Earlier this month I was asked to be the new Waterstones children’s laureate. It was on the news! On television! All week, strangers have been congratulating me. As they shake my hand, they ask if it means I now have to write a poem for the King’s birthday. I explain that I’m the children’s laureate not the poet laureate. They leave looking pleased for me, but slightly disappointed for themselves. I feel like a literary Gareth Southgate.
Invisible privilege
Being laureate isn’t an honour, it’s a job. According to BookTrust, only 42 per cent of children are read a bedtime story, and only half one- to two-year-olds from low-income families are read to daily. Children with a good experience of books before school do better educationally, and, more importantly, are happier. It’s a huge, invisible privilege. I want to do something about the children who are missing out. I’ve been out looking for the best, most innovative approaches to books for early years. I can report that the people at The Meadows Nursery in Shirecliffe in Sheffield can do things with an old copy of the Very Hungry Caterpillar that you wouldn’t believe! They see books as more like a recipe than a meal. Instead of just reading the story, they spin all kind of games and activities out of it over a period of time. Parents are drawn in. Shared pleasure creates shared trust, which in turn helps create community. I asked how they measured success. This has been a very fractured community, but now dozens of its families are about to go on a camping holiday together. I come away absolutely buzzing with the hope that if I can find a way to celebrate and share ideas like these, we can heal Britain with glue sticks and scissors.
Power hungry
I know that to make this happen I’ll need access to people with power. I’m so fixated on how to do this, that when I see the new Secretary of State for Culture interviewing Hacker T Dog on CBBC, I immediately think… Oh! I know him! I wonder if I can get him to introduce… No, wait. He’s not a real dog. He’s a puppet. And even if he was a real dog, that wouldn’t be any help because he’d be a dog. With no political clout. A few years ago, Keir Starmer brought his children to watch me perform at a book festival. Would that help? Is he a fan? But no. In a recent interview he revealed he doesn’t have a favourite novel. Apparently my jumping up and down on stage while wearing a cardboard robot head did not convince him of my literary prowess.
Conspiracists and me
One of the books I was promoting that day was Broccoli Boy. Written in 2016, it described a viral pandemic and a lockdown. Every now and then a conspiracy aficionado notices this and accuses me – at length and in detail – of having helped plan the pandemic. So it’s a worry that two years ago I wrote a book about the whole internet going down and, this morning, it happened. No planes. No cash machines. Just like in the book. I’m braced for more incoming. A man turns away from the non-functioning cash machine at the Co-op, spots me and says, “Congratulations. Do you have to go and write a poem about this internet business now?” “Oh. No. I’m not the… Yeah. I do yeah.”
Bedtime story ban
The Children’s Media Conference brings together all kinds of people who make television for children, from those who are responsible for charming low-tech delights like Tweedy and Fluff (about a bit of tweed and its friendship with some fluff) to global behemoths such as Bluey and CocoMelon. CocoMelon’s soothing, marshmallowy videos of nursery rhymes and lullabies make it the ideal digital babysitter, which is why it’s probably the most watched YouTube content on the planet. On YouTube, audience satisfaction is measured by how many minutes you stayed watching. There’s a general idea that young people’s attention span is TikTok short. Not so for very young people: CocoMelon is aimed at babies and toddlers who can watch it for five hours at a stretch. Five hours is not attention. It’s sedation. There’s been a lot of talk about the relationship between human and artificial intelligence. Animation is the area in which the two have been working together to the most glorious effect. It’s also the area in which we’re already seeing omens. I learned that shows aiming for frictionless, prolonged viewing tend to ban bedtime scenes because when a character goes to sleep that’s a strong “switch off” signal. The link between bedtime and stories goes back to the Ice Age. But here we are breaking that link. And it’s not AI that’s breaking it. It’s humans, but humans who are learning to think like algorithms. I should probably write a poem about this for the King.
Frank Cottrell-Boyce is the Waterstones children’s laureate.
[See also: The best children’s books for summer 2024]
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This article appears in the 25 Jul 2024 issue of the New Statesman, Summer Special 2024