It is a rainy day in Paris and I am taking shelter in the entrance to a
church. Suddenly, as if by magic, David McKee appears and invites me into a
world of dragons and elephants, clowns, kings and Magritte lookalikes that
millions will identify immediately as belonging to their childhoods.
Dressed in my suit, I look much more like Mr Benn, McKee’s most famous
creation, than McKee looks like Mr Benn’s friend, the little man in the fez
who owns the fancy-dress shop from which his adventures always began. In its
changing room, Mr Benn might slip into a suit of armour and, exiting through
a back door, find himself in an adventure with a friendly dragon. Or he
might dress up as a clown and join a circus. In a book that predated the
television series, he once climbed into a prison uniform and found himself
inside Dartmoor. The BBC did not want to make that one.
There were, in fact, just the 13 Mr Benn episodes on television but
the BBC showed them for three decades from 1971 until six years ago, so a
generation got to know them amazingly well. “That is a mistake they make
today,” says McKee, who is a young, long-haired 73, dressed today in a grey
jacket sporting a lapel badge of his second most celebrated creation, Elmer,
the patchwork elephant. “The lack of repetition, I mean. As any parent
knows, if you ask a child which book they want to read, it is the same book
night after night. That’s what forms their security. They know what’s
coming, and they enjoy knowing what’s coming.”
We are talking in a rather nice restaurant near Les Deux Magots, a long way in
miles and spirit from the author’s childhood home in wartime Tavistock and,
indeed, from 52 Festing Road in Putney where he wrote the first Mr Benn
books (and which became Mr Benn’s home, 52 Festive Road). The programmes
were made over a year in animator Bert Walker’s garden shed in Kew, their
music written by Duncan Lamont, whom McKee knew as another dad at the school
gates. McKee wrote the stories and illustrated them in ink and wash. The
animation was “limited”: characters’ legs moved; their bodies did not – but
that gave viewers more time to admire the detail. McKee cites the Fauvists
and Brueghel as influences on his lush, detailed style, and, for the simply
drawn hero, Magritte’s bowler-crowned everymen. In art, everyone steals.
This is why he made no fuss when the Homepride flour men came along in their
bowlers.
The storytelling was slow, “a human pace”, says McKee, who walked out of the
movie Ratatouille because the animation was so fast he got lost.
There was never any violence, not even slapstick. The only time Mr Benn
fired a gun was in his western adventure and that was to alert a dozy
sheriff. Unlike Doctor Who, that other visitor to other times and places, Mr
Benn did not intervene directly but suggested ways people might behave
better. In the second adventure on today’s Times DVD, for
example, he encouraged a big-game hunter to shoot animals with his camera
not a gun.
Christlike, I say. “Oh, I think that’s a bit strong. Luvvy don’t work no
miracles,” McKee replies, guying his own West Country accent. “He is more
like Jiminy Cricket: always let your conscience be your guide.”
For some, I add, Mr Benn’s was not so much time-travelling as tripping.
“I can see that. People say it was the Sixties and everyone was on something,
even Mr Benn. But for me it was more the idea of escapism.”
From Mr Benn’s boring life, I suggest, wondering if he was unhappily married
and what dull job he held down on the days he was not in the fancy-dress
shop.
“But even if life isn’t boring you sometimes need to escape from it. As a
child I always hated it if you read a fabulous adventure and then it said,
‘They woke up and it was all a dream.’ So I wanted it to be so real that he
even brought back a souvenir.” So Mr Benn brings back a box of matches from
the dragon adventure and a photograph from his safari. No hallucinogenics,
then.
The films’ few frames announce a standard of execution and morality typical of
a golden age of children’s television. Although he worked for the BBC, McKee
deplores ITV1’s decision to abandon its own children’s hour. “They are very
shortsighted. Children are an audience but also your audience in the future.
Children’s television in Britain used to have a tremendous reputation for
quality. I used to say they won’t like that because if children get used to
good television they won’t accept bad television when they grow up.”
But what of the politics of Mr Benn? In his first adventure, The Red
Knight, Mr Benn takes on a rapacious matchmaker who has put a dragon out
of work and is charging the local population outrageous prices. McKee denies
Mr Benn’s first name was Tony. He was named before he even knew who Anthony
Wedgwood Benn was. His 2004 picture book, The Conquerors, is an
unashamed satire on the invasion of Iraq but generally the story comes to
him first, often in the bath, and what it means dawns only afterwards.
“It was only recently that I realised I was political. I just knew I was
moral. And I never really considered I wrote for children. I just do picture
books. But I do like having a dual audience; the child and child’s parent or
teacher who is reading to them. I have always said I enjoy writing for the
adult the child will be, and the child the adult still is.”
If there is a political subtext to Mr Bennit is simple: Sixties
antimaterialism. McKee was brought up by an unwell mother and his father,
who sold farming equipment. They lived in a tithed house and when his father
lost his job in his fifties his son, by now a cartoonist on Punchand
the TES, had to buy them a home because the housing market had
risen beyond their savings. His father died of heart disease aged 66. “He
was the best guy I ever knew but the house business brought a lot of
stress.”
McKee still lives in London, although in West Kensington not Festive Road. He
also has homes in Nice and here in Paris, shared with his partner of the
past ten years, a French-Algerian art-dealer called Bakhta. He does not,
however, own a computer and could not tell you his mobile phone number. If
he has anyone to thank for his relatively modest financial success it is not
Mr Benn but Elmer the Elephant, who comes trailing a long list of
merchandising from key rings to spectacle cases. Another book, Not Now
Bernard, was put on the national curriculum. But he is no more likely to
pick a favourite among the “children” he brought to life on his easel than
among his three actual children from an early marriage that ended in
divorce.
“But Mr Benn is very much alive,” he tells me, extracting a page of notes from
his case just before his soufflé arrives. There was a new story, Mr
Benn, Gladiator, in 2001. A few years ago a DVD of the series sold
60,000 copies. Now more TV is to follow. In the Seventies Mr Benn had
another life in a comic. The pictures have been recovered but not the text,
so McKee is now busy writing new stories for them so they can be made into
three-minute films. They may end up on television, the net or your mobile
phone. Meanwhile, the BBC is developing the idea of a live-action Mr
Benn series, although McKee will not be involved in the casting.
“Characters are like children. You bring them up but at some time you must
let them go and live their own lives.”
It is time I went back to live my own life by stepping into the Eurostar. But
before I go Mr McKee gives me – and you – a souvenir. You are probably
holding it in your hands. It is the lovely cover he has drawn for this
week’s Knowledge.
If your Mr Benn DVD is missing from The Times, call 020-7860 1132 or e-mail
custserv@timesonline.co.uk
