Simon Farnaby,
“What I like about having a character from the Dark Ages is that they really did believe in magic then; it was just a fact. And really, magic was nature.”
Yscriptwriter of films and ou’re very likely to recognise
Simon Farnaby’s hair. The actor and writer has a long career as a star of and and his barnet often steals the show. So much so that
Mackenzie Crook cast him in as a rival treasurehunter who resembles Art Garfunkel.
So perhaps it is no surprise that the protagonists of his debut novel, a magical adventure for children, have unruly locks. In The Wizard in My Shed, Rose is a lonely 12-year-old with frizzy hair and glasses, who discovers the 6th-century warlock Merdyn the Wild in her local woods. Merdyn has been hurled into the future as a punishment for his misdeeds, and wants to find his way home. Rose wants to achieve fame and fortune as a singer, although she can’t hold a tune. And so their hairraising and hilarious adventures begin.
“I love stories where kids meet strange creatures from a different time or place,” says Simon. “I loved
Stig of the Dump when I was a child.”
His hugely entertaining tale races along with a warm message throughout, as Merdyn shows Rose the value of nature and she teaches him about loyalty and kindness. Merdyn dislikes the modern world’s lack of connection to nature, and the transformation of Britain’s forests into gigantic shopping malls. “The air here, it stinketh. There is no nature,” he complains of suburban ‘Bashingstoke’, where the tale is set. Does Simon share that sense of a loss of connection with the natural world?
“I do,” he says. “I think it’s inevitable with technology and the way we live that we become slightly distanced from nature. What I like about having a character from the Dark Ages is that they really did believe in magic then; it was just a fact. And really, magic was nature. I think they were perplexed by nature and found it magical, which it is.”
Simon’s own appreciation of nature stems from a rural upbringing in Croft on Tees in Yorkshire, where he roamed the Dales and woods. “My memories of childhood are grubbing around in the back woods where there’d be some mushrooms or a beetle or molehill or dead bird; the most fascinating things you could imagine at that age.”
He recalls keeping a pet fly called Fred in a cupboard, feeding it an old Jammy Dodger – much to his mother’s horror, who let it out. “I told my sixyear-old daughter Eve about Fred and even she said, ‘Dad, a pet fly is a bad pet’. She has a pet bug herself at the moment – a little green shield bug.”
In the book, Merdyn becomes annoyed by the children’s fixation on their phones and dumps them into a pond. But how can parents achieve this screen separation without a soaking? “It’s a very adult thing to do, isn’t it, to announce, ‘We’re going for a walk in the countryside!’ and the kids say, ‘That sounds terrible’. But you’ve just got to persist, and once they’re out there, they find something and love it.”
Simon’s own favourite outdoor pastime is wild swimming, which he’s taken up since the lockdown. He recently found a spot on the River Swale, close to where he spent his school years. “It was fabulous and it had been on my doorstep the whole time and I didn’t even know it was there.”
There’s great joy in discovering the minute details of your local area rather than only gazing at the world online. In the book, the children claim they are keen environmentalists, but Merdyn points out that they don’t even know which species are in their local wood. Can Simon himself identify species while out walking, as Merdyn can?
“My dad was a gardener and grass farmer so I know lots of plants and grasses… I bore people by going ‘oh that’s cocksfoot! Yes, you can tell because it looks like’ – and then my voice goes all nerdy – ‘it looks like the foot of a cockerel, you see’. Bearded darnel is great as well because it has those little beardy bits on it. I have become a bit of a grass bore.”
And was filming Detectorists as idyllic as it looks? “We filmed it in June/July in Suffolk and Toby Jones and I would always say how blessed Mackenzie was, because every time the camera was rolling the sun would come out… I can’t remember it raining once. Paul, who plays the Paul Simon character, and I used to joke that it was our holiday. Mackenzie’s a real nature buff himself and in between takes, he spots kestrels and digs up toadstools. I think he really wanted to give nature the starring role and get those details. He’d go off to film butterflies landing on a bit of grass… on a bit of bearded darnel!”