I suppose if I had to name my favourite children’s author it would have to be Richmal Crompton and the William stories, followed not far behind by Anthony Buckeridge and Jennings, and Enid Blyton with the adventures of the famous five. There are numerous others, of course, but I enjoyed reading these three the most when I was a child. Buckeridge, who died last year at the age of 92, was the subject of The Archive Hour: Fossilised Fish Hooks! Jennings at the BBC on Radio Four (Saturday), an affectionate tribute as well as an exploration of Buckeridge’s influence on radio comedy.
The presenter Miles Kington said that in returning to Jennings after all these years he was surprised to discover that, although the stories were full of schoolboy jokes and slang, they were very funny and cleverly plotted. The books are still in print, unlike other now-forgotten children’s writers of the past. The playwright Alan Ayckbourn felt that the Jennings stories were sunnier than, say, Billy Bunter and Greyfriars, which he thought contained an unpleasant, darker side. Ayckbourn had drawn some inspiration from Jennings when he was at his own prep school. He’d become fascinated by Jennings’s friend Darbishire, who gets him out of many scrapes, and wanted to play him in his own adaptation of Jennings at School, his first play, but at the last minute he fell ill and couldn’t take part. The novelist Jonathan Coe said that Buckeridge had been heavily influenced by P.G. Wodehouse, and reading them both you could see the stylistic similarities, a view also held by Valentine Cunningham, professor of English at Oxford. Coincidentally, both Wodehouse and Buckeridge went to work in banks after leaving school, only to realise soon that they weren’t bankers.
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