They will most likely be the three double-instalment episodes from Hergé’s middle period: the pirate/submarine yarn The Secret of the Unicorn and its sequel, Red Rackham’s Treasure (1943-44); the Inca diptych The Seven Crystal Balls and Prisoners of the Sun (1948-49); and the postwar Destination Moon/Explorers on the Moon (1953-54), in which the pesky Walloon hack reaches the lunar surface two decades ahead of Neil Armstrong, albeit in what looks alarmingly like a V-2 rocket. The individual adventures elsewhere “are a bit slender”, Farr explains. More important, he says, “you pretty much have the entire cast of characters by then. If you do anything before 1940, you don’t have Captain Haddock”.

Spielberg and Jackson have yet to sort out which ones they will work on, but already the casting speculation has been rebooted. Rupert Grint is the latest to be mooted as Tintin. But one insider warns: “There’ll be a few surprises. It may not even be a male actor.” Gwyneth Paltrow is one name that has recurred, with Tom Hanks a good bet to play Haddock.

But you can’t win them all. The day of the announcement, a blogger remarked: “Tintin is just some camp ginger kid poking his nose where it shouldn’t be.” Tintin in Hollywood

So Steven Spielberg is going to make three Tintin movies. What took him so long? I’m well qualified to write about Tintin, because he’s my hero. He came to my rescue. I’m well qualified, too, to write about teenage boys who are reluctant to read, because I was one such boy. I remember only too well the horrors of being given “proper books” to read, both at home and at school; books that were often dauntingly thick, and so closely printed that the whole experience of beginning one filled me with dread.

I should have been an avid reader. Everyone around me wanted me to be, and that was part of the problem. My childhood home groaned with books, every wall lined with them. My mother read to me in bed when I was little. She made words sound like music, and I loved them. Then, from the day I went to school, the music began to die. Words were to be learnt by heart, spelt, written neatly. Reading, I was told, was good for me, like cod liver oil. I read Enid Blyton because the stories raced along, the print was big and they were mostly about boys. I read Just William because he made me giggle. That was the limit of my literary intake, and both were frowned upon.

Comics were frowned upon too, and some were banned. I read Eagle, The Beano and The Dandy. There were few words, fast-moving stories and lots of pictures. There was one great book I did read, and love: Treasure Island, an illustrated edition. I was Jim Hawkins, on the deck of the Hispaniola. It had cutthroats and treasure, and not a girl in sight to spoil things. Great. What saved my bacon, though, with parents and teachers alike, was Classics Illustrated, a series of the great classics, graphically told. Not only did I enjoy them hugely, I could answer questions on them: A Tale of Two Cities, Crime and Punishment, Moby Dick, Lorna Doone and a couple of dozen others. And rattling good stories they were.

Then, aged about 12, I discovered Tintin and was hooked. Snowy barked like no other dog: “Whooah! Whooah!” But he could “talk” too. And there were two bungling detectives in bowler hats, and the irascible Captain Haddock – what a cast of crazies. Heroic Tintin looked like a boy (like me, sort of), but did all his derring-do in a man’s world. And he always triumphed. He travelled the world, implausibly, impossibly (but who cares?) – to Tibet (my favourite Yeti story, and the reason I wrote my own 40 years later, King of the Cloud Forest); to Egypt, in Cigars of the Pharaoh; to the moon, to America, Africa, Soviet Russia; to islands. There was almost always treasure, bodies, mad professors, pirates. Whenever I discovered a new Tintin book, nobody ever had to tell me to read it. I read it from cover to cover, utterly fascinated, totally involved, loving every moment of it, lost as much in the pictures as in the dialogue.

I was an Asterix nutter, too. I loved the wordplay, the wacky slapstick of the humour. But I loved the stories as well. That was both my problem and my joy: words in large numbers still alarmed me, inhibited me, but stories excited me, set me free, made me laugh or cry, or both. I couldn’t get enough of them.

Later on, as a teacher, I rediscovered the power of the music of words. For half an hour every afternoon, I’d read a story to my class. I tried to read as my mother had, meaning every word. I wanted them to believe the story, to feel it, to live it. When I ran out of good books to read, I began to make up my own stories and told them with a passion. There is no more rewarding sound than the silence of 35 children hooked into a story, hanging on every word. Soon I was writing down my stories, and, since I was enjoying it so much, I encouraged them to do the same. In their reading and writing, and in mine, too, we were embarking on our “pursuit of hopefulness”, as the great French writer Jean Giono put it, a pursuit in which Tintin had played a very important part.

So I became a reader long after my teenage years were over. I know now that this does not matter. We come to reading when we come to it. It cannot be hurried or forced, but it can and must be encouraged.

The education secretary and the School Library Association recently produced a list of almost 170 recommended titles for teenage boys. We’ll all have our views of what should be in it, and what shouldn’t. Tintin isn’t there. “Blistering barnacles!”, as Captain Haddock would say. Maybe the stereotyping is too much to swallow these days. Japanese manga comic books are there, and other graphic books. But no poetry, apart from Benjamin Zephaniah – where are Roger McGough and Michael Rosen?

The great thing, though, is that Alan Johnson and the SLA have addressed a serious difficulty: the fact that so many boys become alienated from books at this age. The list is not there to dictate but to encourage. Parents and teachers and children can cherry-pick. But a list is not enough. Giving books is not enough, either. In a society where fame, fortune and football are so exalted, we can hardly be surprised that so many teenage boys (and girls) become alienated from literature. Gordon Brown, we know, is passionate about reading. He will want to encourage young people towards a love of books because he knows reading for enjoyment is the surest high road to knowledge and understanding.

But what can we do about it? Parents need to read to their children, as my mother did, to sow the seed, to inculcate in them an earlyfasci-nation with stories and poems. Primary teachers need to use books, not simply as educational tools to achieve specific outcomes, but to enjoy them with their children. They need well-stocked libraries to do it. The best teachers will love books for themselves and want to pass this on. As Alan Bennett says in The History Boys, it is all about “passing it on”. Children, particularly teenagers, must not feel there are any oughts or ought-nots. The French writer Daniel Pennac has produced a list of readers’ rights. Among them you will find: The right to read anything. The right not to defend your tastes. The right not to read. Tintin came to my rescue when I needed him. Like Jim Hawkins, he’s my hero, and like me, or part of me, he’s Belgian. Just don’t remind the French of that, that’s all.

© Michael Morpurgo 2007 A stage version of Michael Morpurgo’s Billy the Kid is now at the Unicorn, SE1

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