It’s traditional, when the time comes for a celebrity to monetise young readers, for the publisher to shoulder most of the blame. Katie Price, for example, is just doing what comes naturally, but what’s Random House’s excuse for the former glamour model’s series, Perfect Ponies? “I think this story is written by someone who doesn’t have very nice friends,” writes a 10-year-old reviewer of book three (“as usual, stuck-up Henrietta is determined to spoil their fun…”).
Indeed, when there was all the fuss about Simon & Schuster’s deal with Milo Yiannopoulos, who has yet, unaccountably, to write a children’s book, some of us had yet to forget its publication, in 1989, of Budgie the Little Helicopter, by HRH the Duchess of York. “It was a huge proud moment for me,” she would write in My Story, “but the backlash had begun before the books reached the stores.” Admittedly, Budgie’s reception was in stark contrast to that of The Old Man of Lochnagar, by the Prince of Wales; a work that would inspire a Jackanory reading (by the author), a BBC film (narrated by the author), a play and a ballet.
In the case of George Galloway, who last week announced he’d “signed a deal” for the first in a children’s book series, Red Molucca the Good Pirate, the absence of information about his publisher removed any clear focus for the ensuing indignation, beyond the Saddam supporter effortlessly turned children’s writer. If the publisher of George Galloway’s book is, as seems quite possible, George Galloway, or some equally niche, Galloway-sympathising outfit, it’s harder to argue, as with previous celebrities turned children’s authors, that the deals don’t just insult accomplished writers and exploit readers too young to know they’re being conned, but cheat both those groups of chances to find one another.
The invariable retort being: that publishing is not a zero-sum game, that celebrity profits actively benefit the talented but obscure and that it’s better for children to be reading, say, Kylie’s The Showgirl Princess, Geri Halliwell’s Ugenia Lavender, Frank Lampard’s Frankie’s Magic Football, or Coleen McLoughlin’s series about “Coleen Style Queen”, than nothing. Why should stuck-up Henriettas spoil their fun? Plainly, this argument depends on nobody ever actually comparing a 10-year-old’s absorption of the contents of a Coleen Style Queen book with the obvious (at least to doctors and anti-pinkification campaigners) benefit of non-exposure to lines such as: “I was hoping a week in the Portuguese sun would give me the sort of tan that would make him notice me at long last.”
A more pressing question, in Galloway’s case, is which of his talents, along with the revelation of his goodness, he plans to foreground in the opening adventure of Red Molucca. Will the focus be on Molucca the champion cat imitator, or Molucca the rascally rape apologist, or Molucca, loyal friend to silly Saddam and barmy Bashir? With some exceptions – David Walliams, Ricky Gervais – the contents of most celebrity children’s fiction reflects, as with Coleen’s tan and Katie’s ponies, the personality or preoccupations of their purported authors. What, otherwise, would be the point?
Budgie’s successor, Little Red – by the then HRH-less Duchess – is a “brave, sweet, funny, kind” etc redhead who will, it is widely predicted, ultimately meet her doom via the handsome financial adviser she meets in Phuket. One of Ugenia Lavender’s little friends is based, for the benefit of seven- to 10-year-olds, on a friend of the author, the celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay, often described as an old-fashioned bully. From a base near Balmoral, a wise Old Man of Lochnagar betrays an obsession with hot baths, as well as nature. The heroine of Kylie’s Showgirl Princess is, whether out of laziness or as a homage to Philip Roth, Kylie the Showgirl Princess – “it’s pure fabulousness all the way!”
Not that publishers ever neglect to claim some improving, parent-mollifying Message. Kylie, according its editor, “brims with positive messages such as believing in yourself and the importance of friendship and teamwork”. For Madonna, published by Puffin, various threadbare tales of schoolgirl misunderstandings were scarcely more than vehicles for the airing of Kabbalistic pieties. As it turned out, the contrast between these exhortations (beware “the green-eyed monster”) and the author’s contemporaneous stage utterances (“emotional retard”) lent to her homilies an edge that was never within reach of, say, the Reverend Charles Kingsley, creator of Mrs Doasyouwouldbedoneby.
Galloway’s reinvention promises to be no less hilarious, as he sets about enlightening younger readers whose parents have already responded joyfully to his announcement, notwithstanding the instructive limits of a man who saluted Saddam for “your courage, your strength, your indefatigability”. But fair enough, if Roald Dahl’s work can co-exist with his documented antisemitism, why shouldn’t his budding rival, Galloway, who has survived similar accusations, enjoy a similar level of forgetting/goodwill? Already, aware that pirates are often considered to be almost as poor role models as his friends in the tyrant community, Mr Galloway assures us that Red Molucca, reportedly set on Indonesian islands under colonial rule, will be an ethical, Robin Hood-style adventurer, “who is a husband and father, and his family come pirating with him”. If Galloway is to draw, as this suggests, on his own experience, we can hope to see the pirate picking up a new wife in every adventure or scorching lickspittle colonists, Mr Galloway’s opponents being almost invariably lickspittle, with his signature rhetoric. Come next World Book Day, children could be turning up in black fedoras, armed not with cutlasses but with allegations of dirty tricks or speeches urging British troops to “refuse to obey illegal orders”.
Whatever the biographical similarities between Red Molucca and Mr Galloway, parents can probably rely on content that, to judge from comments by his illustrator and ideological sympathiser Joe Cook, will be guaranteed free of any Blairite or red Tory tendencies. “I got involved because George represents an under-reported and undervalued perspective on the world,” Joe Cook, a “newshound and politico”, told the BBC, enticingly. Under-reported? Galloway’s single tweet was more ardently and respectfully covered than any publishing news featuring Katie Price, while a stream of tweeted title suggestions – The Twat in the Hat, Green Eggs and Hamas – established that even his detractors are paying attention. Should any children be inspired by all this to search online for Red Molucca, they will promptly find themselves on a website hosting assorted reflections by Mr Galloway, at random: “The blood of Guevara watered the earth of Bolivia which fructified in the victory of the Bolivian revolution.”
It may be that Red Molucca does not even belong in the celebrity section, but alongside works such as Boys Wipe Out Bandits, by North Korean despot and children’s author, Kim Jong-il, and others who apprehend, unlike the lickspittle Budgie, their duty to foster revolutionary consciousness.
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