Interview: Frank Cottrell Boyce, author of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Flies Again

FOR a brief, tantalising moment I am able to fantasise about Frank Cottrell Boyce – who’s put words into the mouths of Derek Jacobi, Antony Sher, Colin Firth and Corrie’s Ken Barlow – making a book I wrote into a movie.

FCB penned the script for the Oscar-nominated Hilary And Jackie. He wrote 24 Hour Party People, Welcome To Sarajevo and A Cock And Bull Story, which encouraged Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon to believe there might be a terrific TV spin-off centring on their competitiveness re impersonations (there was: The Trip). But this is what he says to me, straight off: “Are you the Aidan Smith who wrote Heartfelt?”

Boyce was casting around for a football story. He considered my tale of swapping sides and supporting deadly rivals for a season. He considered tiny Gretna’s fairytale march to the 2006 Scottish Cup final. Eventually he went with a script about the Homeless World Cup. “Sorry about that,” he says, “but this is a fantastic tournament – I saw it in Rio – so I hope it can be a good film as well.”

I’ve got to trust him because he seems to know what he’s doing. He’s a successful children’s author as well. He’s helping the director Danny Boyle devise the opening ceremony for the London Olympics (more of that later). And he’s just been invited by the family of Ian Fleming to make Chitty Chitty Bang Bang fly again.

“I was hugely flattered to be asked but also a little surprised,” says Boyce, 52, when we catch up in his native Liverpool. “I think one of the family read my children’s book Framed and, because it features a little boy who loves cars, assumed I was a petrolhead. I didn’t like to tell them I’ve had the same car for ten years and that it’s a modest people-carrier.”

The dad-of-seven’s first cinema experience as a lad was the 1968 movie with Dick Van Dyke at the wheel. “It was all the family together, everybody washed, chocolates bought. When Chitty drove off the cliff and the screen went black for the intermission, the whole place screamed. Even now when I come across a heart-stopping scene in a story, I think of it as a Chitty moment. I read the book straight after and was amazed it was so different from the film – different villain, the mum’s not dead, and so on. I didn’t mind that, in fact it helped lead me into the world of fiction, because it seemed like I knew something no one else did.”

Sound credentials, then, but Boyce was still daunted by the project (he’s signed up for three books). “How do you follow not just Ian Fleming but also Roald Dahl who wrote the screenplay? I was going to be standing on the shoulders of giants.” Just as well he got that quote right, I say, unlike rockers Oasis with their mistitled album. Boyce laughs. “It’s easy to knock the Gallagher brothers for being a bit thick, but half of Queen went to Imperial College and yet on the song Killer Queen they talk of ‘gunpowder, gelatine’. Don’t they mean gelignite?”

But get this: Chitty is now a campervan. Isn’t he worried about accusations of sacrilege? “Not really. I was thrilled to discover there was a real car called Chitty Chitty Bang Bang; that seems to make mixing fact with fiction permissible. The real Chitty was a monster car with a Zeppelin engine built in 1922 by an eccentric racing-driver called Count Zborowski and was the subject of a Canterbury Council by-law banning it from the high street – possibly the first asbo.

“I love in the original how the whole family goes on the adventure – usually in children’s fiction the parents have to be got rid off first – so hence the campervan. I’m probably more anxious about upsetting campervan fundamentalists who’re like a weird little religious sect. But, joking apart, of course it’s intimidating, trying to take the story on. I was reading recently about the next Morecambe & Wise script meeting after their greatest-ever gag – you know, Andre ‘Preview’ Grieg’s Piano Concerto, and Eric muttering about how they could have got Ted Heath ‘for another five bob’. Follow that!”

Just as daunting, surely, must be Boyce’s Olympics gig. “Right now it’s Danny, myself and two other guys in a room next to the stadium and we’re drawing, cutting things up and, well, it’s a bit like Play School. No material is allowed to be removed from the room, ever. There has to be total surprise; even the participants on the day will be required to go: ‘What the hell?…’

The show to end all shows, then. Hope they opt for gunpowder and gelignite rather than that setting agent for jellies. v

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Flies Again (Macmillan Children’s Books, £10.99) is published on 4 November