Frank Cottrell-Boyce: 'Being the children's laureate can be very uplifting and very depressing'

Frank Cottrell-Boyce was born in Bootle in September 1959. His children’s books have been shortlisted for a multitude of prizes, including the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize, the Whitbread Children’s Fiction Award, The Roald Dahl Funny Prize, and the Blue Peter Book Award. Millions, Cottrell-Boyce’s debut children’s novel, won the prestigious CILIP Carnegie Medal. His TV screenwriting work includes Doctor Who, Brookside and Coronation Street, while his film writing includes 24 Hour Party People and A Cock And Bull Story. Along with Danny Boyle, Cottrell-Boyce devised the opening ceremony for the London 2012 Olympics. In 2024, he was appointed as children’s laureate.

In his Letter to My Younger Self, he looks back on the role of music in shaping him, inspirational teachers and his time as children’s laureate.

My preoccupation at 16 would have been trying to meet David Bowie. And trying to look like him. I do feel lucky that I was a big Bowie fan, because he was a big reader, wasn’t he? I feel very blessed that I had a pop star who was constantly referring to books and carrying books and reading books. By the time I was 16, I was quite settled in school. I was in a band. It was Liverpool, when it was obligatory to be in a band. Being in a band often meant I made up a name for a band, and we made some badges. It was a lot of walking up and down the city centre.

I was very lucky, because when I was 16 or 17, there was a club in Liverpool called Eric’s, which was really, really buzzing musically. Lots and lots of acts came. They used to have – this is so sweet, because they used to… well, it wasn’t sweet, it was exploitative. But they used to let underage people in in the afternoon. And I now realise what was happening was that we were paying to listen to the band soundcheck. So I saw loads of acts. And there was such a scene around that, you know, and a scene is a very important thing, isn’t it? A lot of musicians, a lot of people wanting to be musicians, but also people from the theatres and the clothes shops, all kind of meeting together. So I feel very lucky to have been in Liverpool in that era.

One of my big lucky breaks was that my dad was a student when I was little. He went into education, and he did a university degree, and he became a teacher. And I wanted to be with my dad. In those days, the Open University lectures were on at five o’clock in the morning on the television. So I would come down and sit with him. I don’t think it educated me, but it certainly gave me a kind of a weird comfort. I wasn’t interested in the lectures at all, just interested in sitting there with my dad. It was wild to be up at five o’clock in the morning with a piece of toast. And he was just very tolerant of it.

I had a great teacher in year six called Sister Paul. I was the youngest in the class through primary school. Well, obviously as the youngest you’re never going to be a top student. You’re at a huge disadvantage at that age. I wouldn’t say I was struggling, but I was unremarkable. And then there was a time when my best friend was off school sick, and he was off for a long time. I felt really lonely, and I really threw myself into this piece of work. And my teacher, Sister Paul, she picked it up, and she could see right away that something different had happened. And she went to the front of the class, and she read it out loud. I can’t begin to tell you how massive that was for me, to hear a teacher read my words out. I mean, I became a film writer, and I’ve heard lots of famous people read my words out. But nothing came close to that. 

All I can remember about that piece she read out was that it was about Vikings. And it was kind of funny. And I did a drawing at the bottom. It was really that she could tell I’d really tried. I think she thought, this kid’s never tried before. I don’t think it was inherently a brilliant piece of work. I think it was like, something’s going on, and I’m gonna notice it. It was really special, probably my first bit of praise. My brother was a brilliant athlete – he was younger, taller and more talented. It was quite hard to live under his shadow. This is the moment when someone said, ‘Come out,  come out from the shadow for a minute.’

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It was completely amazing to be part of the team that put the 2012 Olympic Games opening ceremony together. That was really something; that was a kind of testing out what writing is, because there’s so many different kinds of writing to do. You felt like a scribe, because part of the job was writing letters and writing the media guide. But the other part of the job was conceiving the whole ceremony. It was really good fun. And it was like making a movie, but when you work on a movie, it lasts like six or seven weeks. This was two years. So that’s really nice, because you form these intense friendships when you’re making a film, but then they’re over a couple of months, and this was two years of good company.

On the night of the ceremony I was just sick with worry, just knowing that if one thing went wrong, that’s all anyone would remember. We’d had three rehearsals, but there were lots of things you could not rehearse. I can’t tell you how nerve-racking it was, especially because I had nothing to do. Everyone else, at least, was busy. I’m just sitting there thinking, ‘Please, please, please work’.

The first thing I had published was a letter in Sparky, which was a comic, a DC [Thomson] comic. I got a funny letter published when I was in year six. I got paid 50p. So now I’m a professional writer. And then at university, I put plays on and I applied to work on a soap opera that was starting up in Liverpool called Brookside. It was done very differently from other soap operas. It was shot with a single camera. That was my apprenticeship. Jimmy McGovern was one of the writers. Kay Mellor was one of the writers. It was really great. 

Michael Winterbottom [the director who collaborated with Cottrell-Boyce on six films including A Cock and Bull Story and 24 Hour Party People] and I were on a massive learning curve. That was exciting. We met working in a vanished world. There was a franchise called Thames Television, which was the ITV for the London area. And they had a skills department that made skills programmes, and we were both working on that. And Michael was desperate to make movies, and had really clear ideas about what kind of movies. And I was just very happy to be doing anything really. So it was a student and pupil relationship. He was the teacher, and he’d show me films that I hadn’t seen, and I’d get very excited about them. 

I was on University Challenge and we got into the final. And I can’t remember what we scored [Cottrell-Boyce got most of the answers] but the other team didn’t score at all. I think that’s the only time in its history that that’s ever happened. Yeah, thanks for asking! Not enough people ask me about this. Personally, it was amazing. You kind of go into thinking there’s nothing in this for me except potential humiliation, and so not to be humiliated was a great thing.

I’d tell my younger self it’s OK to be older. There’s no need to hold on. There’s lots and lots of compensations to being old, especially if you’re a storyteller, because you’ve learned more stories. Someone like PG Wodehouse was really knocking it out when he was old. I was thinking about this the other day. Women didn’t have a vote when he started, and at the end he was working with Andrew Lloyd Webber. It’s like, what the hell do I know? I would say you’re lucky to be old, because some people didn’t get the chance. Lean into that look and make the most of it.

Being the children’s laureate has been amazing, because I’ve gone to places that I would never have gone – early years settings, family hubs, prisons, hospitals, all kinds of different settings. So it’s been a real eye-opener, and it’s been very uplifting and very depressing at the same time, often on the same day.

If I could relive any time in my life… I’ve got seven children, so that’s quite an age spread. I can think of one summer when they were all still at home, and I knew it wasn’t going to last much longer, and we went away for the whole summer, and it was just amazing. And I knew that it was a bubble that was about to burst. I was thinking, ‘This is just us, and this is fantastic’. We went to Dumfries and Galloway and we did bugger all. We sat around on the grass, went for big walks, played board games, and it was just great. We were just together.

A British Childhood: How Our Children Live Now by Frank Cottrell-Boyce is out now (Pan Macmillan, £14.99). You can buy it from the Big Issue shop on bookshop.org, which helps to support Big Issue and independent bookshops.

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