There are many children's books I love, and that of course means that there are many children's authors I love too. However, if you have read any of my own stories you will know that they are funny. I like funny books. Does that make me a funny person? No. I get fed up, angry, sad and frustrated just like everyone else, but I do like to laugh. Laughter is good for you.
As a child one of the books I kept dipping into was the Faber Book of Nonsense. It was full of delightfully silly stuff by the likes of Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll. Evidently my interest in humour began at an early age. In the 1950s, when I was aged aged six-10 or so, my family didn't have a television so we listened to the radio a lot. My parents loved the funny programmes and one of them – The Goon Show – really caught my imagination.
It was so ridiculously silly. The man who wrote The Goon Show was Spike Milligan and when I was a bit older I discovered he wrote for children. Silly Verse for Kids, and Badjelly the Witch were two such books and in them I found that same, very silly, utterly crazy humour, so if you read one of my books and find yourself thinking "that is SO stupid!", you can blame Spike Milligan. He was a comic genius who used not just words but sound effects too and often accompanied his poems with daft drawings, as in A Book of Milliganimals. He pushed away any barriers surrounding humour and made almost anything possible.
While I was a student at university I began writing my own very silly poems and providing them with daft drawings. I was imitating Spike – the sincerest form of flattery, as we know. What I didn't realise was that as a result of this imitation I was learning from a master comic. I discovered what worked and what didn't. I also discovered that I wasn't very good at drawing. For that matter, neither was Spike Milligan but it didn't seem to matter for him – it just made his work all the funnier.
Anyhow, in himself, Spike Milligan wasn't a funny person either. He was just like all of us and his life was full of ups and downs. Sometimes he was so depressed he was hospitalised. Despite all that he still churned out some of the funniest, most surreal stories and radio scripts that have ever been written and kept a whole nation laughing. I didn't want to be Spike; I knew that wasn't possible and in any case I wanted to be myself, doing my own writing, creating my own humour, but without Spike I can't imagine what it would have been like. The more I write now, the more I realise how much he has influenced me. Would Doctor Bonkers ever have existed? Or Krazy Kow? Cartoon Kid? Probably not, so thank you Spike! You were a true inspiration.
Jeremy Strong has just published his 100th book: Kidnapped! The Hundred-Mile-An-Hour Dog's Sizzling Summer.
