Michael Rosen on the surprising reason why parents want to 'strangle' him

Thirty-six years ago, author Michael Rosen and illustrator Helen Oxenbury created one of Britain’s most iconic children’s books. We’re Going on a Bear Hunt, the offbeat story of a family hunting the titular bear through mud, snow and a dark forest, has sold 14 million copies and been adapted into a Channel 4 animation.

It is beloved by generations of children and their parents. But Michael and Helen never worked together again – until now.
The pair published Oh Dear, Look What I Got, a new children’s picture book, earlier this week. So why has it taken since 1989 for such a successful team to get back together?

Speaking to Michael and Helen, in the latter’s elegant North London townhouse, there isn’t a particular reason – it just never quite happened.

“I don’t get to choose who illustrates my books, the publishers do,” says Michael, an enthusiastic, warm 79-year-old. “It’s rather like how producers, not scriptwriters, decide who stars in their movie. It’s who they think will work best. I might sometimes get three or four options and I’ll say I like one of them, but the publisher won’t necessarily take any notice. You sort of have to trust them!”

Michael has gone on to work with many other notable illustrators, including Quentin Blake, famous for the Roald Dahl books, and Tony Ross, who illustrated David Walliams’s children’s stories. While Helen has collaborated with writers such as Martin Waddell, with whom she created Farmer Duck, and her late husband, the author and illustrator John Burningham, who provided the artwork for Ian Fleming’s children’s novel Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

Their work includes There’s Going to Be a Baby. She also created her classic board books for babies. But they were both delighted when the publishers of Oh Dear, Look What I Got! decided they should finally be reunited.

“When the publishers told me Helen was interested, I whooped, danced around the room several times and went skipping down the corridor,” says Michael. Helen, 87, says: “I get a lot of manuscripts, but it can take me a year to work on a book, so I wait until something really appeals to me. That’s not very often. This story did because it feltdifferent, with Dr Seuss-like qualities.”

Oh Dear, which is aimed at under-fives, tells the story of a young boy desperately trying to buy things from a series of shops, but being given things that sound similar. Aparrot instead of a carrot. A cat instead of a hat. “Do I want that?” he asks each time. “No, I do not!”

“That format had such intriguing possibilities, from an illustration point of view,” says Helen. “Giving a hint of what the boy isgetting, such as a tail sticking out of a parcel, then revealing it on the next page.

“I think the book will appeal to young children because it reflects the way they are learning language, at that age,” adds Michael. “Maybe they think they didn’t say ‘carrot’ clearly enough or didn’t quite understand a word.”

Despite their admiration for each other’s work, they worked on the book quite separately. “As an illustrator, you can’t have someone standing over your shoulder,” smiles Helen, probably only half-joking. Did she make suggestions to Michael about the words? “There was a small comment,” Michael interjects. “So I rewrote something at the end of the book. But not much. It’s a fairly independent process.

“It’s different for some people. The late, great Allan and Janet Ahlberg worked closely together in the same room. But I’m of the opinion that it’s my job to write the words, then hand them over for Helen and the publisher to make them into a book. I once had a tiny disagreement with Quentin Blake about an illustration of a clothes horse, but that sort of thing is very few and far between!”

Michael feels that children’s publishing has changed radically since he and Helen last collaborated. “Publishers are working authors and illustrators harder to produce more books in a shorter space of time.

“When there were more libraries and schools bought more books, they would sell consistently over many years and had a much longer shelf life. Now, publishers measure success over how many books sell in the first couple of years. If it shifts 5,000 copies, say, that’s fine, then you move on to the next one. I think that makes the stories being produced a little more generic.”

“I don’t know what’s happened to the adventure in children’s books,” says Helen. “People seem terrified of a bit of scariness, which is a shame because kids love it!”

A recent National Literacy Trust survey found that less than one in three eight to 18-year-olds and 44.5% of five to eight-year-olds enjoy reading in their spare time. These are the lowest figures since the trust started polling these groups in 2005 and 2019, respectively. “The closure of public libraries is a big factor,” says Michael.

“And our longing for a story has been powerfully satisfied by film and digital media of one sort or another. You see young children with a phone, rather than, say, a Disney picture book, and the parent has a phone, too. They aren’t learning the fun of reading a book as much.”

“A lot of the problem is down to Michael Gove and the closed curriculum he introduced under David Cameron,” Michael continues. “There was too much emphasis on learning facts and measuring attainment of very specific goals. Teachers couldn’t be as creative in the way they worked with children, or spend as much time sitting down reading them stories.

“I’ve heard, anecdotally, of headteachers seeing young children reading books together in a classroom and asking the teacher, ‘What are they doing? That’s not learning.’ But when children read a book or someone reads one to them, their minds are asking questions ‘Where’s the bear? What is it doing?’ and they’re discussing it.

“That fires their imagination and brain development. The problem is, it’s the sort of learning that’s hard to measure, but it’s hugely important. The Labour Government has done an interim curriculum review, but we don’t really know how they are going to change things around reading. Everything is still up in the air.”

But Michael, who presents Radio 4’s long-running series on the evolution of language, World of Mouth, doesn’t think that the standard of language has gone downhill, as people often claim.

“We’re human beings and, as long as we’re communicating with each other, we’ll invent new ways of talking. Everything from Shakespeare to RAF lingo coming into mainstream use after the war – saying ‘pranging’ instead of crashing – has changed the language. It just happens faster now because of sharing things through the internet and social media.

“I love the way some modern comedians pick up on shifts in language. Paul Chowdhry on different Asian slang, for instance, or Kevin Bridges on the way Glaswegians use ‘how’ instead of ‘why’ in questions.”

As Helen and Michael launch their new book together, how do they feel about the phenomenon that was We’re Going on a Bear Hunt – with its famous, repeated line ‘We’re not scared’ – looking back?

“I’m very grateful for its success,” says Helen. But she adds, self-effacingly: “When I read it now, I can see things that aren’t quite right. ‘Look at how I drew that leg! That’s not as it should be!’.”

“I think the illustrations are wonderful,” says Michael. “The countryside is drawn in such a way that you can imagine that it could be almost anywhere you’ve played with your mates or went on holiday. The muddy bit reminds me of the River Wade in Cornwall. Other bits could be Pembrokeshire or Northumberland.

“You never quite know why a book does well or has such intergenerational appeal. The idea of a bear hunt is very simple, but there’s so much more to it, emotionally. People say it resonates because it’s about overcoming problems – ‘We can’t go over it. We can’t go under it. Oh no! We’ve got to go through it!’

“Adults find that sort of thinking very useful. You wake up on a work-day morning, put your head under the pillow, then you remind yourself you’ve got to go through it. It’s quite a good life message!”

Five years ago, Michael got Covid-19 and almost died, which he wrote about in his book Many Different Kinds of Love: A Story of Life, Death and the NHS.

Despite being nearly 80, not only is he a writer, poet and broadcaster, he is also Professor of Children’s Literature at Goldsmiths, University of London. Did his brush with mortality mean he now wants to fit as much into life as possible?

“I don’t do it consciously, but it does seem that when I wake up, I sort of think, ‘Oh, what am I doing today?’. Emma, my wife, sometimes says, ‘Well, you could do nothing’, and I look at her with horror. So, something is going on, deep down.”
Helen, as a hugely established figure in children’s literature, generally waits for new projects to come along, but says she doesn’t like waiting very long. “I get fidgety. Ratty. It wasn’t very nice for my poor husband.”

They have both achieved so much in the literary world. Helen has written or illustrated more than 100 books for children, selling more than 50 million copies. She and John Burningham, who died in 2019, were jointly awarded the Book Trust’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2018. Michael hasproduced more than 200 books for children and adults, and was Children’s Laureate from 2007 to 2009.

Does it feel good to have such a profound impact on generations of youngsters?

“It’s very nice to see your work on people’s bookshelves,” says Helen. “But I hope I’ve helped children have a laugh.”
“I’m afraid I’ve been reduced to a meme,” says Michael. “Nothing to do with Bear Hunt. My son did a YouTube video of me reading a poem about eating potatoes. The bit where I smack my lips and say ‘nice’ was turned into a meme by some American teenagers and has gone global.

“I get hundreds of people coming up to me in airports and railway stations asking me to do it. In China, I’m known as ‘Nice Grandpa’. When Chinese students are being inducted at Goldsmiths, they scream when they see me. But people do come up to me about Bear Hunt. They say, ‘I’ve had to read that story 9,000 times in the last week. Can I strangle you?’

“Well, the new book means we’re going to be everywhere again,” jokes Helen. “I sometimes read books I might do to my grandchildren,” Helen says. “I thought Oh Dear hadn’t made much impression. But then my daughter told me, ‘It has! The children constantly wander around saying ‘No, I do not’.”
“Oh, yeah, we’ll be everywhere!” Michael laughs.

Oh Dear, Look What I Got! by Michael Rosen and Helen Oxenbury (Walker Books, £12.99) is out now