It’s been more than 50 years since a little bear from darkest Peru found himself homeless and alone on Paddington station wearing a tag saying “Please look after this bear. Thank you”, before being adopted by the Brown family. In that time Paddington Bear has acquired ursine national treasure status in the UK and is equally adored abroad: Michael Bond’s 26 Paddington books have sold more than 35m copies worldwide and have been translated into 40 languages. And this weekend sees the release of the first Paddington feature film, which stars Hugh Bonneville, Nicole Kidman, Sally Hawkins, Jim Broadbent and Julie Walters, with Ben Whishaw providing the voice of the bear. An accompanying Paddington “trail” around London features 50 small statues of the bear decorated by celebrities ranging from David Beckham and Benedict Cumberbatch to Boris Johnson. The statues will be auctioned for charity at the end of December.
“Paddington’s very real to me,” says Bond, when we meet in the study of the London home in Little Venice he shares with his wife of 33 years, Sue. It’s filled with mementos of the character for whom the 88-year-old author has spent more than half his life creating adventures. “I think it’s something bears have. So he comes around with me in spirit and I think an awful lot of stories start because you see a sign or you hear some conversation and you think ‘what if?’.”
Those “what ifs” have led not only to the books but also 56 episodes of the 1970s BBC animated films, a stage play, picture books, annuals, a strip cartoon, a cookery book, a guide to London and, of course, merchandising. Piles and piles of it, enough to fill dedicated “Paddington and Friends” shops and a concession at Selfridges. And Paddington toys are expected to be back on children’s Christmas lists this year with the new film. Bond himself was baffled at some of the requests that came to him in the early days of Paddington-mania – “Toilet rolls with a picture of Paddington! That was an easy one to say no to.” The first Paddington licensee, who produced the classic soft toys dressed in duffel coats, hats and little Dunlop wellies, was designer Shirley Clarkson, who made the very first Paddington Bear as a Christmas present for her young son (and future Top Gear presenter) Jeremy.
It’s an extraordinary level of success for a British children’s book character who doesn’t play quidditch – one matched only perhaps by that other endearingly bumbling bear, Pooh. So to what does Bond attribute the great affection his creation inspires? “Paddington is eternally optimistic and always comes back for more, no matter how many times his hopes are dashed,” says Bond. For him, it’s simply the joy of a little bear who is an outsider getting into scrapes and mishaps – always with the best of intentions – and coming out on top every time. Add that timeless appeal to adventures that are contemporary (the last book, Paddington Races Ahead was pegged to the 2012 London Olympics) and Bond makes the point that although the character has stayed exactly the same, the world has changed and the stories move with the times. The other thing about Paddington, he adds, “is that he stands up for things, he’s not afraid of going straight to the top and giving them a hard stare”.
Studio Canal and the British Board of Film Classification narrowly missed feeling the full force of a hard stare after Paddington was awarded a PG certificate rather than the U that would be more usual for a children’s film of this type, due to “mild bad language” and “mild innuendo”. Bond, who had yet to see the film when the rating was confirmed, was reportedly dismayed at the prospect of sex and swearing, declaring that he would be very upset and “might not sleep well”. Fortunately, a muffled “bloody” and the sight of Downton Abbey’s Hugh Bonneville cross-dressing as a charlady was the extent of the depravity, and a relieved Bond declared the film “a delight from start to finish”.
The film succeeds in capturing the humour and spirit of the original Paddington and also some of the pathos as he arrives in a cold, wet London in which “hardly anyone wears a hat or says hello”, and he yearns to find a home. Director Paul King weaves in some of London’s other immigration stories – filling the soundtrack is the calypso music of the Windrush arrivals who were settling in Notting Hill around the time that Bond was first writing his stories – and concludes with typical Paddington optimism: “In London nobody’s alike, which means everyone fits in.”
In 1958, when he was writing the first book, A Bear Called Paddington, Bond was partly inspired by memories of the evacuee children he saw pass through Reading station from London: “They all had a label round their neck with their name and address on and a little case or package containing all their treasured possessions. So Paddington, in a sense, was a refugee, and I do think that there’s no sadder sight than refugees.”
The books also feature Paddington’s best friend, Mr Gruber, a Notting Hill antique dealer and Hungarian refugee, who can empathise with Paddington as a fellow “outsider”. Bond based the character on his agent, Harvey Unna, who had escaped Germany just before the war – “He was about to have been made the youngest judge in Germany when somebody sent him a message telling him to get out of the country quickly, they’d seen his name on a list. So he arrived with about £10 in his pocket”.
Bond was born in 1926 in Newbury in Berkshire. His father, a “mild sort of person”, was a manager working for the post office and a stickler for rules. However, Bond sees something of him in Paddington: “My father was a very polite man and he always wore a hat. We’d go on holiday to the Isle of Wight and he used to go in the sea with his trousers rolled up and keep his hat on in case he met someone he knew and would have something to raise. He would have been mortified if he hadn’t.”
It was a happy childhood home. “I think the most precious thing you can give a child is your time,” Bond says. “And I think the next most precious thing you can give a child is an interest in books. If you’re brought up with books being part of the furniture, with a story being read to you when you go to bed at night, it’s a very good start in life. I never went to bed without a story when I was small.”
However, Bond’s school years were less idyllic. His C of E parents, who never went to church, sent him to a strict, fee-paying Catholic school, Presentation College, run by Catholic brothers who carried rubber straps for disciplining the boys. The school was chosen “for the simple reason my mother liked the colour of the blazer. She didn’t make many mistakes in life but that was one of them,” says Bond. He describes being “knocked about the head” by one particularly vicious master and cycling a long route to school to avoid getting beaten up by boys from the local state school, who would lie in wait.
As a result, although his parents would have liked him to go to university, Bond fled education at 14 and started work as a mail boy in a local lawyer’s office, earning 10 shillings a week. But by the age of 15 he was working for the BBC. It had set up a small transmitter in Reading and took him on as a “youth in training”, based on his childhood interest in building amplifiers and radio sets. A couple of years later, having narrowly escaped death when four bombs were dropped from a German plane on to the station, blowing the bottom of the building away, he volunteered for the airforce. His wartime experiences gave him the material and the confidence to write, along with a typewriter in the orderly room of his barracks in Egypt, and there he completed his first short story, which was accepted by the London Opinion. The magazine paid him seven guineas and left him thinking that he “wouldn’t mind being a writer”.
Bond continued to write short stories for magazines after returning to the BBC at the end of the war. He went first to the monitoring service in Caversham Park, which was full of foreign nationals listening to foreign broadcasts, so “there were an awful lot of interesting people – they all had a story to tell”, and then became a cameraman, eventually working on Blue Peter.
As the success of Paddington grew, Bond was forced to choose between his two careers and, in 1965, he gave up television to write full-time. He swiftly came up with the concept of The Herbs – a children’s show featuring Parsley the Lion and Dill the Dog – and partnered with the animation company FilmFair to write the scripts for that series, which the BBC commissioned to replace Bill and Ben, followed by The Adventures of Parsley. He was working with stop-motion director/producer Ivor Wood, who had made The Magic Roundabout, and who was keen to try animating Paddington.
The TV Paddington’s distinctive mix of 2D and stop-motion 3D animation was a great success and the BBC commissioned lots more episodes. As recently as 2012, Paddington was voted Britain’s best animated character of all time at the British animation awards.
Getting the right voice for Paddington wasn’t easy (a problem that resurfaced nearly 40 years later when Colin Firth, who was initially engaged to voice Paddington in the feature film, was replaced at short notice by the younger Whishaw). “A lot of very well-known people came and did their bear voices and it wasn’t totally right – you have a picture in your mind of what it’s like but it doesn’t exist really. Michael Horden came in and said ‘I don’t do voices but I’ll read the script’. So he read the script and he did what turned out to be the Paddington voice. As I wrote the scripts I could hear his voice saying the dialogue.”
The series introduced a much wider audience to the character, helped hugely, says Bond, by the timing. “It had the spot after children’s hour and before the evening news. It was the best of both worlds as it had the children there already and then grown-ups coming in for the news and seeing it as well.”
Bond has written other books, other series even. Olga da Polga is the guinea-pig star of a number of chapter books and picture books – and also the real name of the Bond family guinea pig (I’m introduced to Olga number six as she scampers about in the Bond home). There is also a long-running detective comedy series featuring Monsieur Pamplemousse, a French restaurant inspector. (Bond himself is a Francophile, spending a week each month writing in the flat he rents in Paris.) But it is Paddington to whom he always returns.
However, Paddington’s arrival took Bond by surprise. It was 1958, the year that his daughter, Karen, who is now managing director of Paddington and Company, was born but Bond didn’t set out to write a children’s book. Or even a book at all. “The first book started life as a doodle really because I had a blank sheet of paper and a typewriter and you know that nobody else is going to put any words on unless you do. I was looking around the room and we had this small bear, which had been a kind of stocking filler for my first wife, and I wondered, idly, what it would be like if it was a real bear that landed on Paddington station and I typed the first words down. The idea caught my fancy.”
His publisher, Billy Collins, suggested Peggy Fortnum as an illustrator and she brought the bear to life on the page. Paddington went on to be drawn by Wood, who developed the cartoon version for the TV series, David McKee (of Elmer and Mr Benn fame) and, most recently, RW Alley, who has been illustrating the Paddington books since the 1990s. Alley is based in the US. Bond says they have a “nice relationship” and he finds himself going out on missions with his camera to take pictures of particularly English objects that might need to appear in the background of the pictures, such as dustcarts and sports grounds. This has led Bond into some Paddington-esque sticky situations of his own, with security guards and even the police. “You can’t really take pictures these days without people accusing you of all sorts of things,” he says, rather bemused.
Bond has no intention of retiring either himself or his bear. He has just published a new Paddington book, Love from Paddington, a collection of letters from the bear to his Aunt Lucy, and has completed three chapters of a new novel-length Paddington book. “If you’re a writer, people don’t expect you to retire. I don’t want to retire, and I’m very happy and very lucky that I’m working. I don’t know what I’d do if I wasn’t.”
• Paddington is on general release.
