‘Today’s cartoons lack the smell of humanity’
As ‘Not Now, Bernard’ celebrates its 40th birthday, David Mckee tells Jake Kerridge why his creations have stood the test of time
Over the past 40 years, few picture books have given children as much delight as Not Now, Bernard – and almost certainly none has induced as much guilt in their parents. David Mckee’s classic tale begins with young Bernard trying to warn his mum and dad that there’s a monster in the garden that wants to eat him, but, preoccupied with their chores, they ignore him. The Monster duly eats Bernard and then tries to terrorise the oblivious parents, but they simply respond with their usual catchphrase: “Not now, Bernard.”
It’s a book I read over and over when I was a nipper. I can remember loving Mckee’s spiky, expressive drawing style, familiar from his TV animations, King Rollo and the eternally popular Mr Benn. And then there was the transgressive pleasure of a book that dared to acknowledge that parents were not always in the right.
A new edition to mark the book’s 40th anniversary could hardly be timelier now, with locked-down mums and dads muttering their own equivalent of “Not now, Bernard” as they try to juggle work and childcare.
“Children seem to be handling it surprisingly well. It’s the adults who crack in these circumstances,” Mckee tells me from his home near Marseille, where he and his French-algerian wife Bakhta have hunkered down.
If you’re not careful, fobbing children off can become second nature, he observes. He remembers going to a school to talk about the book: “I was drawing something on a large sheet of paper and a boy said ‘David, David, David’, and before I could turn the teacher said, ‘Not now, Peter.’ And the class cracked up, they all said together, ‘Not now, Peter,’ and obviously I had to turn and just say, ‘Yes, what is it Peter?’ And the teacher covered her face with her hands as she realised.”
Artwork created to promote the new edition sees Bernard’s parents concentrating on their smartphones rather than housework or DIY. Are children having to compete even harder now for their parents’ attention than they did 40 years ago? “Maybe. Or perhaps now it’s the children who ignore the parents,” he says in his gently quizzical West Country burr.
Was he a “Not now, Bernard”-style father himself? “No. I think I had all three of them [a daughter and two sons from his first marriage] in the studio with me sometimes. But perhaps they would remember differently.”
It’s difficult to believe now that on its first publication Not Now, Bernard was denounced by some librarians as likely to scare children (or rouse their rebellious instincts), and in the US Mckee was bracketed with Roald Dahl as a subversive influence and blacklisted from some book shops. These days, at 85, he is a universally revered Grand Old Man of children’s literature: Not Now, Bernard is even on the national curriculum.
Mckee was born in Tavistock, south Devon, in 1935. Expected to join his father’s farm machinery repair business, he went to Plymouth College of Art, instead, because he liked the idea of three months’ holiday a year if he became an art teacher. “Then I realised I didn’t want to be an art teacher – I wanted 12 months’ holiday, not three months.” He became a freelance illustrator, cartoonist and painter.
He decided to write and draw his own stories, finding himself by accident at the vanguard of a golden generation of picture book writerillustrators in the mid-sixties that included John Burningham, Brian Wildsmith and Michael Foreman. The new style of creative, funny picture books became hip, with adults buying them even if they didn’t have children.
How has the publishing industry changed over the past 60 years? “I think there used to be more small publishers who absolutely loved books, and I think that’s the first requirement of a publisher. They seemed to be sort of gentlemanly, in a way. I think there’s more pressure from the sales side now.”
Despite his bestseller status, he has some unpublished books that he can’t interest publishers in – perhaps because, in defiance of today’s received wisdom, his books often don’t feature children as characters. He might point out that this hasn’t stopped generations falling in love with the besuited, bowlerhatted Mr Benn, or the TV series based on him.
He made the series in circumstances that today’s creatives can only dream of. “They said, ‘We’ll give you the money to make a pilot, do you know how to do animation?’ and I said, ‘I’ll ask somebody.’ I was lucky to have total freedom from the BBC. There was not this business of groups of people all having to put something in.”
The series is still beloved, even though the animation looks pretty basic today. “I suppose that gives it character, whereas now everything has to be so polished and correct to be acceptable everywhere, it often doesn’t have the smell of humanity.”
It’s been 20 years since a Mr Benn film was announced, to star John Hannah as Mr Benn and Ben Kingsley as the fez-sporting fancy dressshopkeeper who facilitates the staid-looking hero’s liberating journeys into fantasy lands. It never materialised. “The option’s been taken up again, and quite seriously. I think it could make a good film.”
We may also soon see Mckee’s other popular series character, Elmer the patchwork elephant, on our screens. “At one time I didn’t want there to be any Elmer films, but now I’ve signed a contract for films to be made. I always thought, ‘Well, if the children want to do films after I’m gone, they can.’ But I don’t want them to be at each other’s throats if something goes wrong. It’s better that I do it, make the mistakes, and then they can say, ‘Stupid old fool, why did he do it like that?’”
He is delighted that Elmer has become an LGBTQ icon, as the stories have often tackled inequality and unfairness. But he’s hard to pin down politically. Denver (2010) is about the rich benefactor of a small town who agrees to dole out his money in equal shares to the townsfolk when they complain about inequality, only for them to squander it; the book was excoriated by Polly Toynbee in The
Guardian for being anti-socialist. Another, The Conquerors (2005), was a satire on empire-building that was clearly a commentary on the Iraq war (although he had the basic idea in his art school days: “When people ask how long a book takes, I tell them that one took two weeks, and it took 50 years.”). He is attached to no political party but sees himself as a moralist: “Even if there isn’t an obvious moral in a book, there’s a moral feeling behind it.”
Right now, he’s missing the cinema, but is thankful that he has a garden. Work has to take a back seat: “You have to be very involved in the life of the couple, and spend time amusing the other person.”
Even so, he has already been putting the hours in by the time I ring him at 11am. “I said I probably wouldn’t do another book, but in fact this morning I was working a bit on a new Elmer story.” And he is still making time for the work that has brought him the most fulfilment, if a lot less fame and fortune, over the past six decades: “Painting on canvas. It’s like therapy. That’s when I feel good, when I feel me, I suppose.”
‘I realised I didn’t want to be an art teacher. I wanted 12 months’ holiday, not three’