Original subtitles

A life is made up of a great amount of small incidents.

And a small amount of great ones.

An autobiography must therefore,

unless it is to become tedious,

be extremely selective,

discarding all inconsequential incidents.

And concentrating upon those that have remained vivid in the memory.

I went flying with the RAF in the Second World War.

Gloster Gladiators cooperate with the ground forces.

I flew straight to the point

where 80 Squadron should have been.

It wasn't there.

Below me there was nothing but empty desert, and rugged desert at that,

full of large stones and boulders and gulleys.

It was nearly dark now, I had to get down somehow.

I chose a piece of ground that seemed to be as boulder-free as any.

My wheels touched down,

I throttled back and prayed for a bit of luck.

I didn't get it.

I was unconscious for some moments,

but I must have recovered my senses very quickly,

because I can remember...

WHOOSH!

..a mighty whoosh as the petrol tank exploded.

Roald is on his way to his first day of active service flying for the RAF

against the Italians, in the desert of northern Libya.

He hadn't got to the base where he was supposed to be.

He hit a boulder. The whole thing burst into flames.

He pulled himself out,

and then lay on the ground while the plane was burning and while these

extraordinary guns started to go off.

The crash was so bad the plane was completely totalled, he nearly...

I mean, he nearly died.

I think he was very, very lucky to come out of that alive.

My face hurt most.

I slowly put a hand up to feel it.

It was very sticky.

My nose didn't seem to be there.

In the hospital in Alexandria, he lived in this world for six weeks,

I think, of total darkness, of uncertainty about where he was,

about what was going on.

The blindness must have been very frightening.

You're in hospital, and all you can hear are voices.

And then when the bandages come off, you know,

"Am I going to be able to see?" You know.

Blindness, not to mention life itself, was no longer too important.

The only way was to accept all the dangers and the consequences

as calmly as possible.

The crash clearly was incredibly important, because it became

the subject of his first piece of published work.

But I think it also may well have changed his personality.

He thought, and often said, that, um...

he felt something had changed in him as a result of this crash.

They were the head injuries that made him into a writer.

He exaggerated the crash quite a bit.

You know, this was a drama.

This was something fantastic to write about!

These extraordinary ideas, how do they develop?

Where do they come from?

They always, of course, start with some tiny germ.

Somewhere.

And you rattle it around, and...

..hope for the best, and build up a story.

I don't know, it's got to start with something.

When I was seven my mother decided I should go to a proper boys' school.

It was called Llandaff Cathedral School,

and it stood right under the shadow of the cathedral.

The sweet shop at Llandaff was the very centre of our lives.

To us it was what a bar is to a drunk, or a church to a bishop -

without it, there would have been little to live for.

But it had one terrible drawback, this sweet shop.

The woman who owned it

was a horror.

I've forgotten, for the moment, what the horrible woman in the shop was,

but... Mrs Pratchett.

Oh, she was Mrs Pratchett, that's right, yes.

She never welcomed us when we went in.

And the only times she spoke were when she said things like...

"I'm watching you,

"so keep your thieving fingers off them chocolates."

I think it was in school cap days.

It's very nice, because it's a sort of early version of a lot of things

that happen in the books later.

You know, these ingenuities.

Some kind of suitable revenge goes on, which is...which is very nice.

My four friends and I had come across a loose floorboard

at the back of the classroom.

One day, we lifted it up and found a dead mouse.

It was an exciting discovery.

"Hold on a tick," I said,

"why don't we slip it into one of Mrs Pratchett's jars of sweets?

"Then, when she puts her dirty hand in to grab a handful,

"she'll grab a stinky dead mouse instead."

When you're old enough to...

..and experienced enough to be a competent writer,

by then, you've become pompous and...

..adult, grown-up and...you've lost all your jokiness.

You don't have any...

And so, unless you are a kind of

undeveloped...adult,

and you still have an enormous amount of childishness in you,

and you giggle at funny stories and jokes and things,

I don't think you can do it.

The five of us left school and headed for the sweet shop.

We were tremendously jazzed up.

We felt like a gang of desperadoes setting out to rob a train.

We were the victors now, and Mrs Pratchett was the victim.

She stood behind the counter, and her small, malignant pig eyes

watched us suspiciously.

When I saw Mrs Pratchett turn her head away for a couple of seconds,

I lifted the heavy glass lid of the gobstopper jar,

and dropped the mouse in.

Well, I think Roald thought they'd got away with it.

But, in fact, of course, he hadn't.

The consequences, of course...

..hit hard.

We didn't speak as we made our way down the long corridor into

the headmaster's dreaded study.

He raised the cane high above his shoulder,

and as he brought it down...

..it made a loud swishing sound.

SWISH-CRACK!

And there was a crack like a pistol shot as it struck Thwaite's bottom.

"Harder! Harder!" shrieked a voice from over in the corner.

We looked around, and there was the loathsome figure of Mrs Pratchett.

GRUFF VOICE: "Lay into him!"

SWISH-CRACK!

You could hear your fellow...

..friends being caned.

And you knew you were next.

I mean, that's pretty tough.

I think it affected him a lot.

And, of course, it went through a lot of his children's literature.

Vicious people are much more interesting than nice, good people.

There's nothing more boring than a totally good person.

They've got to have quirks, and bad habits, and things like that.

You can have a nice one as well, chucked in there,

but if you had a book full of nothing but nice people,

it would be awfully boring.

"It's like a war!" Matilda said.

"You're darn right, it's like a war," Hortensia cried,

"and the casualties are terrific.

"We are the Crusaders, the gallant army fighting for our lives

"with hardly any weapons at all.

"And the Trunchbull

"is the Prince of Darkness.

"The foul serpent.

"The fiery dragon with all the weapons at her command."

Mrs Trunchbull in the movie is very, very like

Mrs Trunchbull in the book.

She's larger than life,

a grotesque adult who absolutely hates children and finds them

the most revolting things in the world.

Her way of punishing them is rather different, however, to the norm.

She likes to whirl them around her head, and throw them out the window.

CHILDREN GASP

Aaaaargh!

I never liked authority.

I've never got on very well in institutions.

Always...er, difficult.

But it's wrong, of course, to be like that,

because you couldn't run schools and institutions like that

if everyone was like that.

There shouldn't be too many rebels around.

There shouldn't be.

But you are one?

Well, I... Yes, but you get much mellower as you get older, you know.

I'm still a rebel in some respects, yes.

Very much so. I don't like conformists, people who conform.

At school, every boy in our house used to be given, each term,

a plain brown cardboard box with 12 chocolate bars in it.

And every...

Each of these, except for the one, which was the control bar,

and was always a coffee creme bar,

they were new inventions from a famous chocolate manufacturer,

and we were meant to taste them.

We were given them free, and we tasted them,

and there was a bit of paper in there, and we marked them all

from 0 to 10. I realised then, you see,

that this vast chocolate factory had in it a room,

a secret room, where fully grown men and women spent their entire time

trying to think up and invent new chocolate bars for children.

And I've never been in one, or seen one,

or met anyone who's worked in one, but they clearly must exist,

mustn't they?

ARCHIVE: Every big industry has its backroom boys,

where research and science take over.

The fascination of chocolates became immense when he was at Repton.

That was the seed,

the cocoa bean, that was planted for Charlie And The Chocolate Factory.

Willy Wonka was partially my father.

I think he based most of his adult heroes

on parts of himself.

Parts of his dreams of glory.

Parts and characteristics of himself that he liked in himself.

The inspiration that I've had from Willy Wonka,

it's just the idea that there should be no limits to your creativity.

Let free rein happen, and...

Just try introducing all sorts of

wild and wacky ingredients,

and see what happens.

Mmm! It's nice? Yeah, really good.

That's certainly got the crunchy cricket. Yes.

Did you know that he's invented chocolate ice cream so that it

stays cold for hours and hours without being in the refrigerator?

"That's impossible," said little Charlie, staring at his grandfather.

"Of course it's impossible," said Grandpa Joe.

"It's completely absurd."

"But Mr Willy Wonka has done it."

Somehow, he conjured up,

time after time, these magical stories,

and I think he did believe...

..that you have to believe in magic.

Roald wrote the screenplay

for the movie of Charlie And The Chocolate Factory,

and had very high hopes for it,

but he was very disappointed when they came to shoot it.

He thought Wonka was more mercurial and more weird,

and he had Spike Milligan in mind, and, in fact,

insisted that the producers do a screen test with him.

And Spike Milligan even shaved his beard.

They didn't like him, so it ended up with Gene Wilder.

He thought Gene Wilder just wasn't eccentric enough.

He was too soft.

Invention, my dear friends, is 93% perspiration, 6% electricity,

4% evaporation and 2% butterscotch ripple.

That's 105%.

Any good?

Yes.

Everything that happened in his life coloured what he wrote.

Everything.

When you finished school, you were very anxious to get a job that would

bring you to exotic places in the world.

Yes. Why was that?

Well, I think... If you think of the time, which was 1933, or '4,

there were virtually no aeroplanes flying you anywhere.

There weren't any. No commercial airline.

FOG HORN BLARES

It's impossible for young people today to understand the excitement

of getting on a boat and travelling solidly for three or four weeks

and finishing up in Africa among the coconut palms.

He joined Shell, he was a trainee oil executive of some description,

but he'd only joined Shell so that he could get to go to Africa.

That's where he wanted to go.

To me it was all wonderful, beautiful and exciting.

And so it remained for the rest of my time in Tanganyika.

Oh, I loved it all.

There were no furled umbrellas, no bowler hats, no sombre grey suits.

And I never once had to go on a train or a bus.

Finding himself in Africa must have been a revelation,

an incentive as well, I'm sure.

Of course, he could not know at that stage that he was going to be

the writer he was, but I'm sure that that sort of stuff silts down

in the consciousness and comes out later.

Now, these black mambas are real bastards.

Not only are they one of the few snakes that will attack without

provocation, but if they bite you, you stand a jolly good chance

of kicking the bucket in a few hours.

The black mamba is extraordinary, and I'm not sure if I know how to...

to draw a black mamba, but they're

pretty hefty and serious.

One morning, I was shaving myself in the bathroom,

and I was gazing out into the garden.

I was watching Salimu, as he methodically raked the front drive.

And then I saw the snake.

It was six feet long and thick as my arm.

It had seen Salimu and was gliding fast, straight towards him.

I yelled in Swahili, "Salimu!

"Beware, huge snake, behind you."

It would reach him in another five seconds.

I lent out of the window, and held my breath.

He waited until the very last moment,

when the mamba was not more than five feet away, and then...

..he brought the rake down hard,

right on the middle of the mamba's back.

I rushed down the stairs, absolutely naked,

grabbing a golf club as I went.

I shouted to Salimu, "What shall I do?"

"Stand away, Bwana! Leave it to me."

The boy hit it accurately, and very hard, on the head.

Salimu let out a great sigh, and passed a hand over his forehead.

"Oh, thank you, Bwana, thank you very much."

The first book I did was The Enormous Crocodile,

which, I suppose...

I mean, when I got it, it was the first book I'd done, you know,

and I was just sort of amazed to look at it,

but, of course, he had that background in Africa,

so that if it was, you know, this great, greasy river that he was in.

That, to him, was a real river.

It says he has hundreds of teeth, I think.

So I sort of came to do it with hundreds...

I mean, I started off drawing real crocodiles,

but real crocodiles are not like this at all.

They don't have teeth like that.

Real crocodiles have sort of wobbly mouths like that,

and they have a tooth here and there, you know,

sort of thing. But this has...

And of course, what it is...

..you know, it's specially for eating children.

CHANTING AND SINGING

"Soon," he thought, "one of them is going to sit on my head,

"and I'll give a jerk, and a snap.

"And after that, it will be - yum, yum, yum!"

SQUAWK

At that moment there was a flash of brown.

It was Muggle-Wump, the monkey.

"Run!" Muggle-Wump shouted to the children.

"All of you, run, run, run!

"That's not a seesaw! It's the enormous crocodile,

"and he wants to eat you up."

I'm quite prepared to have them

killed in the most grisly possible way,

like having little boys from Eton pulled out of the windows

and eaten by giants, bones crunched up and everything.

That's fine as long as there is a whopping great laugh

at the same time.

Will you warn your controller that this looks like yet another attack?

SIREN WAILS

VOICE OVER RADIO - INDISTINCT

At exactly ten o'clock, I was strapped into my Hurricane,

ready for takeoff.

Well, six months after his crash, he found himself in one of these,

a Mk I Hurricane,

with only two hours flying experience in this,

flying to Greece.

Two days after he got there, he found himself flying in combat

for the first time.

I took off and climbed to 5,000 feet.

I cruised around, admiring the blue sea and the great mountains.

I'm just beginning to think to myself that this was a very nice way

to fight a war, when the static erupted.

STATIC BUZZES

Bandits over shipping at Chalcis.

I cleared the top of the mountain range with 500 feet to spare,

and as I went over,

I saw a solitary goat, brown and white, wandering on the bare rock.

GOAT BLEATS

"Hello, goat," I said aloud,

"I bet you don't know the Germans are going to have you for supper

"before you're much older."

To which, as I realised as soon as I'd said it,

the goat might very well have answered,

"And the same to you, my boy,

"you're no better off than I am!"

Suddenly, I spotted the bombers.

They were Junkers, 88s.

I counted six of them.

All six rear gunners began shooting at me.

Quickly, I turned the firing button from "safe" to "fire".

The odds for the British pilots in Greece at that time were terrible.

There were about 15, they had about 15 planes when Dahl arrived,

they had 14 before.

And there were over 1,000 German planes, you know,

and so they were totally onto a loser.

It's a very nice aeroplane to fly.

It handles really well.

They say it's a very good gun platform,

but I wouldn't want to get shot at in one.

I think he's a very brave man.

Only seven hours on type,

to then go into combat with it would be very scary.

The Hurricane gave a shudder

as the eight Brownings in the wings all opened up together,

and a second later, I saw a huge piece of his metal engine cowling,

the size of a dinner tray,

go flying up into the air.

Dear Mama, thanks for your telegrams.

We had great fun in Greece

although I must admit I was pleased to get away safely.

I arrived at the house here looking like a tramp, with nothing but

my flying suit and a pair of khaki shorts.

Incidentally, I got three German aircraft confirmed,

and two unconfirmed.

Lots of love to all, Roald.

We know they...

They flew alone and they came back,

or in many cases, didn't come back.

So that was extraordinarily, um...

That was old-fashioned heroism, really, I think.

The guilt that he was a survivor lay with him,

and in his ideas book, you can still see the names of the pilots

who flew there, which he's obviously written down much later,

and put an X against the ones who died.

Timber Woods, Oofy Still.

I mean, there were probably only two or three of the 30-odd pilots

in that squadron, around that time, who survived.

Those years...

..must have been terrifying.

And again, the losing of your friends, you know,

you come back and they're dead.

They've gone. They've been shot down.

And, again, it comes back to his books,

when you think of the children who lose their parents.

You know, and the lives that they have to cope with,

after the loss of a father or mother, or a great friend.

And he learnt to cope with that.

Did you like being a pilot when you were in the war?

Um, only the training part, really.

It's not much fun to fly an aeroplane and be shot at

at the same time.

So the answer, really, the honest answer, is no.

In fact, you started to write

when you were assistant air attache in Washington.

How, in fact, did it come about?

To be quite honest, I had no thought of writing at all,

right up to the age of, what, 20...something.

And I was wounded, a bit, in the war,

and sent to Washington,

and it was early days, and, erm...

I was sitting in my rather grand office in the British Embassy,

wondering what to do, and there was a knock on the door,

and I said, "Come in."

And a tiny little man came in, with thick glasses,

and said, "Excuse me, are you busy?"

And I said, "Not in the least, no.

"Do come in." And I thought he was going to ask for a job.

And he said, "My name's Forester.

"CS Forester."

I said, "Get on," you know, "You can't be that."

One of my heroes. Really?

A great...one of the great writers at that time,

Captain Hornblower and everything else.

The only pleasure I seem to get from life these days

is when you come home from one of your confounded adventures.

He said, "Now, you've been in the war.

"America's only just coming in. You've been in action.

"I'll take you out to dinner..." Lunch, it was.

"..tell me your most exciting exploit,

"and I'll write it up in the Saturday Evening Post

"and we'll get the British a bit of publicity."

Roald would be there,

looking very young and handsome at the time.

Of course, in uniform.

So we went out to lunch, and...

I remember we had roast duck.

And he was trying to take notes and eat this bloody duck

at the same time, you know, and he couldn't do it.

And I said, "Well, why don't I scribble it down for you

"this evening in sort of a rough way,

"and then you can put it right when I send it to you?"

And he said, "Ooh, that would be super."

"Would you do that?" And I said, "Of course I will."

So we finished our duck, and I went home that evening

and I wrote the thing out and sent it to him.

And I got a letter back, about a week later,

saying, "I asked for notes, not a finished story.

"I didn't touch it."

The Saturday Evening Post had bought it at once for $1,000,

the agent takes 10%.

Here's my cheque for 900 bucks, you see. Amazing stuff. Superb.

I thought, my God, it can't be as easy as all that!

If they hadn't had such a good lunch,

and had so much in common to talk about...

Who knows? He might never have been a writer.

I don't know.

But that was definitely a turning point.

Down once more,

squirting lorries all along

and watching the bullets making little flashes

where they hit the metal, and throwing up little spurts of sand

where they missed.

Time to be going now, up and home.

Hell's bells! What was that?

It felt like she was hit somewhere.

Flying high, high above the Earth,

gave him the feeling that he could write.

It gave him something to write about,

and that whole world of pilots,

the sky, the air...

The sort of sense of magic and escape,

and almost entering a different world,

like a world of his imagination...

All figure very strongly in those first stories he wrote.

I was met by Walt's number-one artist,

and taken to the Beverly Hills Hotel,

and after a bath and a shave

was driven up to the studio and ushered up to Walt's room.

The room itself is very magnificent, with sofa, arm chairs

and a grand piano.

Almost the first story that he wrote

after Shot Down Over Libya was called Gremlin Law.

And this was a story about these little creatures, the gremlins,

they were what the pilots and the engineers blamed

for unexplained mechanical failures.

Walt wanted to make a film of The Gremlins.

I think, suddenly being next to Walt Disney in a studio SO famous...

Ah! I mean... Fantastic.

Just fantastic.

He would give me all his best artists to work with,

and anything else I wanted.

"Oh, and by the way, I've put a car at your disposal

"for the whole time you're here."

I said, "Thank you very much,"

and followed him down to an enormous room where half a dozen

of his best artists were waiting with pencils poised

to be told what a gremlin looked like.

Let me see.

What do I think they look like?

I always like people who have...

..little horns...

'Terrifying odds, terrifying situations, and you had to be...

'..cool about it, you know.'

What happened if somebody was killed? They "bought it",

I think was the expression at the time.

Really, gremlins were a piece of fiction, if you like,

they were a piece of mythology that could move that off,

so you could talk about it but not have to talk about it with quite

the drama or seriousness that it would actually have, I think.

ENGINE ROARS

Every pilot knows what a gremlin is,

and every one of them talks about gremlins every day.

These little tykes with horns and a long tail,

who walk about on the wings of our aircraft,

boring holes in the fuselage.

SHRILL DRILLING

TINKING

And urinating in your fuse box.

Well, the film got quite a long way into production,

but the urgency to make the film fell away,

from Disney's point of view,

and, in fact, it never got finished.

Disney published a book based on the drawings and illustrations that had

inspired the animators, with Roald's original story.

And so, with the help of the gremlins,

a pilot was able to return to his flying.

But he was only one of many hundreds who have come to know and understand

the truth about these little people,

who have learned to love them,

to fear them,

and respect them.

He is, indeed, an unhappy man

who goes up into the sky to fight saying,

"I do not believe in gremlins."

MUSIC: James Bond Theme

My first little book I wrote was called The Gremlins,

which was bought by Walt Disney.

And Eleanor Roosevelt read it to her grandchildren,

and loved this book. And so I got invited to the White House.

And we got to know each other a bit, you know,

and I would go for weekends.

FDR had...his country place was called Hyde Park, a vast place.

And we used to go there.

I got to know him.

I was only a young chap of 26 in an RAF uniform,

and I had no business around there, really.

Didn't I read that you were a spy?

HE LAUGHS

No, that's an ugly word.

Spy!

No, I did. I worked for British...SIS, yes,

the last half of the war, when I was injured and couldn't fly.

Sure I did. Yeah.

We were going to have a picnic lunch in the garden with Franklin.

At one o'clock, an old Ford car came bouncing over the grass,

driving furiously, with two other cars,

full of the toughest looking thugs I've ever seen, in hot pursuit.

The President was driving the old Ford,

which is especially built so that the throttle and the clutch,

and everything else, can be operated with his hands.

In it was also Crown Princess Martha of Norway.

The President was relaxing, and seemed to be enjoying himself.

What he was doing was working in that very grey area

where British interests and American interests did not mesh,

and making sure that the British knew what was going on

behind the scenes in America.

ARCHIVE: Winston Churchill has crossed and recrossed the Atlantic

to confer on strategy and to plan future offence, not defence.

When Roald discovered that the Americans

were planning to destroy British civil aviation after the war,

that definitely got to Churchill,

who was... Roald was quite proud of the fact that Churchill was

incandescent with rage when he read it.

My job was to try to help Winston Churchill to get on with FDR.

And tell Winston what was in the old boy's mind in America, you know.

I was really not spying against the Americans,

I was trying to create amity.

So we move in very high circles.

So bloody high that sometimes it's difficult to see the ground.

There was this tall, good-looking RAF English guy.

And the Americans, of course, love the English.

So he had a ball.

But, also, he was fascinated by the politics.

He was definitely finding out information

for the British government.

That was exciting.

So he was...

He was the perfect spy, I think.

MUSIC: James Bond Theme

Roald met Ian Fleming when the two of them

were working in intelligence in New York,

and thought he was good fun, he was naughty, he was dangerous,

he had a bit of edge to him.

Roald had no idea that he would later go on to write

all the James Bond books.

Then in London they saw each other from time to time,

and it was no surprise,

when it came to writing a screenplay of You Only Live Twice,

that the producers turned to Roald rather than someone else to write it.

MUSIC: You Only Live Twice theme

ARCHIVE: Did you have a certain number of things that you had to do?

For example, Bond normally goes through three women in a film,

doesn't he? How many women does he go through?

I don't know what you mean by going through them.

Well, he disposes of them, they get killed,

they sacrifice themselves, you know?

Yes. Are you up to ration?

There's no question that you must stick to that sort of formula,

I think.

I asked that when I went in, first.

They said, "Oh, yes."

I said, "He wants a woman, doesn't he?

"To chase around and fall in love with,"

and they said, "Well, three would be better!"

MUSIC: You Only Live Twice theme

Action! I'm a spy.

I know that.

He had a pretty devastating effect on women.

I remember speaking to one person and she just said he was

the most attractive man in Washington.

He was 6'6" tall, he had these matinee idol looks,

he was in uniform.

He was, you know, a serving officer.

These famous actresses, these beautiful models,

these wealthy, influential beauties, they wanted to sleep with him.

He was perfectly happy to do that.

I remember a twinkle in his eye about Ginger Rogers.

I drove out to have dinner with Ginger Rogers.

Very nice girl.

But then it's also interesting that he gives it up.

FILM NARRATOR: The kind of woman who could enslave any man.

Except one.

Patricia Neal was a very celebrated stage actress at that point.

She'd been in successful movies like The Fountainhead,

and The Day The Earth Stood Still.

They're the kind of things that are,

you know, a bit weird, a bit offbeat.

Gort. Klaatu...barada...nikto.

The two of them fell into a very easy relationship.

They decided to get married, I think,

because they felt they would make beautiful children.

They were both, sort of, eager for marriage and it seemed a good bet.

During this part of his life he started writing short stories, and

is now an acknowledged master of the craft.

Collections of his stories like Kiss Kiss

and Someone Like You have become bestsellers all over the world.

How do you arrive at these plots?

I mean, what gives you the idea for a short story?

Obviously, the spark has got to come from something you see... Yes.

..somewhere, or something you hear. It's got to.

She carried the meat into the kitchen, placed it in a pan,

turned to the oven on high and shoved it inside.

Then she washed her hands, ran upstairs to the bedroom.

She sat down before the mirror, tidied her hair,

touched up her lips and face.

She tried to smile.

It came out rather peculiar.

It made very good television,

which lots of people got to know in the 1970s

as Roald Dahl's Tales Of The Unexpected.

I ought to warn you, if you haven't read any of my stories, that you may

be a little disturbed by some of the things that happen in them.

He'd spot a, sort of, psychological situation

and then insert a pretty convoluted plot, say,

like a woman murders her husband with, you know,

with a frozen leg of lamb and then serves...then cooks the leg of lamb

and serves it to the police officers, for lunch,

who are looking for the murder weapon.

It's just a matter of looking.

Find the weapon, find the man.

Hello, hello, who's putting in for promotion, eh?

So many of them are...

..husbands treating their wives badly.

I mean, I find that rather interesting,

because he's so often accused of not liking women, you know,

which was quite the reverse!

When I walked into his house for the first time, it was filled with women.

He had daughters, stepdaughters, you know, a wife.

He had sisters.

They were... It was this one man,

almost like a lion surrounded by a pack of lionesses.

He preferred the company of women to the company of men,

funnily enough.

And I think he got on with them better than he got on with men.

Your own story itself is stranger than fiction, isn't it?

I mean, it really is a remarkable story.

I mean, one minute you're a successful writer,

you're married to a beautiful film star, Patricia Neal,

and then a series of accidents, a chain of tragedies,

that are absolutely extraordinary...

Let's talk about Theo, your boy.

What were the sequence of events leading to that?

When he was a baby, his nurse pushed his pram into a taxi in New York,

and he got severe head injuries, which developed into hydrocephalus.

It's too much cerebrospinal fluid in the ventricles,

and you get pressure in there.

Your brain suffers damage unless you are very swift and quick

to relieve the pressure, and then you have to...

This was 16 years ago, and they did have a shunt,

or a tube with a valve in it,

where you could take...drain the fluid out of the ventricle and down

and put it in the place you hoped it would be all right in.

But they weren't very competent, the shunts they had in those days.

He had to keep going back and having new operations.

He had five. Because the shunts kept blocking, and I said, "Well, I mean,

"bugger this, we must be able to make a better shunt than this."

And so I thought of a lovely man who

I knew was an inventor, who I'd been flying model aeroplanes with.

Stanley Wade, his name was, in Wickham.

Well, who was Stanley Wade, then?

He was a very skilled engineer

who was very interested in model aircraft.

And what I'd admired so much about him was that, instead of buying

these tiny model aeroplane engines, he made them all himself.

He turned them in his workshop.

I said, "How about you doing this?"

He's an eccentric fellow, with nothing much to do, and he said,

"Yes, all right."

So the actual thing he used in a brain would be very much smaller?

Yes.

And the tolerances that he was working to were probably

plus or minus 1/1,000th of an inch.

And if you don't have good tolerances like that in something like a valve,

it's just not going to work.

We had the enormous advantage of the head of neurosurgery at Great Ormond Street,

Kenneth Till, was a tremendous co-operator in this, you see.

And he told me exactly what was wanted, and I told Stanley,

and Stanley slaved away over his thing and we...

He, you know, he really did it, not me.

ENGINE HUMS

Who was going to think like that?

And what doctor would actually listen to him and think,

"Well, that's quite a good idea, let's have a go"?

You know... That, to me...

Well, he never gave up.

He really believed that Theo could...

..have a normal childhood and become...

...a good person,

which, indeed, Theo is.

Saves the lives of thousands of kids all over the world.

He made sure it was never sold for profit.

That's just the kind of way he looked at a difficult situation.

"Well, what, practically, can one do to think one's way out of it?"

Sadly, Theo's accident was just the beginning, you know,

two years after, that his eldest daughter died

from meningitis following measles.

Eventually he picked himself up,

only to have, three years later, another disaster,

which was that Pat suddenly struck down by the most terrible stroke,

while making a movie in LA.

When she woke up from consciousness, she could neither speak nor,

of course, read or write or walk,

having a good deal of paralysis down the right side.

I was out for two and a half weeks, I think.

And the first thing I remember is singing songs.

And I was in the hospital, I think, a month altogether.

And then Roald, my husband, took me out one night.

And then I started trying to get well.

But I'm not well.

I must spend a year and hope to get well at that time.

My mother was three months pregnant with me

when she had three massive strokes.

She had just won the Oscar for Best Actress

for Hud with Paul Newman, so she was at the top of her career.

She could not walk, she couldn't talk, she couldn't read,

she couldn't write.

He was determined that he was going to get his wife back.

And so he flew everybody back to...the whole family back

to England, and he got everybody in the village in Great Missenden,

all his friends and volunteers, teaching her how to move her hands,

how to walk, and really, Mum and I learned

how to walk and talk together.

And what about words, as well? She obviously had a vocabulary,

a retained memory? She didn't have any, no.

When she started to pick up words, she made them up.

She, she used to...

When she used to say, wanted to say...

I made a whole list of them once and I don't know where they are.

She used to want to say, "You drive me crazy,"

she used to say, "You jake my diagles."

Which is a splendid phrase, you know.

I had all my words mixed up.

I said words that didn't exist.

She used to call a dry martini a red screwdriver.

Now I talk properly, I hope!

I think Dad thought, "Wow," you know, "There is,

"there's a whole other vocabulary here that hasn't been explored,

"but I could have a little bit of fun with," which he did,

in the Big Friendly Giant.

"I is not a very know-all giant, myself.

"But it seems to me that you is an absolutely know-nothing human bean.

"Your brain's full of rotten wool."

"You mean cotton wool?" Sophie said.

"What I mean and what I say

"is two different things," the BFG announced, rather grandly.

Please don't eat me!

You think because I'm a giant that I'm a man-gobbling canniable?

HE LAUGHS

Aar.

That's a good onion, isn't it?

I grew 100 of these this year.

We've just dug them up, and they're drying out now.

I wouldn't live anywhere else except in the country.

Here. I've never lived in the city.

And, of course, if you live in the country,

your work is bound to be influenced by it.

I suppose the most...

The one that was most dependent,

purely on this countryside around here,

is Danny, The Champion Of The World.

Except for the swift fluttering of its wings, the hawk remained

absolutely motionless in the sky.

It seemed to be suspended by some invisible thread,

like a toy bird hanging from the ceiling.

Then, suddenly, it folded its wings

and plummeted towards the earth at an incredible speed.

Oh, this was a sight that always thrilled me.

Dad knew every little nook and cranny of our village.

He knew every rabbit hole.

He knew every mole hole.

He knew... He knew everything about it and he loved it.

He had great admiration for all of it.

My father learned about the countryside because he had

a great friend that he met in the '40s

when he first moved to our village in Great Missenden,

called Claude Taylor.

Claude taught me everything.

His knowledge of the habits of wild animals,

be they rats or pheasants or hares, was very great.

And he was happiest when he was out in the woods, in the dead of night.

I think Claude gave him a lot of inspiration

for Danny, Champion Of The World,

Ah, Sweet Mystery Of Life,

Fantastic Mr Fox...

He liked the way they cheated,

the way they out did the wealthy farmers,

who probably treated them quite badly, and they had devious ways of

feeding their family.

I think the idea of poaching pheasants by feeding them raisins

with mashed up sleeping pills inside them was undoubtedly Roald's idea.

He did it with Claude Taylor, but it's a totally, totally Dahl idea.

BIRD SQUAWKS

This is ideal for pheasants.

This is just where they like.

There's a nice bit of thick cover there for them to go into,

out of sight of predators, and some nice open spaces for them.

Is this Roald? Or Claude?

This is Roald.

I can't remember what Claude looks like.

Do you know what he looks like? I think he was more... He was butcher,

I think he was quite a big man. Yes.

But it's lovely to draw these things in the dark.

What is very nice and very atmospheric is to do that torchlight

in the middle of the darkness.

Here's a little...

..little drugged pheasant.

Not quite flying.

This is a typical tree that they'd roost in.

And the poachers know that, probably better than we do.

GULPING

They gobble the raisins,

then feel sleepy,

then go up to roost.

And then the little buggers sleep so hard that they fall off their bough,

and we catch 'em on the way down.

I look at it this way, if anyone poached me,

that's how I'd like it to be done.

He and Claude got up to these tricks in the early 1950s,

and then you see it, more than 20 years later,

it comes out in Danny, The Champion Of The World.

One of the things he liked about the movie version of that was that

it caught the...the delight in simple pleasures of the countryside.

And it has a very cosy, simple, warm heart to it.

What do you think we should do with them, Danny?

Let them go.

Well said, lad.

I just have that feeling that in some ways, in the children's books,

or in some places in the children's books, he was able to express

feelings that he wouldn't have expressed coldly, as in...

just like that, I think. So you come to it innocently,

in a children's book, and, in a way,

I think it gave him a bigger gamut of emotional feelings

than he might have done anyway.

Dear Mama, we are planning a gigantic fire balloon,

to be 18 feet high and 12 feet wide.

It should lift at least one boy.

Huge sheets of tissue paper cut into sections,

and then you glued them together,

you'd paste...with glue, and then at the end,

he had a little round tin with methylated spirit...

Cotton wool soaked in methylated spirit, and that was tied on,

you know, like a parachute.

And then that was lit and it filled the tissue paper balloon.

We did it from our garden, and there are fields all around.

And we would just watch in awe every single time.

We would say, "Look at it! Look at it!

Look at it go! Do you think it's going to go left?

Do you think it's going to go right? Will it go backwards?

Which way d'you you think it's going to go?

And then the light would go further and further

and further away until it would fade away.

Both a man, a father and a mother,

should be sparky with their children,

and invent things and go places with them, you know, and...

Make bows and arrows or balloons, I don't know what.

But you have to do things with your children.

On looking back,

I think he knew his life was not going to be very much longer.

The Minpins, it was his swansong, I think.

The thought of being able to get on the back of a bird and fly, what...

..what... Nothing more wonderful could a child wish for, than that.

There was a brightness like sunlight below them.

And little Billy could see a vast lake of water, gloriously blue,

and on the surface of the lake,

thousands of swans were swimming slowly about.

The pure white of the swans against the blue of the water

was very beautiful.

It was...it was surprising to me,

when he wasn't there any longer.

Because he seemed kind of battered,

but as though he would go on and on.

So it was something of a shock when...

when he wasn't there any longer.

But, at the same time, I think he's still there.

I mean, he's very present for everybody, really, I think.

There's a wonderful quote at the end of The Minpins,

one of Dad's stories, and it says,

"If you don't believe in magic, you will never find it."

His spirit was so large, and so big, um...

It might sound a bit mad,

but because he taught us to believe in magic,

I feel like, in some magical way, he's always with me.

SHE LAUGHS