IF PARENTAL HEARTS are sinking at the thought of Christmas, just think how much worse it would be if you had Horrid Henry for a son.

“He’s much more anarchic than William Brown,” laughs Francesca Simon, his creator, talking of the boy who has become a phenomenon of children’s publishing. Since he first appeared a decade ago, more than 5.5 million Horrid Henry books have been sold in the UK. Now the 15 books are to be televised as 52 animated, 11-minute episodes. “He’s the kind of person a child wants to be,” says Simon, 51, “not sit next to in class.”

Anxiety over children’s behaviour haunts modern consciousness, but Simon thinks that “childhood has always been in crisis. Henry is boiling over with things he wants. The TV animation has kept the ferocity of that. Children have always asked me when it was going to be on TV; I think that seeing a child’s anxieties and wants dramatised as comedy is cathartic.”

Educated at Yale, then Oxford (where she read Old and Middle English and acquired her taste for alliteration), her work is steeped in Greek mythology: she points out that many Greek writers complained about children’s behaviour in their time, too.

Simon grew up in Los Angeles, where her father, Mayo, was an Academy Award- winning writer. Every new house in the wealthy Hollywood enclave where they lived would be broken into and trashed within weeks by children whose millionaire parents would just write large cheques to avoid trouble; by comparison with that, she thinks her creation is mild.

“Henry isn't actually wicked — what you get is his fantasy of turning into a man-eating crocodile or a king or a dragon in order to eat his brother. There’s an illusion of bad behaviour, together with some things children would like to do but don’t dare.”

Horrid Henry has been translated into 23 languages, but one country steadfastly refuses to publish the stories: the United States. “It’s a great shame,” the author says. “The stories are a way of channelling negative feelings. They are emotionally truthful, but not advising a child to actually cut off their sibling’s head.”

The eldest of four children, Simon longed to have her parents to herself — just like her hero, Henry, who falls from grace as soon as his brother Perfect Peter is born. Innocent, obedient and obnoxiously virtuous, Peter is Henry’s foil in every way.

“Henry, of course, is the imp inside everyone. We all have aspects of Horrid Henry and Perfect Peter — the desire to be good, the longing to rebel — and sometimes it’s great to let the imp out,” Simon says. “I think the books provide a safe way of enacting intense emotions without the guilt. Adults love stories about transgressors, the thrill of forbidden acts like adultery and murder, and children are no different.”

Written in simple language and superbly illustrated by Tony Ross, the stories are achingly funny and surprisingly sophisticated.

Dragged away from TV and computer games, taken off on boring holiday hikes and school trips, forced to enter races and spelling competitions, Henry does always do what he’s told — but he answers back, and tells people in thank-you letters: “Next time, just send money.” He can be relied on to destroy the best-laid plans of adults — switching labels on Christmas presents and wreaking revenge on dinner-ladies, nit nurses and babysitters — not to mention of his family and schoolmates.

“Comedy is always about people trapped together, without choice, and what is a family but that?” his author says.

Simon has exactly the squiggly brown hair, bright dark eyes and infectious laugh that you might expect of the creator of one of the great subversive figures of childhood. But her home in North London, by contrast with the alternative world of rude rebellion she has penned, is a model of modernist order, with a placid little Tibetan spaniel, a gentle intellectual husband and a delightful teenage son.

But, be warned: the audiobooks, read with manic gusto by her friend Miranda Richardson, are so funny that my husband once crashed our car because we were all laughing so hard. Being able to share the secret life of this dreadful child is one of the great bonding experiences of modern family life. If you want to survive the festive season, Horrid Henry could be your salvation.

Horrid Henry’s Christmas Cracker is published by Orion (£4.99; offer, £4.74) on October 6. The ITV series will be broadcast from October 31

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