Read Bernard’s latest blog piece for the Guardian.
C.S.Lewis said of story: ‘Nothing, I suspect, is more astonishing in any man’s life than the discovery that there do exist people very, very like himself.’ The same for girls and boys, too, of course. When ‘Break in the Sun’ was televised I was told of the comfort some children took from seeing a hero who was also a bed-wetter. Children need this kind of reassurance. Story is first and foremost imaginative entertainment, but as bonuses it throws light on other people’s lives, and brings the crucial comfort of identification.
Today books for young people are doing this better than ever, depicting identifiable life for British kids in all its breadth and complexities. How sad that the television industry is currently failing to do what it used to so well. Schools are criticised for their target failures, hospitals are castigated for needless deaths. Well, British TV – with caveats for the BBC - should be ashamed of its abject failure to meet the story needs of a nation’s young people. For their futures we’ve got to do so much better.
Bernard Ashley grew up in south London - where he still lives, three streets from where he was born. His screen writing credits include Running Scared, The Country Boy and the RTS award-winning Dodgem (BBC), and Three Seven Eleven and Justin and the Demon Drop Kick from his own book for ITV. He also scripted a BBC TV/Childline drama featuring Sean Maguire for Newsround. In addition two other of his novels have been adapted for the screen - Break in the Sun (BBC TV) and Terry on the Fence (Children’s Film and Television Foundation).
His first novel The Trouble with Donovan Croft (1974) was one of the early books to set a school story in the state system. Eighteen other novels of urban life have followed, and last year saw the publication of two thrillers for teenagers: Down to the Wire (Orchard), and Smokescreen (Usborne). He has been shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal three times. This summer his third Ben Maddox thriller – Flashpoint – was published by Orchard. In 2008 Frances Lincoln Books will publish Angel Boy and Usborne will publish Solitaire, his twentieth novel.
Of his work Philip Pullman wrote in The Guardian:
‘A commonplace setting, an everyday situation, ordinary characters. Bernard Ashley’s great gift is to turn what seems to be low-key realism into something much stronger and more resonant. It has something to do with empathy, compassion, an undimmed thirst for decency and justice. In a way, Ashley is doing what ‘Play for Today’ used to do when TV was a medium that connected honestly with its own time, and what so few artists do now: using realism in the service of moral concern.’
