Nice lighting. But she has the laptop and I haven't got a laptop because I don't really understand any of this shit, as Nikki will understand,

because she actually spoke to my technical support earlier on when Anna turned her laptop on because I don't know how to do it. And normally I'd be upstairs where I have been most of the day and in my studio, which is organised chaos. And I've been doing a nice picture of the prime minister's departing special advisor, the 11-year-old whiz kid who thinks you can solve the world. You can solve the world through Minecraft or whatever the fuck it is. A sort of serious question how has this particular uh year in mankind's history affected your work

uh well it's uh it's it's an interesting question which has been asked of me repeatedly because here we are in the middle of a monumental shipwreck possibly one of the most harrowing experiences of most of our lives, those of us who haven't lived through a world war, and most of us haven't, where we are constantly surrounded by thousands and thousands of our fellow citizens dying as a consequence of a hideous disease, but also government mismanagement and misgovernance. And it's that last bit which the satirist could link on to otherwise we would go insane with existentialist terror if we were just surrounded by all this

death and all this horror but while we can still actually blame somebody and i think we absolutely can blame the government for having the world beatingly highest death toll on the planet um there is hope for us because we can laugh at them in that wonderful mocking way that satire allows us to do. And through that laughter comes the redemption because we release all those lovely endorphins. And, you know, the aforementioned Dominic Cummings going is actually a dark day for British satire because he was the first truly nominative determined subject of satire, because he's called Cummings, and he's a wanker.

Well, let's build from there. Let's take that energy and crank it all up from there. Mitch. Right, let's do it. Hello, and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast that gives new life to old books. Hem, hem. Today it is our birthday. Cheers, cheers. But we're at school, which is utterly wet and weedy and smell of chalk, Latin, books, school ink, football boots and birdseed. Actually,

worse than this, some cads, rotters and swats want us to read peons. Cheers, cheers, cheers. We have to say the weedy words and speak them beatifully with expression as if we knew what they meant. I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound, the platform where readers crowdfund books they really want to read. And I'm Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reading Dangerously, Hello Clouds, Hello Sky. And joining us today are, on this, our fifth birthday show. Yes, incredibly, we've been doing this thing for five years. Five years.

It's 125 episodes, 2 million downloads or listens or whatever. Anyway, and we are joined today by a new guest and the lady we refer to as the original guest. Friend of the show. First up, joining us today for the first time is Martin Rosen. Hello. Martin is a multi-award winning cartoonist, writer, illustrator, broadcaster and poet. His work has been published everywhere from The Guardian and The Daily Mirror, his current homes, The Spectator, Racing Post, Morningstar and The Erotic Review. His many books include graphic novelisations of The Wasteland, Tristram Shandy, Gulliver's Travels

and The Communistic Manifesto, a glowingly reviewed but almost wholly unread novel, Snatches, we should do that on here, Mitch. Several slim volumes of verse, a one-word picture book titled Fuck the Human Odyssey, and Stuff, a memoir about clearing out his late parents' house, which was long-listed for the 2006 Samuel Johnson Award.

In 2001, Ken Livingstone appointed Martin Cartoonist Laureate for London in exchange for one pint of London Pride bitter per annum. Are you still receiving that? No, it's six years in arrears. I mean, it's six years from when he was voted out of office. I only got two pints, but, you know.

Well, hopefully someone listening to this will speed you a crate of ale. And in 2017, a full-page editorial inspired by one of Martin's Guardian cartoons, The Daily Mail described him and his work as, quote, disgusting, deranged, sick and offensive. Congratulations. I'm going to have it carved onto my tombstone with The Daily Mail written after it, like a theatre review outside a theatre.

He has served three terms as a vice president of the Zoological Society of London, lives in South East London and has to stop collecting taxidermy. Lyssa, we're also joined by Lyssa Evans, official friend of the show and as we said, the original guest. This is her sixth and a half backlisted appearance. She was on our very first show five years ago for JL Cars, A Month in the Country. Our 35th and 36th shows, which was a combination of two episodes on Patrick Hamilton and then a drunken minicast on Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders. No one can remember any of it, even though it's on the internet. Our 70th episode on Charles Dickens' Great Expectations.

Our 78th episode on Ghosts by Edith Wharton, which was our Halloween episode in 2018, and of course last year's Proustmas special recorded at the London Library, which is our 108th episode. And incidentally, that episode is the most popular episode of Batlisted. So that leads me to ask you, Lyssa, have you finished reading it yet? No. Perfect. I'm eking it out. Yeah. Sorry. As well as making us look better, Lyssa writes fiction for both adults and children. Her most recent novel, V for Victory, set in a boarding house in 1944, was published in

August. I've talked about it on this show and is the third book in a loose trilogy following on from Old Baggage and Crooked Heart. Before she was a writer she produced and directed radio and TV comedy. She considers her funniest book to be the Carnegie shortlisted Wedwabbit. Ostensibly for children, this seems to have a link with the book we're going to be talking about doesn't it? Ostensibly for children though to be honest it could be seen as an allegory for almost anything. She read the audiobook herself're going to be talking about, isn't it? Ostensibly for children, though, to be honest, it could be seen as an allegory for almost anything. She read the audiobook herself and had to invent a different voice for each of seven different colours of Wimbley Woo,

as well as a six-foot plastic carrot. She was hoarse for two days afterwards. Do you read your adult stuff, Lissa? No, nobody asked me to, but I insisted on doing this one. I just spend so much time getting jokes perfect when I write them. And I just couldn't bear the thought of hearing a joke read wrongly. So you've got jokes read correctly by somebody who's not really an actress as opposed to a brilliant actor not doing the jokes quite perfectly.

I did massively enjoy doing it. You know, the precision of it was very pleasing. There is no audio book of The Complete Molesworth. Well, there we go. The book that Martin and Liz are here to discuss is The Complete Molesworth, first published by Max Parrish & Co. Ltd. in 1958 and reissued in expanded form as Molesworth by Penguin Books in 1999 and then in Penguin

Classics in 2000. We'll say a bit more about what the complete Molesworth consists of, it's slightly complicated. It is. But we'll come on to that shortly. But not so fast John, cheers cheers. What better way to mark five years of doing this than to ask what better way to mark five years of doing this than to ask what have you been reading this week aha thanks for asking me andy um i have been reading a very big book it's called the sea view has me again uh the subtitle is uve johnson in sheerness by that uh notable uh historian some might say psychogeographer, although I wouldn't. I think he's a historian. Patrick Wright.

It is a 670-page. What is it? That's a really good question. I think it's two things. A book and that. It's a book. It's a history. It's a history of Uwe Johnson, the great East German writer who arrived in the UK in the early 70s and lived for a decade in Sheerness. It's 26 Marine Parade Sheerness.

If it were light outside, I could see it from here. on the Isle of Sheppey. It is also a history, a geography, a gazetteer of the Isle of Sheppey, this strange kind of island in the Thames estuary. And it's entirely fascinating on both those levels. I've never read any of A. Johnson. He is one of those writers, suppose that came out of the separation of Germany into two states he was an East German he escaped into the West into the New York in the 60s and as I say fetched up much to the surprise of all his friends and to the shock of his friends, who included people like Hannah Arendt and Siegfried Unset from Surkampf, his publisher, who one of the many things that is kind of interesting about this book is the relationship over a period of time of a great writer writing his masterpiece, Anniversaries, his masterpiece, which is four volumes, a huge cast of characters over a long historical period set in America.

None of it is set in Sheerness, but he did write quite a bit of certainly the fourth volume of the four in Sheerness. So it's an amazing feat of research. He gives you the newspapers. Johnson, the novelist, was obsessed with newspapers, particularly the Sheerness Guardian, which had some fantastic headlines, cats escaping from the cattery, that kind of thing, the usual thing, Sheernesserness man in human in human torch mystery um there's

there's social history there there's kind of uh the the there's the history of the 19th century hulks the fights between you know obviously sheerness like a lot of these places became holiday cottages for uh for east enders uh there's there's a of drinking. I'm going to read you a passage. You described this to me as being like, a bit like W.G. Seybelt, if he had written a 680-page book rather than a 200-page book. It's kind of, it's like, I think I might have said Seybelt on steroids.

Let me read you a little bit. This is Johnson. He liked to drink, and he liked, this is the pub he used to hang out in in which was called the napier tavern so the republican ronald peel told jens that's the reporter that's that's that's that was one of the people who wrote about johnson after he died that johnson had always turned up at the same time in the evening stepping into the napier tavern saloon bar with a brief good evening, or good heavening, as Johnson himself imagines in the registering his pronunciation, and then taking his customary place on a high wooden barstool

with a seat upholstered in red synthetic leather of the type Tom Waits was in those days hymning as Nougahyde. He allegedly always wore the same distinctive garb too, a black peached watchman's cap, a black jacket, black trousers, black leather boots, and sometimes a thin black tie. The same gear, in other words, that had shocked Michael Hamburger, who had been astonished to find this highly, the translator, who had been shocked to find this highly regarded

and sensitive writer going about in such garb. Even the astrays on the bar had to be black at his request, and to make matters worse he would insist on having two, one for stubs of the French cigarettes that stank so disgustingly to Peel's frankly English nose, and the other for the matches which Johnson, in a gesture that confirms other accounts of the exactness with which he measured his progress along the road to ruin would line up in an orderly row as he made his way through the carefully counted cigarettes he allowed himself over a two-hour visit 11 cigarettes eight pints of hurleman and also that's a german lager and also just before returning home a double vodka

with tomato juice ice ice and lemon, but without Worcester sauce, served in a large glass. Such was the alleged tally by the end, Peel told Jens, rounding off his betrayal by adding not just that he'd been obliged to order in a special supply of Galois, but that he had to return the entire stock to the supplier after the writer's death, since none of his other customers would dream of smoking these pungent foreign things anyway without giving away too many spoilers he he dies

in living on his own he he separates from his wife he ends up living in 26 moraine parade he dies and is not found for three weeks uh there's a i mean a little detail. One of the reasons he wasn't found is that he drank his tea and his coffee without milk. So the usual telltale piling up of milk bottles on the doorstep didn't happen. Well, this is how Backlisted celebrates his fifth birthday, with a 680-page and thoroughly miserable account of a man drinking himself to death in Sheerness.

Fantastic. Well, I loved every scrap of it. I have to say, I found it completely compelling. And that might tell you more about me than... It's been a hard year. It's a hell of a lockdown read. Literally everything that has ever been written and has ever happened on the Isle of Sheffy

is contained in this book. How will I follow it? How will I follow this? The Sea View Has Me Again by Patrick Wright. Patrick Wright, brilliant writer, great book. Andy, what have you been reading? I've been reading Susanna Clarke's new novel, Piranesi, which is her first novel since Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, which many of our listeners will have read. I'm sure lots of people have been reading Piranesi in the last few weeks, couple of months. It's quite a hard novel to talk about because the less you know about it, going into it it the better. I had strenuously avoided all reviews. I didn't even read the jacket copy because I didn't want to know anything at all about the book going in with the result that

a significant proportion of the book was mystifying to me. But what I'm going to say to listeners is if you want to fast forward by four and a half minutes you should probably do that. If you're planning on reading this book or you like the sound of what i've just said i'm not going to reveal any spoilers but but the less you know the better so you could feel totally happy to to to go ahead slightly and get on to the molesworth discussion okay they've gone those lightweights uh we can uh we can carry on talking about the susanna clark you know how every so often a book comes out. I don't read loads of new fiction, obviously, because for professional reasons and also my sympathies tend to be with older books, out-of-print books, dead authors, not living ones,

not troublesome living authors, but safely in the ground authors. And I'm very sceptical of novels which are hailed for speaking for their moment, unless they're by Ali Smith. I've just read a book by an author who shall remain nameless, which was spoiled totally by the sense that the author concerned was straining every sinew to capture what they thought the year 2020 was going to be when they wrote it. And obviously they've fallen completely flat on their face because things have turned out rather differently whereas Susanna Clarke's Piranesi I hate the phrase speak to but seems to speak to this year and this particular moment and us living in our bubbles and in our various isolation with a sense of menace outside that we can't quite quantify incredibly skillfully and adeptly. And I said that I found the beginning of the book quite mystifying. That's what Susanna Clarke wants.

And by the end of the book, I was just totally gripped by it and very, very moved, very moved. I haven't read a new piece of fiction which manages to marry intellect and imagination. I don't even know generically what it is. I suppose it's science fiction, but it isn't pure science fiction. It's a really fascinating novel about dislocation. And given the gap between her novels and the fact that I believe she has been very ill in that period, one could also read it as a metaphor for isolation via illness, about never leaving a particular space and having to go outside by going inside, by going into one's head and into one's imagination. into one's head and into one's imagination. So the book is set in an imaginary, what seems to be a museum, albeit a very strange museum, a vast museum full of statues, seemingly without end. And all I will say about it is, as the book goes on, figures such as, for instance, Alistair crowley or rd lang come into this picture and um

the narrator in the third chapter the third chapter is called a list of all the people who have ever lived and what is known of them and i'll just read you a tiny bit of that entry for the 10th day of the fifth month in the year the albatross came to the southwestern halls. Since the world began it is certain that there have existed 15 people. Possibly there have been more but I am a scientist and must proceed according to the evidence. Of the 15 people whose existence is verifiable, only myself and the other are now living. I will now name the 15 people and give where relevant their positions. First person, myself. I believe that I am between 30 and 35 years of age. I am approximately 1.83 metres tall and of a slender build. Second person, the other.

I estimate the other's age to be between 50 and 60. He is approximately 1.88 metres tall and, like me, of a slender build. He is strong and fit for his age. The other and I are searching diligently for the knowledge. We meet twice a week on Tuesdays and Fridays to discuss our work. The other organises his time meticulously and never permits our meetings to last longer than one hour. If he requires my presence at other times, he calls out, Piranesi, until I come. Piranesi, it is what he calls me, which is strange because as far as I remember, it isn't my name. Third person, the biscuit box man. The biscuit box man is a skeleton that resides in an empty niche in the third northwestern hall. He goes on, other persons include the concealed person,

other persons include the concealed person, persons 5 to 14, the people of the alcove, the 15th person, the folded up child. The folded up child is a skeleton. I believe it to be female and approximately seven years of age. She is posed on an empty plinth in the sixth southeastern hall. Her knees are drawn up to her chin. arms clasp her knees her head is bowed down and he ends the 16th person you who are you who is it that i'm writing for are you a traveler who has cheated tides and crossed broken floors and derelict stairs to reach these halls? Or are you perhaps someone who inhabits my own halls long after I am dead? I really want to read this. I really want to read it. I thought this just was spectacular and also really exciting.

You know those occasional moments you have where you think, gosh, that book's a bestseller. That's on shelves in virtual bookshops all over the country. Well, in fact, in real bookshops all over the country, but we can't necessarily access them easily. But I cannot recommend that highly enough. Susanna Clarke Piranesi, published by Bloomsbury. Great. That little bit you read just gave me a slight Rob Shearman feel.

Robert Shearman, a bit of Neil Gaiman. Yeah, a bit of Gaiman. Calvino. A bit of Borges. Yeah, Borges, definitely. And yet, how often are we gripped

by a novel by Borges? Not necessarily terribly often. Or Calvino, let's be honest. Susanna Clarke, I think, like I said, head and heart. Brilliant, brilliant book terribly often. Or Calvino, let's be honest. Susanna Clark, I think, like I said, head and heart. Brilliant, brilliant book. Fantastic. That's really good. We'll be back in just a sec. Lissa, where were you when you first became aware of the gorilla of whatever he is, St Custard's, Nigel Molesworth. Do you know, I've got a really, really clear memory of it because I was living in Surrey with my parents, I was about eight, and we had a sort of kitchen

diner, and I remember the milkman came to the door, back door, which opened the kitchen, and my mother had to explain to the milkman what that noise was and that noise was me sitting in armchair hysterical reading molesworth i could not speak and and the effect on me was phenomenal i mean so i was about eight and i think by then i'd read a lot i'd read early and i'd read probably most of the narnia books i'd read I'd read Mrs Molesworth's high Victorian imaginative writer I've read a lot but I'd read proper books and this was this was anarchy I mean you know part of its impact yeah yeah was that there was nothing else like it at the time you know the the terrible idiosyncratic spelling the cartoons

instead of illustrations um you know but the lack of structure the lack of plot the lack even of sentence and and the fabulous sarcasm the slapstick they but you know the cool protagonist sitting there taking the world apart with whatever verbal weapon he could get it was it was like you know molesworth was driving a tank over the kind of books i'd read and i was next to him and and and he was crushing normal narrative you know beneath his caterpillar wheels caterpillar spelt with one l and and i had never read anything like it and i internalized vast numbers of the best lines. And for years, they came out in my own writing, not the actual lines, but the rhythm of them, the shape of them. They provided me with a permanent pattern of what a funny line feels like.

And for me, that was, you know, that's an extraordinary turning point. My whole life in some ways has been about comedy. produce radio and television comedy i i write funny lines and i know what they're supposed to feel like because because that's what jeffrey willans gave me and and and you know they they propelled me into the life i lead in some ways gosh that sounds profound but they did that's why we asked you that's why we always ask you back but the pros we're gonna we're gonna talk to you in a moment about the other half of the equation i mean i so enjoyed at mixed are very jangly times i i so enjoyed having an excuse to sit and read these from cover to cover again over the last week or so and listen

i i totally agree with you about the prose it's just it's just the the rhythms of it and the and the economy of it and also you write the anarchy of it because you don't know where it's going to go next and the variety of it there is there is you know the broadest of slapstick there's the skeletto footnote that digs in underneath the bland prose there's the satire that you know which builds and builds as you get older but you know the parody the pastiche you know he's had a huge variety of of techniques which he uses with molesworth martin, that's Geoffrey Willans spoken for. I want to ask you, can you remember, you're obviously an eminent cartoonist.

Can you remember when you first became aware of Searle as Searle, as opposed to someone whose work you were familiar with? I mean, or perhaps can you remember the first time you saw a Searle cartoon and laughed? laughed well it's interesting because um you know seoul has been declared by the majority of my profession to be the greatest british cartoonist of the 20th century and i think that's unquestionably true um but i discovered seoul like many people, through Molesworth, because he was no longer current by the time I became aware of political cartoons, which I started becoming aware of when I was nine or ten. In fact, I could date almost precisely the moment when I realised I wanted to be a cartoonist, when I stole my sister's history school textbook when I was about 10 years old and started thumbing through it. It was full of Gilrays and Cruikshanks and Rowlandsons and Tenniels and Daily Lows. And I thought, this is

what I want to do. And I went and found some pens and started trying to draw like Gilray etched. But I remember precisely when I first bought Whiz for Atoms uh i have a crystal clear memory of being 10 because my mother died when i was 10 and i suddenly found that uh the best way to cope with that was through books and there was one book which maybe we can talk about some other episode of this uh called um let's kill uncle which i've spoken about many times oh yeah it was a absolutely fantastic book but also i remember at my god-awful prep school, high church Anglican prep school, where they had a book fair

where people would come around and sell books and I was given some money to go to the book fair. And I was already reading Let's Kill Uncle and I thought, you know, what's something else? And I was already immersed in cartoons, but the kind of cartoons I was immersed in at that stage was probably people like Felwell and so on, you know, the great punch cartoonists who were around.

And, of course, Searle was no longer around. He had fled to France in 1961. And I saw Whiz for Atoms. I just thought, well, that's a great cartoon on the front of there. And was immediately sucked in to this magnificent world. And it was as much for Willans as it was for Searle that they were almost perfect collaborators. Which is really bizarre because if you look at the history of collaboration between writers and cartoonists, it's always been a sort of slightly uneasy one.

I've had relationships with various, in a professional way, with various writers. I've found it easier to actually write my own stuff to illustrate because you don't have to deal with the bloody writers that way. But, you know, Ralph Steadman's relationship with Hunter S. Thompson was much, much lairier and more unpleasant than yeah Ralph often chooses to

remember but these two seem to be made for each other although it was in fact set up because Searle was so fed up with some of the St Trinian's girls which he created we can talk about them a bit more in a minute that he wanted to try something else we've got a clip here which from Ronald Searle himself from uh and I've I've kept in the introduction for this because I think it's just well you'll you'll hear why this was Channel 4 News in uh 2010 ran an interview with Searle on the occasion of his 90th birthday and they went to the south of France to interview interview him so so here it is he's our foremost graphic artist as any fool know that's f u l e k n o ronald searle the illustrator of millsworth

and creator of st trinians is 90 tomorrow he's given his first television interview in 35 years to our arts correspondent nicholas glass who joined him for a glass of bubbly in the south of france ronald searle regards in trinians as just a single chapter in a long working life. Intrinions stuff came up quite accidentally. They got published, it only lasted six years. My principle has always been the moment it's successful, kill it. Because it can only get worse. But basically I was more interested in illustration and reportage.

Of course, the British still feel safer with the comic appeal of Nigel Molesworth and his prep school, St Custards, a glorious collaboration with the writer Geoffrey Willans. It was a potpourri of ideas between Searle and Willans that actually made a book. People like it. They still like it curiously enough. I was going to say, do you have an explanation? Well, not really, because in fact those days have gone. But there's a basic public that still run around crying, as every fool knows.

Oh, hallow clouds, hallow sky. I don't know, it's a sort of cult thing. And it dribbled on. And it dribbled on. There we are. That's what we've gathered to celebrate i don't know how the collaboration took place maybe martin can talk about it but what i love about it is the feeling that that it was quite random in some ways you know sometimes there's

illustrations which have nothing to do with the text i think the ghoul going into rome and then the ghoul coming out that's what comes out what comes out of nowhere, but it's a beautiful, it's a beautiful illustration, very funny, but where's it come from? John, they give one another a lot of space, don't they? It struck me reading it again. Yeah. It's so rare to get words and pictures to work like this. I mean, I suppose, you know, you're thinking collaborations, you know, Quentin Blake and Dahl. I love the surreal element to it. And I particularly, I've always loved the Gaul. And it's funny, you go back to it. I mean, I read it, I suppose I read it when I was, I would have been about 10 when I first picked it up. And like you, they said, had absolutely, unlike a lot of people who went to prep schools and who had

kind of, my school was just an ordinary, it's just an ordinary primary school. But that's the thing, it doesn't matter. You don't have to have those references the kind of brilliant pictures of teachers they're just people in authority aren't they philip hensher says that you know he went to a comp our former guest philip went to a comp um he says in his introduction to the complete molesworth that he was appalled when he was re reading molesworth which he loved one day and realized that he was onealled when he was reading Molesworth, which he loved one day, and realised that he was one of the oiks that Nigel Molesworth was fulminating against, always being warned off.

But it doesn't seem to matter, Martin, does it? That sense that Searle says about the world isn't like that anymore. Well, it clearly isn't. It's an interesting clip. I mean, the essential thing about this collaboration is they were equals, which is not always the case between an illustrator and a writer. It can actually go one way or the other. But in this case, they are absolute equals because, as you said,

they give each other enough space to go and do their own thing. So, you know, Willans mentions a gerund, and suddenly you have this wonderful series of drawings of a gerund going off rebuffing a gerund div and not allowing it to be part of its sentence but um searle you know typically of the man he um rather grumpily dismissed the genesis of his own art because one of the essential things about Ronald Searle was of course that he was a prisoner of the Japanese from the age of 20 for the next four and a half years working on the Burma railway he was in Changi jail you know saw things of a type which

none of us I hope will ever witness and felt compelled to bear witness to it. So he was actually drawing at the same time, managed to get drawing equipment. Had he been caught with this stuff, they would have killed him on the spot. So he used to hide the drawings underneath the mattresses of his fellow prisoners who were dying of cholera. So knowing that was the only place the Japanese guards wouldn't search. And you look at these drawings and they're extraordinary. And they are actually documentary evidence of war crimes. He said, he was asked, you know, about building the railway. And his brilliant answer was, one didn't think it was a railway. It was just murder.

Yeah, exactly, exactly. But as I said, this is exhibits A to Z and then on again of war crimes. And you look at sort of drawings like British and Australian prisons of war dragging wagons with tree trunks on them, being used as beasts of burden or even more horrific Burmese peasants heads beheaded you know decapitated heads on a row with sort of Japanese soldiers laughing because they'd been caught pilfering off the Burma railway and they'd been executed and then you look four years later to stuff that Searle was doing in the St Trinian's series and you see little girls pulling a roller

on sports day saying I bloody hate sports day replicating the image of the British and Australian prisoners of war being used as beasts of burden and another one of a St Trinian's girl sharpening a knife on a knife sharpener with a row of heads on the shelf above her and the headmistress coming in and say this is Bertha she's our head girl now this is this is the most extraordinary thing about seoul that he rather than going into deep trauma although he was in deep trauma is why the reason he abandoned his family 15 years later was that he retold tragedy for jokes he did that thing where you actually find redemption through laughter. And Willans does exactly the same thing.

And actually, I had never realized this before I started rereading this again in the last week. Right at the beginning of Down with School, about page 14, where it's the beginning of term, two short speeches for headmasters. And it says, I would like to to introduce and it's got footnotes to explain what's going on i should like to introduce a new master who have joined us in place of mr blenkinsop who left suddenly footnote nine who would have thought he seemed so nice i feel sure that he will find fill the place occupied by his predecessor footnote 10 not too faithfully, I sincerely hope. And actually, right at the beginning,

you're talking about paedophilia. I mean, it's clearly what you're talking about because it was the background hum, the fucking enormous elephant in every single school room in a prep school. We had one in my prep school because they caught up with him after 50 years. And you were also dealing with, of course, post-war,

many traumatized soldiers who didn't know what else to do so who went into schools and took out their various post-traumatic stress disorders on their on their young pupils right listen is that is that why is is man's inhumanity the map to man a perpetual theme the reason why we don't get too hung up on it being a 1950s prep school for lower middle class children yes i i think so i've been puzzling as to what why i connected or we all connect so greatly with it but the darkness of it appeals to to children as much as it does to adults and and and i grew up with some book of St Trinian's cartoons as well and read the introduction about the Serle and Japanese prisoner of war camp.

And the darkness of it makes the laughter feel dangerous as well. There's a fantastic cartoon of Molesworth 1 and 2 setting a trap for Father Christmas. And the trap is a gigantic Spikes man trap, which would actually cut someone in half. And it feels naughty and also horrible to laugh at these things, but it's liberating as well. Far darker than most children's fiction.

The darkness of it is something... Here's a clip from Desert Island Discs in 2005. Searle actually did Desert Island Discs twice, and I'll say a bit more about the differences between his two appearances in a minute. But here he is talking about some of the very things we've just been discussing. If you could only take one of those eight records, Ronald,

which one would you take? One of those records? Only one. Well, I think the last one. No problem. I mean, if I want to have an uplift stuck on an island, there's no doubt about it, champagne, even listening to it, I don't have to drink.

My leg is in the air. And what about your book? As you know, you get the Bible in Shakespeare. Ah, yes. Well, you know, I thought about, you know, I'm fascinated by history and fascinated by people. And I thought, well, what I'd love to have is a recent publication, which is the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. But the problem is, it's in 60 volumes. So I thought, if you could persuade Oxford to bind it into one book it'd be rather like a concertina but I'd like to take that

as my one book and your luxury, what would that be? oh champagne, no actually I had thought that my luxury would be a mosquito net because I know that when you're stuck on an island you're going to be eaten alive anyway by insects then I thought oh to hell with that, let's have

champagne, because what i would do is i would drink this i would have the best possible bottle of champagne probably crystal roger and then i would write a note put it into the bottle throw it into the sea saying please send another one so putting himself in that tradition uh we would agree with him right that that he's in that kind of savage uh uh i don't know yeah i mean the um i've discovered as i have traveled around the world talking to cartoonists from unhappier countries than ours um where they don't have our 300 year long tradition of doing genuinely hideous pictures of our betters. And they recoil sometimes in horror. And I say, we've had 300 years of this.

This is what we do. This is, you know, we're part of the conversation. How else would you draw the Prince of Wales except as an obese lecher riddled with syphilis? I mean, there's no other way to draw. Otherwise, you wouldn't recognise him as the Prince of Wales. And he also manages to introduce a note of vicious politics in into into quite light-hearted things on on parents day the headmaster takes the schoolmaster through a

series of questions and he realized the series of questions actually a stalinist show trial in which they're having to admit to having sabotaged the school piano. And it's absolutely extraordinary. I mean, Philippa Henscher actually, I didn't know her, in his introduction says, unstoppable satirical verve and a startling width of cultural, political and philosophical range. That's absolutely true.

He snatches politics from all over the place and from the most vile history. He uses examples to make us laugh. But there's also just wonderful absurdity of it. So in that thing Lisa was just referring to, in that

interrogation, they suddenly say, who invented the steam engine? Answered Joseph Stalin. Yeah. Lisa, I'm going to ask you to read in a minute, but I want to just talk to you a bit about, from a writer's point of view, from a comedy writer's point of view, it struck me going back through these books again. One of the genius things that Willans does with the character of Nigel Molesworth is although Molesworth speaks for, you know, all horrible schoolboys,

actually the brilliance of it is that Nigel Molesworth is a very specific character. He's a unique character. So lots of the jokes are coming out of character. Once you get to know him, and I was thinking, you're talking about his uh the parents drinking clearly nigel molesworth is a very creative boy who's who's writing and drawing and and is able to do creative writing like uh the his prunes essay but he's wildly underappreciated genius he's a lonely genius one of the great insights into reading them again, we haven't even mentioned Fotherington Thomas,

but I'm going to say, if you read all four books through and they take on the quality of a novel, the story of the novel of The Complete Molesworth is Nigel Molesworth realising he could be friends with Fotherington Thomas.

As the books go on, they become more like equals. Nigel Molesworth realising he could be friends with Fotherington Thomas. Yeah, yeah. As the books go on, they become more like equals. And it struck me that's totally right. That's right to the character of Nigel Molesworth, right? And that's why it's funny. Yes, Nigel is never going to be like others. And he's viewing this from on high. You know, he's a lowly schoolboy, but actually he's like God in these books.

He understands what's going on in everybody. He sees world politics and is able to inject it into his own environment. You know, Nigel is omniscient. It's absolutely extraordinary. I have a sneaking suspicion, actually, you can tell by the way he looks that actually Nigel Molesworth grew up to be Jonathan Meads oh yes that's perfect the way he

stares at things it's perfect isn't it would you be kind enough to audition for the audio book absolutely I'm going to read a bit it's called All About Armand which is about um molesworth's well basically it's about his french textbook everyone know that armand is a wet because

he wear that striped shirt and city store hat in lesson 6a armand has just entered into salamanger from the jordan he entered not to pinch something to, but to give Mama the jolly fleur which he had picked. Papa is pleased. Papa is not worried, as he jolly well ought to be at this base conduct. Papa is highly delighted. Thou art a good boy, Armand, he said. This afternoon I will take thee to the zoo.

Ah, you think. Papa is not so dumb as he look. He will throw Armand to the lions. Are there any animals in the zoo? Asked Armand. Oh, but yes said Papa without losing his temper at this feeble question. Hopla hopla I am so happy. Perhaps the lions are not bad enough perhaps it will be the loops. The loops could indubitably

do a good job on Armand. Is it with these thoughts that Papa go hand in hand with his little son? They pay 10 sous. They pass through the turnstile. They enter into zoological gardens. They look round themselves. How big the elephants are, observe Armand at length. Yes, and also the giraffes. The monkeys are amusings. Oh yes, on a fair, and there is a fox. Foxes are naughties. You wonder if it was Noel Cowder who wrote the dialogue. It's so nervously brilliant, my my dear how long can it be before papa do Armand but it's not to be, they pass the loops and the lines but naught happen

except that papa observes that the sky is blue, although it is sometimes grey they go out of the turnstile and return home, next week we will go to La Campagne, say papa now you can see what has been going on. The zoo and the Bordeaux-la-Mer are too crowded.

Get Armand by himself in the meadow, and it is money for jam. Money for jam. Money for jam. And there's a fantastic illustration of the enormous backside of an elephant, and then Armand, who's the wettest weed in the history of wet weeds, gazing at it and observing how big it is. Oh God, I mean, I just remember weeping at that.

So Martin was telling us that Molesworth starts off as a punch column, no Searle involved in the late 30s and early 40s. And following the success of St Trinian's Willans or Willans agent approaches Searle to say well I've got this material and you you you're the

best-selling author of the St Trinian's maybe we could get together and initially Searle's response was well no I don't want to do more school. And he said that as soon as he started reading it, he could see all the space in it. He thought it was funny, but he could also see what he could bring. So I want to have these books originally published with their subtitles, because the subtitles are exquisite in their own right. So The Complete Molesworth is made up of four books the first in 1953 down with school exclamation mark a guide to school life for tiny pupils and their parents followed in 1954 by how to be top a guide to success for tiny pupils including all there is to know about space. So that's like moving into the space race, isn't it?

1956, Whiz for Atoms, a guide to survival in the 20th century for fellow pupils, their doting maters, pompous paters, and any others who are interested. So that's the... And then the complete

Molesworth is published before Back in the Jug Again, which is the final book. And as far as I can work out, what happens is they have The Complete Molesworth ready for publication, and Geoffrey Willans dies of a heart attack in early 1958. And they go ahead with the publication of The Complete Molesworth containing parts of Back in the Jug Again and then Back in the Jug Again is published with additional material which all then gets folded into later editions of the complete Molesworth. So when we listeners say the complete Molesworth, we don't mean the 1958 shorter version,

we mean the complete Molesworth, not the C-O-M-P-L-E-T Molesworth. I think any fool knows that, actually. Martin, the language. I'm going to ask you actually about Willan's language. It struck me that the text is funny, but it's not just funny. It's misspelt in a way which doesn't really come across when we read it out loud. But actually, when you see it on the page, it's almost like a compliment to the cartoons. Well, exactly.

I mean, it is a perfect marriage of text and image, weirdly, because most cartoons are a battle between text and image. But this is a perfect marriage. I remember reading a Molesworth book in a, you know, it's raining outside, read a book, boys. And I had two books to read. One of them was a Molesworth book and the other one was 1984. I think I was about 12 at the time. And my English teacher, who was a very inspirational teacher in many ways, but he thought I should read the Orwell because he was worried that my spelling was so bad that it would just be made worse by reading the Muldoon. So he wanted to corrupt my mind with this horror story about Stalinism instead,

which, you know, good for him. this horror story about Stalinism instead, which, you know, good for him. They are actually both I think equals 1984 and the Molesworth Tetralogy in many ways. They're about horror but dealt with in different ways.

But you're absolutely right. It's part of the joy of reading it and it's actually about literature because, as you say, you can't read it out loud and get the stuff inside. it's almost like the typographical conceits of Tristram Shandy

I absolutely agree I absolutely agree it's the way the words work on the page a huge part of the charm I mean you know it's Clockwork Orange or Ridley Walker or God knows Finnegan's wake you know you you can't you can't fully get the the the effect they're not normal misspellings i mean he

he can spell quite complicated words perfectly well nobody actually spells no as in i know something k-n-o with nothing on the end of it, or happy with only one P. None of these are normal spellings. Or say with no Y. Or say with no Y. They're part of Nigel's shorthand as he views the world. I feel they're just a way of him writing quickly the deep thoughts that he tends to have quite a lot. Yeah.

John, say a bit about Fotherington Thomas. Apart from the fact that he obviously ended up in a prog rock band after school i mean genesis he was in genesis i'm going to quote fotherington thomas here for probably many of our listeners this will chime with them i simply don't care a row of buttons whether it was a goal or not nature alone is beautiful that's it and to which Molesworth appends, I do not think he will catch the selector's eye. Yes. One of the problems with the book, right, is you just give up underlining.

Because it's just so full of gems like that. Deep dislike, the nature walk, the deep dislike, any excuse to go off for a fag and to to and to impugn the the kind of the the the the botany teachers there's a there's a bit in whiz for atoms i'm just going to read this little bit this is about the relationship between fotheringston thomas and molesworth it's one of my favorite favorite bits of the whole thing when molesworth is reading a crystal ball and he looks into the what's the future going to be for grabber the head boy. And what's the future going to be for Fotherington Thomas,

the eye of the prophet Molesworth next light upon dear little Fotherington Thomas. What does the crystal ball reveal for this girly? Can it be true? Air vice-marshal, Sir Basil Fotherington Thomas, BC DSO clubs, spac spacemans oval teenies air vice-marshal sir basil fotherington thomas lowered himself into the cockpit of the gleaming space jet

complete with all parts two million quid and so so molesworth looks into the future and he sees Fotherington Thomas's obituary. Obituary by a pal. All those who knew Basil Fotherington Thomas will mourn the death of a very brave space pioneer. Oh, goody, say Fotherington Thomas, peeping over my shoulder. Oh, goody, Molesworth, you have put me in and made me brave. How can I thank you enough? I'm brave. I'm brave.

Hurrah. I should not thank you enough? I'm brave. I'm brave. Hurrah! I should not count on it, I say. It is only a flight of fancy. Thanks all the same. You are super, Molesworth One. You really are. Now, what is your future? Who, me?

Oh, I say, gosh, no. Fearfully, I put my great nose towards the crystal ball, dot, dot, dot. Another splendid creation by Nigel is this daring cocktail frock in burnt orange and squashed muskrats. Note how Nigel has modelled bodice and waist in crushed chipmunk and a flaring skirt with matching beads. No wonder that Nigel's beeline is the sensation of the season. Nigel has flare!

Curses! I take the wretched crystal pill and punt it out of the season. Nigel has flair! Curses! I take the wretched crystal pill and punt it out of the window. It takes few things to drive me back to the imperfect sub-junk of avoir, but this is one of them. I mean, it's beautiful, right? Brilliant.

So beautiful. Martin, have you got a passage that you wanted to share with us? Yes, I have. Which, just to show how the empire of Molesworth spreads into every corner of life, I read this at my old school friend John Lewin's funeral. He rather tragically died at the age of 41 of a brain tumour. But I'd been to see him in hospital and I used to read to him

when he was in hospital and I'd read this to him and it made him laugh, which it was meant to, because it is very funny. And then his widow asked me to read it again at his funeral but it made people laugh again. And it's Grimes, the headmaster Grimes,

who is of course an echo of Evelyn Waugh from Decline and Fall. And it's the first assembly of term. And it's, remember this, he leer, you never had it so good. Well, this is just what we expect. We have it every term and our tiny hearts sink to our boots. It will be nothing but lat, fr, arith, geom, algy, geog, ect. And with the winter coming on, it will be warmer in Siberia and a salt mine. Oh well, we wait for what we know will come next.

And what, say Grimes, have we all been reading in the holes? Tremble, tremble, moan, drone. I have read nothing but Red the Redskin and Guide to the Pools. I have also sat with my mouth open looking at Lassie, Wonder Horse, etc. on TV. How to escape? But I have made a plan.

Fotherington Thomas, say Grimes, what have you read? Ivanhoe, the Vicar of Wakefield, Wuthering Heights, Treasure Island, Vanity Fair, Westwoodhoe and Waterbabies and... That is enough, good boy. And Molesworth?

He grinned horribly. What have you read, Molesworth? Gulp, gulp, a rat in a trap. Proust, sir. Come again? Proust, sir. A great writer. The book in question was Swan's Way.

God blithe me. what did you think of it eh the style is exquisite sir and the characterization superb the long evocative passage silence thunder grimes there is no such book impertinent boy i shall have to teach you culture the hard way report for the cane after prayers cheers cheers to think i have learned that all by heart it's not fair they get you every way they get you every way yeah okay so uh something to bear in mind is that they they're actually there's a film uh there's an animated film coming of molesworth and um matt lucas is doing the voice of nigel molesworth and i noticed in the press release for this thing because i haven't finished

it yet they're filming at the moment um that jeffrey willans isn't mentioned anywhere on the press release uh it's very much martin about you know um the director is saying well searle authorized me to to uh make a a movie of his creations and which seems a bit you know off it certainly is in the cell didn't to be fair to sell he didn't really take credit for um no i mean for it is um yeah williams presumably is still in copyright so his estate will have something to say about that i would have thought well let's let's hope we've alerted them today to that. Happy birthday, Backlisted. Martin, why should people read Molesworth now in 2020? Well, just because it's incredibly funny and it's about the universal human condition

where we are struggling with self-deprecating wit and humour against the monstrosity of oppression all around us. I mean, it's as simple as that. That's what it's about. It's actually getting the last laugh because it is incredibly funny. But also, I read it almost 20 years after it was first published

and it was still resonating then and I'm sure it is still resonating now. And so there are generation after generation after generation of people for whom this means something just in the same way as Winnie the Pooh does and all that stuff. In fact, I based my my uh characterization of uh david cameron on basil fotherington thomas uh he was part little lord fauntleroy and part and the first

tory conference he did when he was leader i I had him skipping on stage going, hello trees, hello clouds, while the Tory faithful are thinking, string them up, set it off, string them up, set it off, string them up, set it off. And wondering how this would turn out. He had sort of two kittens next to him. But I just wanted to digress briefly about, I had a sudden moment of insight yesterday, digress briefly about i had a sudden moment of insight yesterday very much with molesworth and fotherington thomas on the mind um about our current prime minister who i assume when this goes out will still be our prime minister boris johnson who obviously likes to think of himself as um a kind of molesworth character he uses right coinages like girly swat and things like that. But I realize he isn't. He isn't.

He is, in fact, Father Innocent Thomas. Because somebody told me where the new book about him, his mother says where he got this whole idea about the world king, that he wanted to be world king to stop the screaming in his head, his father hitting his mother, all the other madnesses inside the head of Boris Johnson. And he got the idea of world king from the Trigyn Empire, the Trigyn Empire possibly, which of course was a science fiction strip

that appeared in the back of Look and Learn. Now for the uninitiated, Look and Learn used to have double page spreads of a nuclear reactor with a double deck of bus for scale and it was solely for girly swats it was only girly swats would read look and learn therefore boris johnson is fotherington thomas an utter wet and a weed and a girly swat QED. Very good. Very good. Lissa, I was going to ask you for another reading, but I think you've got something special you could read.

I have. In 1986, there was a new statesman competition in which you had to write a love letter between poorly matched fictional characters. I'm going to read my winning entry. You have to imagine the spelling dear madam bovary i take my humble pen in hand to express my great regard and invite you to my present dwelling visit custer's cheese cheese surrounded as i am by masters prunes and gerunds your impressive beauty and commander the fruit subjunctive would add a certain junisei koi grammar to my bleak dorm also peas and say to tell you there is a piano on which

you can tinkle extensive grounds to blub in and 300 boys starved of cultural contact your passionate hem hem admirer nigel molesworth-esque p.s could you bring some of your arsenic as fotherington th Thomas is particularly troublesome at the moment? Brilliant. Can I just add one thing about the pictures? It needs to be said. The only time I ever met Quentin Blake when we were doing a thing at the British Library,

and we agreed that at the beginning of Down With School, the St Custard's Camera Club, school dog thinking is the finest English drawing of the 20th century. Oh, yes, yes, absolutely. There it is. His dogs were like nobody else's dogs. They're not cuddly. They're not warm.

They're, what are they they're dogs it's extraordinary it captures the dogginess of the dog anyway that's not me saying that that is um that is quentin blake oh fie lo egad and away for it is the bell and it tolleth for us uh so super thanks to martin and lissa for being top guests and to nikki and her high frequency radio set on a wavelength so high that no beat can hear and Unbound our very own St Custards cheers cheers cheers you can download all 124 previous episodes plus follow links clips and suggestions for further reading by visiting our website backlisted.fm and we're always pleased if you contact us on Twitter and Facebook hemhem and now in sound and pictures on Instagram too.

You can also show your love directly by supporting our Patreon at patreon.com forward slash backlisted. We aim to survive without paid for advertising and your generosity helps us do that. All patrons get to hear backlisted episodes early and for much less than a plate of prunes and rice, they get two extra locklisted a month. The dorm where we chums go for a quiet hour to enjoy a film of Marilyn Monroe, a quiet cig or a plate full of roast turkey. It's ECT, ECT, cheers. Ah, and here are some more of our great lock-listener chums. Yes, Richard Schelling, Michelle Metcalf, Heather Easton, James Cook, Michelle Burke, Featherbooks, Jane Gregg, Heather Hansen, Miles Brown, Andrew Heavens, Jessica Fox Epstein, David Cuthbert, Paul Martin, Sunil Sharma. Marlon Ferugia, Susie at Rams Hill, Kendall Spooner, Justin Hegriberg, Glenn Hubbard, Eric Peterson, Chris Hutchison,

Milan Carroll, Chris Heaney, Tim McElreath, Paul Rocket, Elizabeth Adams, Neil Denham, Stephen Witkowski, Karen Van Rossum, Simon Hemsley. Hemsley, that's good. Hem Hemsley. And we'd also like to say, do you want to give out a birthday message, Mitchinson? Well, I think we should say thank you to everybody over the last five years, all of those people who've contributed to the, what did you say, almost 2 million downloads and listens that we've had. And particularly for all of the patrons, all the people who've supported us over the last year through lockdown and hopefully out the other side.

It's been, yeah, it's become something that Andy and I could never have imagined all those years ago, back when Justin Trudeau, I think, had just been made president of Canada. And yes, Hunger Games was just in the cinemas five years ago. Yes, that was a fiction, wasn't it? The Hunger Games, not in the cinemas five years ago yes that was a fiction wasn't it the Hunger Games

not a very real prospect Obama was still president so thank you thank you and thank you to all our guests over the last five years

yes who've appeared who I would I would emphasise this they choose the books they do so

when you suggest a book which is fine you can do that but actually our guests usually choose the books they do so uh when you suggest a book which is fine you can do that but actually um our guests usually choose the books and we'd especially like to thank our guests today uh martin rosen and uh the original guest uh lissa evans guest number one they'll never take that away from you, Lisa. So thanks very much, everybody. See you next time. You can choose to listen to Backlisted with or without adverts.

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