Ladybird The BOOKOF... sellinga million
How to make an instant bestseller: take an old children’s educational format, add a sprinkling of grown-up humour with a sigh of worldweariness and voila! Sales of 1.5 million. Sarah Oliver meets the geniuses behind...
They have sold 1.5 million books in four months, making them the biggest adult authors of 2016, and at one point held eight of the Top 10 nonfiction slots in Britain – but you’ve probably never heard of Joel Morris and Jason Hazeley. Their genius idea was to pastiche the Ladybird books of the Sixties and Seventies, which used simple language and illustrations to explain the world to children.
But instead of railways, pirates or space travel, they’ve made comedy gold from grown-up subjects such as The Hangover, Dating, The Shed, The Hipster and The Midlife Crisis – all with Ladybird artwork.
You may not have heard of Morris and Hazeley, but if you’ve watched Charlie Brooker, Mitchell and Webb, Miranda, David Walliams or Alan Carr then you’re familiar with their work. Ditto if you saw Paddington or read The World According To Gogglebox or Brendan O’Carroll’s Mrs Brown’s Family Handbook, which they ghosted as jobbing writers.
And they haven’t coarsened the Ladybird brand with swearing, sex or toilet humour – they are far too fond of it. ‘We are embedded in that world,’ says Morris.
‘The suburban lives of the Peter and Jane books. The families in them are the ones we grew up in; we were those kids cycling along the middle of the road on a Seventies estate after school, a Dalek and a Basil Brush at home.’
The idea sprang from a casual conversation last March.
‘We were chatting one afternoon discussing who we’d most like to be published by and agreed it was Ladybird,’ says Morris.
‘The Hipster came first. Ladybird said, “Yes, and make it a series,” and handed us the keys to their archive of 11,000 drawings. I felt like JJ Abrams must have when he was given Star Wars – the chance to re-work something special from your own childhood.’
It proved an extraordinary comic resource. ‘You’d never have thought there’d be a Ladybird image of a family in a postapocalyptic landscape,’ says Morris. ‘But there is!’
The characters in their books are often drawn from people they know. Edge Of Tomorrow and
Game Of Thrones star Tony Way, a friend, is the hungover chap desperately counting his loose change to pay for a full English breakfast.
The fortysomething whose midlife crisis features a noisy motorbike is a tribute to Morris’s brother-in-law who died recently from cancer. The bike was on his bucket list. The mildly interfering mum who nags her adult son about wearing a warm scarf is a nod to their own mothers.
Hazeley even wrote himself into the midlife crisis book – he’s the man riven by angst when he spots a tub of boat varnish in B&Q and realises he won’t ever own a boat even though he’s never wanted one anyway. ‘That was me one Saturday morning,’ he says. Then adds: ‘Though there’s something reassuring about having your choices narrowed by time,’ which makes the pair start to reminisce about turning 30, listing all the things they were thrilled to be too old to do. Interrailing comes top.
Morris is 45, married with a son of six. Hazeley, 44, lives with his girlfriend and their daughter, 10, and son, seven. Their homes are on opposite sides of London and the two meet by Thames-side pubs and cafés to write.
Says Hazeley: ‘Comedy writing has one of two dynamics. You’ve either got one person working hard and the other sitting at the back puffing on a pipe, or pace and swap, where one person types while the other one paces and then they change places. That’s how we work. We can tell the difference between our writing but other people can’t. We’re an equal partnership.’
Their lives haven’t changed much, mainly as they’ve yet to receive a penny: their first royalty cheque is due in April. (Morris flushes behind his pint as he tells me this.) Instead they have calibrated their success in other ways, notably when they got an email in capitals from Jeremy
Paxman that read: I LOVE YOUR LADYBIRD BOOKS.
Morris says: ‘We write a book every summer when the big TV names head off to various festivals – we have to feed our families, buy shoes for the children. We thought these would do okay, we’d sell 50,000. When they came from the printer I said, “Done!” But now they’re going into translation in Estonia, Poland, France and the US. It feels unreal.’ For Hazeley, success came when he saw a picture of Ladybirds For Grown-Ups stacked at a supermarket checkout.
Ten more titles are expected to follow this year, likely to include
How It Works: The Cat and How It Works: The Dog, Office Politics,
The Ex, Student Life and Zombie Apocalypse.
There might even be one about diva-ish behaviour inspired by Elton John. And after that? ‘Well,’ says Hazeley, ‘we are not going to be giving up our day jobs.’
The pair are great friends as well as writing partners and grew up together in Chelmsford, Essex. Morris says: ‘We were the worst at sport in the sixth form and were banished from the playing fields to the computer room – something which sounds as old-fashioned as a scriptorium now – to type up the school newsletter. We made one with spoof ‘O’ levels and the Peanuts cartoon as drawn by Picasso, which was passed around under desks.’
They’ve been hard at comedy ever since, supporting themselves in the early years selling advertising and playing keyboards (Hazeley) and working in a bookshop (Morris). They sold their first sketch to the BBC in 1990, but it was the success of The Framley Examiner, an online parody of local papers (it netted them two book deals within a fortnight of launch in 2001) that gave them their big break.
‘If you give me the means to make something like a school newsletter or a local newspaper, I will put nonsense into the machine and see what kind of sausages come out the other end,’ says Morris. ‘I love it, always have.’ It’s effectively what they’ve done to Ladybird’s venerable production line.
They were both devotees of the originals as children and now read them to their families. Morris always collected vintage copies of the books and Hazeley blew up a Ladybird picture of a house, with the word ‘House’ under it, to hang in his first proper home.
‘It was how I learned to read,’ he says. Their affection and respect for the brand shine through the re-boot, which is pulling in the kind of sales figures the publishing industry expects for a celebrity cookbook, not a 56-pager in the Humour category.
They remain modest. ‘Most of what we have in print,’ reflects Hazeley, ‘are the kinds of books in people’s toilets.’ Morris chortles and they raise their glasses to their own good fortune, deftly sidestepping the fact they are disciplined and prodigious and take comedy very seriously indeed.
It’s probably because of that they don’t want to emulate Ladybird’s own tally, which was 646 books between 1940 and 1980. Says Hazeley: ‘One day the jokes will run out and we won’t repeat ourselves. These are meant to be celebratory books, open-hearted books which make people laugh and feel happy. They were such fun to write, we giggled our b**** off doing them and it would be wrong to flog them to death.’
‘Wegrewupinthesuburbanfamilies
ofthePeterandJanebooks’