Viva Brighton Issue #45 November 2016

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BOOKS .................................... ....52....
BOOKS .................................... Ladybird Books for Grown-ups Satirical recycling Photo of Jason and Joel by Idil Sukan “I love watching people reading our books in the bookshop, and laughing” says Joel Morris, half of the team responsible for the Ladybird Books for Grown-ups series, down the phone. “It’s the nearest I’ll ever get to performing in front of an audience.” As a day job, Joel (above right) writes comedy for TV with his working partner Jason Hazeley. “It kind of dries up in the summer, so we always write a book together. We really wanted to write a Ladybird book, but we realised that new artwork of the quality expected would, nowadays, be too expensive - they really used to use top-grade artists from the ad agencies. So we thought we’d put modernday captions on top of the old pictures, and that there’d be a lot of humour in that. We realised there was a factory producing reprinted Ladybirds, which offered the means of production.” Ladybird loved the idea, and made the pair official Ladybird writers, giving them access to over 13,000 images from their archive. “Whenever anyone else has done a similar thing on the internet, they have always written new text to an entire book,” he continues. “We decided to create completely new books by using images from many different Ladybirds, and mixing them together.” The resulting books, gently parodying modern life, have titles like The Hipster, The Hangover, The People Next Door and The Ladybird Book of Red Tape. They have been a huge success, a fixture at the top of the best-selling non-fiction lists. One reason for this is the way they have managed to capture the ‘voice’ of Ladybird, and reapply it to modern issues. “It is the voice of certainty,” says Joel. “There are no grey areas. ‘Richard III was a bad king’, that sort of thing. There’s a lot of use of the present tense; it’s all in the here and now.” Another, it must be said, is that they are bloody funny. Ladybird send me a few books to read before my interview with Joel, and I embarrass myself on the train, snorting out loud; I’m particularly tickled by a cat called ‘Ottolenghi’. Joel and Jason have an interesting modus operandi. Each of them works on a different book until they can’t think of anything else to write, then they swap over. “It works for us in comedy writing, and it works just as well with these books.” Each book takes about three weeks to write: they have to source the pictures and research the subject thoroughly before the writing process begins. The books are aimed at people who read the original Ladybirds, which is a surprisingly broad segment of the population: “kids would read the books their parents had when they were kids.” They even work on a foreign audience. “New Yorkers, for example, who’ve never seen an original Ladybird book, still get the joke that these are images for kids’ books and the captions have been changed to suit an adult audience.” Alex Leith Joel and Jason will be talking at the Lewes Speakers Festival, Sat 26th, 5-6.15pm, All Saints Centre. lewesspeakersfestival.com ....53....
Page 2 and 3: 䌀䤀吀夀䈀伀伀䬀匀
Page 5 and 6: CONTENTS ..........................
Page 7 and 8: Christmas at Middle Farm Aromatic E
Page 9 and 10: SHERLOCK STUDIO ...................
Page 11: BITS AND BOBS .....................
Page 14 and 15: ASK THE LEGAL EXPERT How it works a
Page 16 and 17: VALUATION DAY Jewellery and Antique
Page 18 and 19: Searching for the extraordinary? Ou
Page 20 and 21: BITS AND BOBS .....................
Page 22 and 23: 23 New Road Brighton BN1 1UF 01273
Page 25 and 26: BITS AND BOBS .....................
Page 27 and 28: PHOTOGRAPHY .......................
Page 33 and 34: INTERVIEW .........................
Page 35 and 36: COLUMN ............................
Page 37 and 38: COLUMN ............................
Page 39 and 40: COLUMN ............................
Page 41 and 42: LOCAL MUSICIANS ...................
Page 43 and 44: JAZZ ..............................
Page 45 and 46: TALK ..............................
Page 47 and 48: MUSIC .............................
Page 49 and 50: WITCHCRAFT ........................
Page 51: MUSIC .............................
Page 55 and 56: BOOKS .............................
Page 57: ART ...............................
Page 60 and 61: 伀爀椀最椀渀愀氀愀
Page 63 and 64: ART & ABOUT .......................
Page 65 and 66: DESIGN ............................
Page 67 and 68: LOCAL MAKER .......................
Page 69 and 70: WE TRY... .........................
Page 71 and 72: THE WAY WE WORK This month, Adam Br
Page 73 and 74: THE WAY WE WORK Mahbub Alam, Hi Lif
Page 75 and 76: THE WAY WE WORK Milu Islam, Smart L
Page 77 and 78: Food & Drink directory ADVERTORIAL
Page 79 and 80: FOOD REVIEW .......................
Page 81 and 82: RECIPE ............................
Page 83 and 84: FOOD ..............................
Page 85 and 86: COFFEE ............................
Page 87 and 88: TRADE SECRETS .....................
Page 89 and 90: MY SPACE ..........................
Page 91 and 92: HEALTH ............................
Page 93 and 94: HISTORY ...........................
Page 95 and 96: BRICKS AND MORTAR .................
Page 97 and 98: MINDFULNESS IN BUSINESS ...........
Page 99: Providing hospice care for local ch

Viva Brighton Issue #45 November 2016

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