Walliams the WICKED storyteller!

His riotously funny books make millions of children squeal with delight — and tomorrow we’re giving away a FREE David Walliams audio book. Here, another top children’s author hails the genius of the biggest seller since Harry Potter

My children are banned from reading books by david Walliams — that’s a common cry from the parents of young children i meet. in my day it was enid Blyton, while for some of my daughters’ friends it was roald dahl who was forbidden.

When i was a child, Blyton did not pass the parental censor mainly for linguistic reasons. her style is thin and bland, her vocabulary dull. She wrote easily to be read easily — nothing must get in the way of the story, which is usually an adventure featuring a secret or a mystery.

The language may have been objectionable, but there was nothing unacceptable in the Fifties about the characters. Blyton children are confident, well-spoken and middle class, though they do employ dreaded slang occasionally.

They have neither psychological depth nor subtlety, they are naughty but never wicked, enjoy adult-free larks but are never seriously at odds with either their parents or teachers, who in turn may be stern and unfair but are never disgusting or abusive.

My parents vaguely believed that books should be ‘improving’ and challenging. i was supposed to be reading classics — The Wind in The Willows, Treasure island, dreary old heidi (written in 1880 and set in the Swiss Alps) — not Five Go To Smuggler’s Top.

roald dahl was frowned on by the parents of children in my daughter’s class at school for being vulgar, puerile or grubby. every generation of children has a writer they adore and their parents would like to ban. That wonderful accolade might now go to the best-selling children’s author of today — david Walliams.

don’t take my word for it. Simply buy a copy of tomorrow’s daily Mail to redeem a free Walliams audio book from your local Tesco and find out how brilliant he is for yourself.

listen to Walliams read three of his stories and you’ll understand how he managed to knock J.r.r. Tolkien’s lord Of The rings and The hobbit out of the top 20 most popular children’s books for the first time since the charts began.

As christmas looms, four of his books are in the top 20, with this month’s bestseller The ice Monster, in which a Victorian orphan meets a mammoth, at number one. What would my parents have made of entire pages, sometimes two or even three pages, of Walliams’s books ratburger or Awful Auntie, which repeat exclamations like ‘AAAGH’ and ‘GAAAH’ and ‘EEEK’ in capital letters over and over again?

That is what children’s comics do, they would say, and nothing in print sinks lower than that. So as an experiment, i gave a couple of Walliams’s books to nine-yearold daisy, the daughter of friends who believe that any book read eagerly by a child is a good book.

‘daisy has just finished reading all 316 pages of ratburger in under 48 hours and is now 26 pages into the next,’ came the report. ‘no wonder she doesn’t want to get up in the morning. i think she’s reading late into the night under her duvet.’

What more could a children’s writer want? indeed, i would argue that Walliams, who made his name in a series of crossdressing turns on the BBC

comedy series Little Britain before improbably — but brilliantly — turning his hand to children’s books, is a worthy successor to Roald Dahl.

In 2014, Awful Auntie came top of the official UK Best-Selling Books chart for a record-breaking six weeks in a row. No other book has had a longer run since the hardback of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix in 2003.

Last year, David Walliams was Britain’s bestselling children’s author for more than 100 weeks in a row.

Children devour Walliams’s books. They inhabit the worlds he creates, which are a tease on the everyday world they inhabit.

They laugh while reading Walliams, gasp, read faster, snort, chortle, hold their breath, roll on the floor laughing. Such enthusiasm should win over the

disapprovers, but doesn’t always. Walliams, like Dahl before him, is always on the side of the child.

Indeed, he is one of them. He knows what kids love and hate, what disgusts them, what makes them snigger and roll their eyes. He understands totally why bodily parts and functions are fascinating and hilarious, why eight-year-old boys crack up when someone says ‘it’s in the bottom drawer’. All of this is rude and hysterically, unfailingly funny to anyone aged between seven and 11.

Children are powerless creatures, their lives ruled by adults and adults’ timetables, yet in these stories adults are not only cross and sour-faced but often unutterably wicked and vile. They always, however, get their comeuppance. The kids outwit them and triumph. Good conquers.

As well as being an anarchic writer, David Walliams is a very moral one.

Mr Stink is a touching story about a smelly tramp who is given shelter in a garden shed by a little girl who discovers and feels very sorry for him.

Ratburger features a truly appalling stepmother — the latest in the long line of fictional bad ones — who is lazy, feckless, shiftless and occasionally downright cruel. The just deserts she gets are too awful to describe — there’s a clue in the title, but children happily take dreadful events on board. Why else would Hansel And Gretel and other gruesome fairy stories have been so popular for centuries?

To get into their minds properly the writer must, somewhere at the core of his being, be still a child himself.

Roald Dahl never really grew up, David Walliams certainly hasn’t done so yet — and by now it’s probably too late.

His transformation from television comic actor to worldwide top-selling children’s author happened seemingly overnight, but his rise is not altogether surprising. He was a successful scriptwriter for children’s television programmes before concentrating on acting and scriptwriting for adults.

Once he had written his first story, The Boy In The Dress, in 2008, which demonstrated immediately his instinctive understanding of children who are misfits as well as of the healing power of loving friendship, there was no stopping him.

His anarchic vein of daft humour combines perfectly with his warmheartedness, as well as with his scorn and loathing for the things, major and minor, perpetrated by adults on children.

Yet his books are never preachy. If there is moral medicine, it is always diluted with humour. Children respond to it because they see the sense as well as the inherent rightness.

The pairing of the doyen of children’s illustrators, Quentin Blake, with Walliams on the latter’s first three books emphasised the importance of his links with the similarly child-centred, anarchic worlds of Roald Dahl.

The two are kindred spirits, yet Walliams is no pale imitator.

Dahl is also an inherently moral writer, always on the side of the child, but Walliams’s warmth and kindness are more prominent.

His delightful Billionaire Boy, published in 2010, pleases all those who know in their hearts that loads of money may buy any object — even an orang-utan as a child’s personal butler — but can’t buy true happiness.

Roald Dahl knew that, too. He also knew that children themselves can be greedy, materialistic little beasts.

YeT there is a welcome and delightful whisper of sentimentality in David Walliams that is missing from Dahl. Why do some parents disapprove of both authors? Is it because they are afraid? Afraid of writers who side with children and encourage their lawless, wayward side, afraid they will pick up slang and bad grammar that may prevent them from getting on in the world?

Attitudes have become more relaxed over the years, but rude words and a childish obsession with bums and burps are still frowned upon by parents.

Most of these parents will not have read David Walliams’s books, of course, any more than mine read enid Blyton. But that doesn’t stop them disapproving — maybe because they guess that, in fiction at least, children conquer all and stupid, harsh or ridiculous adults always come a cropper.

It is a release and a relief, as well as fun and an uproarious delight, to read books like Awful Auntie, in which a horrible relative and her evil owl are pitted against an orphan. As you would expect, David Walliams’s jokes are ace, and adults are missing out if they never read him.

I would encourage all grownups to plunge into the world of Walliams — except that I suspect

might prefer the kids to have it all to themselves.