Quentin Blake

Desert Island Discs: Archive 2005-2010

BBC

Society & Culture, Personal Journals

4.4 • 804 Ratings

🗓️ 1 October 2006

⏱️ 37 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Kirsty Young's first castaway is one of our most popular illustrators, Quentin Blake. His work is immediately recognisable and is full of energy, anarchy and joy. An award-winning author in his own right, he is best known for his long collaboration with the author Roald Dahl. In the same way that it is impossible to think of Alice in Wonderland without imagining Tenniel's solemn drawings, when one imagines Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or James and the Giant Peach it is invariably Quentin Blake's pictures that spring to mind.

As a child growing up in the London suburbs he was self-contained, quiet and serious. Family friends remember that he didn't say much - but that he always loved drawing. His cartoons were first published in Punch when he was 16, making him one of its youngest ever contributors, but after graduating from Cambridge and training as a teacher, he decided his future lay not in one-off sketches for magazines, but in book illustration. He was named the first ever Children's Laureate in 1999 and in 2005 was awarded the CBE. He lives in London and continues to work towards the establishment of a museum celebrating the history and techniques of illustration.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: String Quartet No 2 - Intimate Letters by Janácek Book: Collected Works by Charles Dickens Luxury: Arches watercolour paper

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, it's Nicola Cochlin. Young people have been making history for years, but we don't often hear about them. My brand new series on BBC Sounds sets out to put this right. In history's youngest heroes, I'll be revealing the fascinating stories of 12 young people who've played a major role in history and who've helped shape our world. Like Audrey Hepburn, Nelson Mandela, Louis Braille and Lady Jane Grey,
0:24.7	History's Youngest Heroes, with me, Nicola Cochlin.
0:27.8	Listen on BBC Sounds.
0:30.3	Hello, I'm Krista Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive.
0:35.2	For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
0:38.4	The program was originally broadcast in 2006.
1:01.2	My castaway this week is artist and writer Quentin Blake.
1:09.9	For more than 50 years, his work as an illustrator has brought to life the characters and fantastical happenings in some of our most treasured children's books.
1:12.7	His style is, in itself, almost a definition of childhood, exuberance, subversive, chaotic and spirited, drawings with a degree of
1:19.0	innocent optimism that can be almost painfully touching, but never sickly sweet. Quentin Blake,
1:25.4	it's almost impossible to imagine books like James and the Giant
1:29.1	Peach or the BFG without the drawings that seem to have sprung from your pen. Is it a pen
1:36.2	you use when you're drawing? It's mostly a pen I use. I use an assortment of things. What I like best
1:42.8	is a scratchy pen. It's an old-fashioned writing pen, and it's called
1:47.1	a Waverly nib, and you can feel it when you're drawing. You know, you can feel the shapes that
1:53.1	you're making. That's what I mostly use, but I mean, as I get older and do it more often, I sometimes
1:59.1	use reed pens or I use a quill.
2:02.1	A few years ago I was given a vulture's wing feather,
2:05.2	and I thought this would make a marvellous quill.
2:07.4	So I cut it and drew vultures with it.
2:10.2	And since then I've been getting parrots feathers to draw parrots with
2:14.0	and swans feathers to draw swans with.
	...

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