anderswolleck

In his cartoon books Bunny Suicides and Return of the Bunny Suicides, Andy Riley has shown great talent in chronicling the adventures of extremely depressed but creative rabbits. Now in his new cartoon book, Great Lies to Tell Small Kids, he is taking pleasure in coming up with the best lies to tell other small, innocent but less furry creatures.

Andy Riley is a UK native who is best known as a writer on such television shows as Little Britain, Black Books and many more. He has just created his own television show, Hyperdrive starring Shaun of the Deads Nick Frost.

Andy Rileys Bunny Suicides have taken the internet world by storm and become a cult hit. Great Lies to Tell Small Kids should do the same with such witticisms as Every ant you meet must be named and Wine makes mummy clever.

Buy Great Lies to Tell Small Kids

Daniel Robert Epstein: Why do you have problems with cute things?

Andy Riley: Im championing cute things. I dont have any particular problem with rabbits. I would say the rabbit books are about ingenuity. Its fun to whack some rabbits, I dont know why. I actually thought about doing it with kittens or puppies for the second book but theres a reason why rabbits were better. The second book was going to be tortoise suicides. I threw that idea out, thankfully.

DRE: What about children? Theyre cute too.

AR: Yeah, Ive got a child. I started drawing the book just about the time he was born, which was exactly a year ago. It occurred to me that everyone lies to children, without exception, you just cant help it. It starts with a small thing like Theres no more chocolate left, is there? Little things like that and it builds from there.

DRE: Was it just reading all these parenting books that made you realize that?

AR: I did see a couple parenting books. The original inspiration was a friend of mine who told me something he was told when he was a kid. It was that when you hear the ice cream trucks music, that means theyve run out of ice cream. I was taken with that one. This is passed on through generations of parents and then I thought, well lets make up 90 new ones.

DRE: You have a new show coming out soon, right?

AR: Yes, this month. Its called Hyperdrive. Its coming out very well so Ive got high hopes.

DRE: Is your name well known over there?

AR: In the world of comedy, yes. But the newspapers dont go, Tonight! A new sitcom from Andy Riley. Im not that well known.

DRE: What was the impression people had when these books started coming out? Were they just one more thing you were doing?

AR: When youre a scriptwriter what happens is that when you talk to people in almost any other line of work, they dont regard it as being quite a real skill. I think thats because everyone harbors an idea that they can do it much better than anyone else, they just havent gotten around to it yet. Oh, I write scripts. What stuff have you written for? Black Books. Ive seen that, very funny. It doesnt get a big response. Whereas if you say youre a cartoonist, even the comedy writers eyebrows go up, Oh, you draw cartoons? Thats so clever. You get more respect for being a cartoonist than being a scriptwriter, which I find annoying because writing scripts is harder.

DRE: The kind of comics you do could be seen as easy, but I know its not.

AR: Yes, its easy once you have the idea. Having the idea is the hard part, actually drawing the cartoon, thats fun. There is some skill involved, but its the thinking up that does your brain in.

DRE: The Bunny Suicides is really popular in the US. I see people posting them online all the time.

AR: I know people post them on the internet. There was someone in Belgium who decided that he would scan in 100 pages of my cartoons and put them up on a website without any accreditation whatsoever. I like that people like them enough to toss them around. Im a bit annoyed with the first person that scanned them in because he damn well knew where they came from. He could at least put my name at the bottom, but I dont really mind. In the modern age, you have to let a few downloads go. You cant insist that everyone send you money every time they look at these things; the world isnt like that anymore.

DRE: What kind of response do you get from the US fan mail-wise?

AR: Not much. In Britain Ive gotten a lot of complaints from rabbit charities.

DRE: Really?

AR: Oh yeah. There was this charity called Bright Eyes. Then there was the Brown Hare Preservation Society, they didnt like it either. It surprised me because it wasnt about hares, it was about rabbits. They couldnt tell the difference. Youd think the Brown Hare Preservation Society wouldve have figured out there isnt a single hare suicide in there.

The American response is slightly different. Often Americans go, Why are these rabbits so depressed? British people never ask that question. I think theres just a slightly deeper culture of psychoanalysis in America. Whereas I think in Britain, people look at the rabbits committing suicide and they just assume thats what the rabbits want to do. That it is their own business and its best not to inquire. The British think about rabbit privacy and the Americans try to rationally connect with the rabbits.

DRE: The Americans want to give them Zoloft so they have to keep paying the pharmaceutical companies.

AR: Yeah. I dont get a real particular Canadian response.

DRE: What do you use to draw the books?

AR: Its all very old school. I use Indian ink and a pen. I do it like they did it in the 19th century, which is great for making things handmade. You can make very clean-looking things on the computer, but Im not really too interested in that.

DRE: I think its very interesting that you consider the bunnies cartoons about ingenuity.

AR: Yeah, its really not about the depression at all. Exactly why the rabbits do it, I have no idea. Its all about methods of doing it; any old fool could shoot themselves or jump off a cliff, but its the very strange, roundabout way they do it that I like. They have their own internal logic. I dont fully understand it, but it works.

DRE: When you walk around do you see things that make you think of new ways the bunnies can kill themselves?

AR: No, I dont tend to have ideas walking around like that. I drink coffee and go to the shed in the garden. Then I sit down and I work with a sketchpad. I go Im going to have an idea now. Thats when all the stuff you see on the street filters through and comes together. It mostly happens when I apply myself.

DRE: Did you have the same process with the Great Lies book?

AR: Yeah. I go to the shed at the end of the yard, sit down and do it. It worked for Roald Dahl. He went and just wrote from nine to five everyday in the shed. Its a good way to get stuff done because I dont go around with a little tape recorder. I tried once but it put too much pressure on me. I felt guilty at the end of the day because I hadnt filled it up.

DRE: I would assume its not the same thing for the television shows you work on because you write with other people.

AR: Those are partnerships, so thats very different. Thats my main job; I do that five days a week. I squeeze in cartoons in the evenings and weekends. Writing in the partnership is basically having very long conversations where I take notes. You can actually work a lot more efficiently that way. When you write on your own you can often spend half a day staring at the wall. When there are two of you, you never have to discipline each other.

DRE: Correct me if Im wrong, I believe there used to be a time in British comedy where the guys that did a lot of TV, used to put out a lot of books. I remember that John Cleese had a comic strip at one point, Eric Idle used to put out all these books and Dudley Moore as well. Is that still true today?

AR: Oh yes. It happens. Its just that the ones that you mention are British performers who have cracked America and have a very big profile there. There arent many of them around. The League of Gentleman is big in Britain, but not very big in America, they put out books and graphic novels. Ricky Gervais does childrens books called Flanimals.

DRE: Do you feel that youve cracked America with these books?

AR: I dont think so. They seem to be steadily selling in a culty way, which makes me very happy. Britain is very different because its all about the Christmas market. In Britain, my sales graph is very low for the entire year except December. Then the books suddenly double their sales every week until just before Christmas. Then in January it crashes down towards nothing. Its not quite like that in America, it sticks along very nicely.

DRE: So in the UK people only read around Christmas time.

AR: With the little books that I put out, yeah. Its very much the thing that people buy at Christmas for their friends and then they read it themselves.

DRE: Now when you write for TV, do the executives know the books? Are they like, Wed love jokes like you do in your books.?

AR: Not especially. Theyre kind of unconnected. Most of the people that I work with now are aware of the books or at least have seen them a little bit, which is nice. But it doesnt really affect what people ask me for.

DRE: Youre one of many people who has worked on the screenplay for Gnomeo and Juliet.

AR: Its principally me and Kevin [Cecil]. We wrote a draft three years ago. Then we were brought back. It is all up to Disney. Weve had an on and off relationship with it. Its like an ex-girlfriend who keeps looking you up. Also we did a rewrite of Corpse Bride.

DRE: Thats cool!

AR: Yeah, I havent actually seen it yet because I dont go to the cinema so much. So annoyingly, I dont know if any of our stuff actually got in it. We knew one of the producers so he brought us in to have a crack at it. We spent about two days sitting down with Tim Burton to talk about what he wanted to do.

DRE: Whats Hyperdrive about?

AR: Hyperdrive is a science fiction sitcom set 150 years in the future. Its about the British space force so essentially it is an armed forces sitcom. Its more like Sgt. Bilko than a regular sitcom. Its lots of little workplace niggles about where you go to find pens and little gadgets dont work properly. It also has massive alien invasions happening at the same time. Its that clash of very small things and very big things and the effects are absolutely terrific.

DRE: Have you heard of Warren Ellis comic book Ministry of Space? Its about the British space force as well.

AR: No. I dont know that one.

DRE: Its not like your show. In that book theres a secret to how the Brits started their space force.

AR: I even go to comic shops and Ive never seen it. This sort of thing happens in writing all the time. People have similar ideas completely independently. I think most people go around saying So and so ripped so and so off! Its never normally true. I know two comedians who at the same time, independent of each other, wrote a routine about Apollo astronauts going to the hairdressers with exactly the same jokes in it. Hairdressers are a bit of a comedy staple in Britain. Apparently all hairdressers ask you where youre going on your holidays, I shave my head so I dont really know. The comedians both did stuff about when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin go to the hairdressers. The hairdresser goes, Are you going anywhere nice this season? Oh, I thought I might go visit my brother, he lives a couple hundred miles out. Might go there. Oh, really? Go see your brother. Yeah, yeah. You didnt fancy the moon? The two of them had to have a little meeting to decide who owned it. I think they tossed a coin. Also in the 1950s we had the comic book Dan Dare who was in the British space force. He was the biggest British comic character of the 1950s.

DRE: Ministry of Space is a very good book, you should check it out.

AR: I definitely will now.

DRE: Did you ever do standup?

AR: No I never did. I tried once when I was a student but it became quickly apparent it wasnt really for me. I dont like working in the evenings for one thing because it threw my timing all off. I could write the material, but I couldnt quite do it so thats why I became a comedy writer. Ive worked with some extremely good comedians. I can sit around, have ideas with them and operate at their level. But I cant perform it.

DRE: How did you get into television?

AR: I started writing for the radio because theres actually still comedy produced on the radio in Britain. I started out on that, principally because I wasnt having any luck at the time selling my cartoons. To be a cartoonist was always my intent and I got sidetracked into being a comedy writer, which is fine because I really enjoy it.

DRE: Are you working on new Bunnies book or another cartoon book?

AR: Ill be putting out another book next Christmas. I have couple pretty good ideas about what its going to be, but I wont tell you now. I havent even had the proper conversation in my head as of yet.

DRE: Will it be another one page gag type of thing?

AR: Itll be exactly the same dimension and exactly the same number of pages as the other books with an equally garish cover on the front. I might go for yellow this year.

DRE: What do you know about SuicideGirls?

AR: When I put Bunny Suicides into Google a year and a bit ago, I found out that lots of people love SuicideGirls. There are lots of pretty ladies. I looked at the pictures of the nice, pretty, Goth ladies. Also I work with Nick Frost and Simon Pegg quite a lot. They got interviewed on SuicideGirls recently so I looked at your interviews a couple of times. Hyperdrive has got Nick in it as the lead.

DRE: Nick is so great.

AR: Yes hes absolutely fantastic and this is his first go as a leading actor. I think hes a little bit nervous because hes never had that number of lines before. As you know, hes not actually a trained actor. I think he looked at the sheer amount of pages he had to get through and went, Fucking hell. Ive got a lot of stuff. But hes really good. We always fancied him for the lead.

DRE: How many episodes are you going to be doing of Hyperdrive?

AR: Weve done six for the first series. You know how short British series are. In America wed have to do 13 or 24 or whatever and we would have had to hire a team of writers. Then wed all be making more money than we do in Britain. Here its always short runs with always the same one or two writers.

DRE: You guys that work get a lot of work. Then you got to wait for the next group of guys to break in.

AR: Yeah, also all the comedy writers basically know each other. Even if theres one you dont know, you get to know the people that do know that person.

Ive got some experience in American television because weve made a pilot about four years ago, which very nearly got on The WB Network. We were going to make it and move out to LA with our wives.

DRE: What was the pilot?

AR: It was called Slacker Cats. It was a slacker comedy about some cats. We didnt want to have people in cat suits so it was animated. It very nearly got on the WB until they axed their other two animated shows. So even though they liked ours enough, they said, We havent got an animated show that we can partner it with. We jumped every single hurdle except the last one. It was quite frustrating. There are a vast, infinite number of Jewish comedy writers that are all really good at it. So when you have a show that works fantastically well like Friends or Seinfeld or something, then its fantastic. You have 26 episodes a year instead of six. In Britain, Seinfeld wouldve run for three seasons with 18 episodes. On the other hand, it does sometimes flatten out rough edges and spikes that make things interesting. Ive been around American networks and I know how oppressive they can be with all the executives leaning over you, picking over every word. The whole thing has become about pleasing executives rather than making it funny. We have a lot more freedom in Britain because there is less to do.

DRE: Each show becomes almost a miniseries because often they have a beginning, a middle and an end.

AR: Well some do. The Office does.

DRE: Coupling as well.

AR: I havent really watched much of Coupling.

We have sort of a series arc in Hyperdrive, but with the world the way it is, people rarely watch every episode of something. There are just too many bloody channels. Youre lucky if you can make them watch one episode. So arcs can actually be quite dangerous. If you cant follow whats going on quite quickly thats when peoples thumb are quivering saying, Turn over, turn over! Theres a documentary about Nazis on the other channel.

DRE: Theres always something about Nazis on.

AR: Ive got History Channel, U.K. TV History, Discovery Civilizations so at any given time theres always something with Stuka dive bombers and then the Nuremberg rallies. You just cant move from Hitler.

DRE: Hes always got a lock on ratings.

AR: Apparently magazine editors found that if you just put Nazis or dinosaurs on their covers. More copies of the issue will sell. If you speculate that he was gay then everyone pays attention.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck