Viva Brighton Issue #45 November 2016

BOOKS
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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
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