Once upon a time there was a boy band...
Creating a modern-day fairytale came easy to The League of Gentleman's Jeremy Dyson. After all, his childhood was haunted by them
Jeremy Dyson The Guardian Tuesday 15 January 2008 07.44 GMT
When I was a little boy growing up in Yorkshire, my dad told me that the wolf from Little Red Riding Hood lived in the stone pump-house by the edge of Eccup reservoir. And I believed him. I would hurry past as fast as I could, afraid I might catch a glimpse of the beast itself peering out, standing upright among the cogs and pipes, its snout pressed against the glass.
Fairytales were the first fiction I ever loved. More than loved - I was possessed and consumed by them. I had to flick past the illustrations in the Ladybird books at speed because they unnerved me so. The heroes frightened me more than the baddies. Something about the photo-realistic renderings of these humanised animals - dressed in antique clothes, standing erect on their hind legs - was enough to instil in me a clutching terror. What if the bedroom door opened one night and one of them tottered in to pay a visit? Perhaps Puss in Boots, with his flamboyant hat and sly smile; or the mother from The Goat and her Seven Little Kids, so keen on amateur surgery (she slices open the tummy of the wolf who has eaten her young, replaces them with heavy stones and sews him back up again while he sleeps). And what about Rumpelstiltskin? He wasn't even an animal; there was no name for what he was, but the Ladybird illustration was so detailed, it seemed he could only have been painted from life.
So when, just over a year ago, the BBC asked me to adapt a favourite fairytale for a contemporary audience, I didn't really hesitate - I chose the Three Billy Goats Gruff.
There's something inherently comic about the notion of a troll under a bridge, the three goats trip-trapping prissily across the wooden planks above. In fact, it was something that Reece Shearsmith (my co-writer on The League of Gentlemen) and I would often laugh about. I'm pretty certain there's a list of jokes from our early days of developing that TV series where it was supposed that Royston Vasey had a bridge with a troll living beneath it. Buses and cars would have to stop and pay him a toll. "Have you got nothing smaller?" he says. "It's been all tenners this morning."
But it's one thing to idly suggest something because I know it'll make Reece laugh, and it's another to create an hour-long drama out of it. When I told them my choice, the BBC producers looked at me, bemused. Their reaction was understandable. On the surface, the tale contains very little actual story. Three gallant goats, siblings of ascending size, decide to cross a bridge bedevilled by a truculent troll in order to get to the tasty-looking pastures on the other side. And that's it. It's hardly The Sopranos.
When gently probed about what the story of this modernised version might be, I was unable to offer an immediate solution. But on the way home from a meeting with the series's producers, something about the tale began to niggle. Read lightly, it seems that the goats are the goodies and the troll is the baddie, and he ends up getting his just deserts. The goats simply want to get across his bridge and the pig-headed troll won't let them, so he gets butted into the water. But the more I thought about it, the more this began to trouble me.
Why do the goats want to get to the other side of the valley? There's nothing wrong with their side - no suggestion of famine or blight. The pastures are still verdant - there's more than enough grass to go round. They simply look across the way, and think it seems good and sweet.
All right, the troll is bad-tempered in not wanting them to walk across his bridge, and is guilty of avarice, but does he deserve to die for it? In some more contemporary, politically correct renderings, such as the delicately illustrated picture-book version beloved of my two-year-old daughter, the troll doesn't die but scrambles to the side of the river, where he ends up apologising and making friends with the goats. This is not the case in the pitiless Ladybird telling, in which the eldest goat deliberately butts the troll into the river, where he drowns and is never heard of again.
Ultimately, the original story leaves you feeling decidedly uncomfortable. Greed and aggressive acquisitiveness have been rewarded, and a capital crime has gone unpunished. This is a story with no heroes. Instead, beneath its almost too-simple surface, it paints a startling, Shakespearean vision of human nature (albeit disguised as goat nature).
We shouldn't be too surprised - any fiction that survives for hundreds of years, transcending the culture that generated it, is going to have something of value at its heart. The beauty of fairytales is that their essential, unchanging truths are cloaked in metaphorical grotesquery. Their anthropomorphism and monstrousness give them a punch on a subconscious level that plain old naturalism just can't compete with.
Around the time of my meeting with the producers, the 2006 series of The X Factor was just beginning. I am a huge X Factor fan and was already tuning in. About five seconds into that Saturday's show, the connection was made. The goats would be an aspiring boy band, and the troll their obstructive manager, determined to keep them in their place on the northern club circuit. I wanted to amplify the ambiguity of the original story, so that one's sympathies might switch from the rapacious band to the supposed "monster" himself, the manager, who actually ends up becoming their victim.
Fifteen months later, the story has been written, cast and made - with Bernard Hill as a finer troll than anything I dared imagine. My daughter caught a glimpse of him on a DVD of an early cut. At first, she was alarmed by his hairy, warty, tusked figure. But I explained to her that it was just a troll from Daddy's silly story, like the one in her Billy Goats Gruff book. It had slipped my mind that I'd already told her that the troll from that book lives under the bridge we like to walk over on Saturday mornings. The next time we were there she wanted to stop, to see if he'd pop out and say hello. She doesn't take after her father.
· Billy Goats Gruff is on BBC1 on January 31 at 9pm.
Jeremy Dyson The Guardian Tuesday 15 January 2008 07.44 GMT
When I was a little boy growing up in Yorkshire, my dad told me that the wolf from Little Red Riding Hood lived in the stone pump-house by the edge of Eccup reservoir. And I believed him. I would hurry past as fast as I could, afraid I might catch a glimpse of the beast itself peering out, standing upright among the cogs and pipes, its snout pressed against the glass.
Fairytales were the first fiction I ever loved. More than loved - I was possessed and consumed by them. I had to flick past the illustrations in the Ladybird books at speed because they unnerved me so. The heroes frightened me more than the baddies. Something about the photo-realistic renderings of these humanised animals - dressed in antique clothes, standing erect on their hind legs - was enough to instil in me a clutching terror. What if the bedroom door opened one night and one of them tottered in to pay a visit? Perhaps Puss in Boots, with his flamboyant hat and sly smile; or the mother from The Goat and her Seven Little Kids, so keen on amateur surgery (she slices open the tummy of the wolf who has eaten her young, replaces them with heavy stones and sews him back up again while he sleeps). And what about Rumpelstiltskin? He wasn't even an animal; there was no name for what he was, but the Ladybird illustration was so detailed, it seemed he could only have been painted from life.
So when, just over a year ago, the BBC asked me to adapt a favourite fairytale for a contemporary audience, I didn't really hesitate - I chose the Three Billy Goats Gruff.
There's something inherently comic about the notion of a troll under a bridge, the three goats trip-trapping prissily across the wooden planks above. In fact, it was something that Reece Shearsmith (my co-writer on The League of Gentlemen) and I would often laugh about. I'm pretty certain there's a list of jokes from our early days of developing that TV series where it was supposed that Royston Vasey had a bridge with a troll living beneath it. Buses and cars would have to stop and pay him a toll. "Have you got nothing smaller?" he says. "It's been all tenners this morning."
But it's one thing to idly suggest something because I know it'll make Reece laugh, and it's another to create an hour-long drama out of it. When I told them my choice, the BBC producers looked at me, bemused. Their reaction was understandable. On the surface, the tale contains very little actual story. Three gallant goats, siblings of ascending size, decide to cross a bridge bedevilled by a truculent troll in order to get to the tasty-looking pastures on the other side. And that's it. It's hardly The Sopranos.
When gently probed about what the story of this modernised version might be, I was unable to offer an immediate solution. But on the way home from a meeting with the series's producers, something about the tale began to niggle. Read lightly, it seems that the goats are the goodies and the troll is the baddie, and he ends up getting his just deserts. The goats simply want to get across his bridge and the pig-headed troll won't let them, so he gets butted into the water. But the more I thought about it, the more this began to trouble me.
Why do the goats want to get to the other side of the valley? There's nothing wrong with their side - no suggestion of famine or blight. The pastures are still verdant - there's more than enough grass to go round. They simply look across the way, and think it seems good and sweet.
All right, the troll is bad-tempered in not wanting them to walk across his bridge, and is guilty of avarice, but does he deserve to die for it? In some more contemporary, politically correct renderings, such as the delicately illustrated picture-book version beloved of my two-year-old daughter, the troll doesn't die but scrambles to the side of the river, where he ends up apologising and making friends with the goats. This is not the case in the pitiless Ladybird telling, in which the eldest goat deliberately butts the troll into the river, where he drowns and is never heard of again.
Ultimately, the original story leaves you feeling decidedly uncomfortable. Greed and aggressive acquisitiveness have been rewarded, and a capital crime has gone unpunished. This is a story with no heroes. Instead, beneath its almost too-simple surface, it paints a startling, Shakespearean vision of human nature (albeit disguised as goat nature).
We shouldn't be too surprised - any fiction that survives for hundreds of years, transcending the culture that generated it, is going to have something of value at its heart. The beauty of fairytales is that their essential, unchanging truths are cloaked in metaphorical grotesquery. Their anthropomorphism and monstrousness give them a punch on a subconscious level that plain old naturalism just can't compete with.
Around the time of my meeting with the producers, the 2006 series of The X Factor was just beginning. I am a huge X Factor fan and was already tuning in. About five seconds into that Saturday's show, the connection was made. The goats would be an aspiring boy band, and the troll their obstructive manager, determined to keep them in their place on the northern club circuit. I wanted to amplify the ambiguity of the original story, so that one's sympathies might switch from the rapacious band to the supposed "monster" himself, the manager, who actually ends up becoming their victim.
Fifteen months later, the story has been written, cast and made - with Bernard Hill as a finer troll than anything I dared imagine. My daughter caught a glimpse of him on a DVD of an early cut. At first, she was alarmed by his hairy, warty, tusked figure. But I explained to her that it was just a troll from Daddy's silly story, like the one in her Billy Goats Gruff book. It had slipped my mind that I'd already told her that the troll from that book lives under the bridge we like to walk over on Saturday mornings. The next time we were there she wanted to stop, to see if he'd pop out and say hello. She doesn't take after her father.
· Billy Goats Gruff is on BBC1 on January 31 at 9pm.