1982: ROALD DAHL's writing shed | Pebble Mill | Classic Celebrity Interview | BBC Archive

the man who lives in this house makes very good orange marmalade he also breeds orchids he has never eaten a dish of tripe in his life and he wishes that his dog could speak to him and that eccentric sequence of autobiographical irrelevancies may even give you a clue as to who he is he's rolled down of norwegian and welsh origins and by now probably the most widely read author of children's books in the entire world titles like charlie and the chocolate factory james and the giant peach danny the champion of the wild and most recently the bfg the big friendly giant they're the sort of books that have brought him such a worldwide readership that he's reputed to spend 200 pounds a month on postage alone just answering the letters from his young readers all right hilary what do we got this morning well we have an enormous book here from a school in norfolk and a lot of pictures and letters as well that's super isn't it dahl's books for children have made him immensely famous and rich a children's bestseller goes on selling and on and on and he's had several it's his mixture of the quirky the bizarre and sometimes downright shocking that children love hello gorgeous anita and all the brilliant children who sent me such lovely pictures and letters and they adore the way he takes their side in his books and that hairs out of the way he stirs them deliciously close to the wickedly unconventional and rude all right hillary uh we've done the letters here's a bit more manuscript for you adult reader has no role down from his collections of short stories many of which formed the hugely successful television series tales of the unexpected roald dahl is 66 now 40 years a writer and his first publication was something of a patriotic effort oh that was in the war after i finished my raf flying and i was sent to washington i was sitting in the british embassy and in a little man poked his head round the door with thick glasses and said may i come in and i thought he was looking for a job and he said my name is c.s forrester oh indeed and i thought no come on rubbish he's one of my heroes he said honestly it is and and he came in and and he said i've been asked to do a piece about uh some um action in the war and you've just come out the raf and you were shot down and all that and the americans weren't in the war then and we were trying to do a lot of british propaganda he said come out to lunch with me and tell tell me the most exciting thing that happened to you and um i'll write it and it'll be published in the that evening post and it'll be very good for britain so we went to lunch and then uh we were eating a roast duck and and uh forester was trying to take notes and eat the duck at the same time and he and he couldn't and i could see he couldn't and he was and i said look would you like me to jot this down for you this evening and i'll send it off and you can put it right and he said oh that would be marvelous and so i did and i sent it off and a week later later i got a letter back from him with a check for a thousand dollars saying i haven't touched the word it was wonderful and they want more that's how i started i spent the ensuing 20 years or 25 just writing short stories for adults nothing else and then i began to have my own children and tell them stories in bed the usual thing you know and i i probably ran out of a plot for a short story and i and i was telling one to my small children in bed and and it was one they seemed to rather like about a peach that got bigger and bigger as it grew on the tree and i thought well by golly why don't i have a goat writing this myself nothing else to do so i sat down and had to go i enjoyed it enormously i found myself loving doing it you know and that became james and the giant piece yes in 1953 roald dahl married the hollywood actress patricia neal they had five children and cruel misfortune patricia suffered three dreadful strokes dahl spent years of his life restoring her to full health one of their children olivia died of measles when she was seven dahl himself has had several operations on his hips and spine but through all this adversity he has remained sufficiently disciplined to spend four hours each day in his writing hut at the top of the garden i couldn't possibly work in the house especially when there used to be a lot of children around and even when there aren't children there are vacuum cleaners and people bustling about now i always write in this little hut i always have it is absolutely quiet up here it may not be uh pretty or tidy and it certainly hasn't been cleaned and the floor hasn't been swept for five years at least so it's full of everything the only thing i i i did uh remove about two years ago uh we had a goat that got in and there was some goat droppings on the floor and i thought well i better get a dustpan and sweep those up and i did i've taken a great deal of trouble with the actual chair i sit in and the place i put my feet which is tied to the legs of the chair so i don't shove it away when i press my feet against it also in the winter i get into a sleeping bag and that's right up to my chest keep the feet warm the legs warm and i always use six pencils and they always have to be sharpened before i start finally you get settled you get into a sort of nest get really comfortable and then you're away the pencil doesn't very often touch the paper it's looking and musing and correcting and then then you do a little writing and in the end you get something done but your concentration is fairly intense you're lost you're into this world of the story that you happen to be doing it's terrifically demanding you know what do i write four four and a half hours a day so a quarter of my waking hours i am completely immersed in a dotty world of fantasy and you come out you know in a kind of mooney state to my mind i don't identities any question that to write a children's book of comparable quality to a fine adult novel or story is more difficult it's much more difficult to achieve the children's book now why is that goodness knows do you have to put yourself in their minds or is that the wrong way yes you do you see when you're when you're old enough to to to uh and experienced enough to to be a competent writer and you're ready to write a book for children because a young person can't do it it shall come by then you're usually you become pompous and and uh adult grown up and and and you've lost all your jokiness you don't have any any any and and so unless you are a kind of undeveloped uh adult and you still have an enormous amount of childishness in you and you giggle at funny stories and jokes and things i don't think you can do it another things one hears about writing for children and i'd love to know whether it's a myth or not is that children are very severe critics well i think they take the the books far more seriously than adults if you read a novel a good goodish novel you read it you enjoy it you put it down and that's it then you go look for the next one uh if a children if a child picks up a book and likes it uh that's not the end of it you know it's at least it's read at least four or five and sometimes 15 times and each time it's got to stand up to that sooner or later some of them finish by knowing them by heart a rural vantage point in a small home counties village hasn't restricted dahl's vision his wide ranging interests from the domestic to the romantic contribute hugely to the pleasure of reading his books his stories are like his life full of offbeat bits of color and knowledge he's about as near as you'll find to a 20th century renaissance man [Music] and inside that hand there's a controlled kaleidoscope of riotous imagination immense literary skill and most important of all to him the sheer enjoyment of living i love pictures and i've always collected pictures even when i couldn't afford to buy them and now i have some good ones lovely ones i love wine and have several thousand bottles in the cellar i love furniture especially 18th century english furniture i love cultivating plants especially orchids a lot of things you know i think nearly everyone every say semi and semi-intelligent person likes those sort of things [Music] we have a good snooker table in the house and we play three times a week and that's played with my local friends sunday's a long session i mean we start at 6 30 four of us and we finish about 11 and someone brings in some sausages in the middle uh that's lovely it is so difficult to play you see and and what infuriates all of us and i think especially me is it it's one thing that you cannot get really good at however hard you try unless you are supremely gifted you're very successful why do you still write you don't need to presumably work anymore no i love it i love it yes i i don't know what i do without having something to work and worry about uh all day you've been telling the children who write you that you're now 66 you're getting old and you're feeling old and if i may say so you're not looking older you're going to go on forever no i feel very ancient when eventually you do finally have to give up or want to give up whichever comes first when when i die when you die yeah is there any particular way in which you want to have been remembered say by a child who turns into an adult uh well [Music] you can quote oscar wilde and say when i am gone i hope it will be said my sins were scarlet but my books were red you

Channel: BBC Archive

Views: 178,821

Keywords: bbc, archive bbc, classic tv, british tv nostalgia, bbc archive, archive, the bbc archive, nostalgia, legendary television, retro tv, vintage, roald dahl, roald dahl shed, roald dahl interview on writing, children's literature, roald dahl bbc, roald dahl pebble mill, james and the giant peach, tales of the unexpected, roald dahl writing hut, roald dahl writing process, great authors, how to write a book, creative writing, Pebble Mill, Frank Delaney, classic interviews

Id: AsxTR09_iWE

Length: 12min 47sec (767 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 12 2022