Dr Simon Reads... BBC 500 Words (2016 Winners) - Children's Writing Contest

Dr Simon Reads … BBC 500 Words

If you missed it, I suggest reading the 500 Words 2017 post before going any further for way of explanation. The short version is, 500 Words is an annual writing contest set by the BBC for children of 13 and under, with three finalists from each of the two ages categories selected and read out by famous actors. Both the range and quality of stories are generally excellent and worth checking for yourself. Here, I just discuss the winners and point out why you should read them, or even better, listen to the celebrity readings. If you can access the BBC, try this link http://bbc.in/2jCr9e9

The Smoking Pipe by Fergus Gathorne-Hardy

Bronze Winner 2016 Age 5-9

“The river smells different when it’s full or empty. As we approached the Thames, the old brick warehouses looming on either side, we caught the rusty, smudgy scent of low tide. My dad lifted me over the wall to check the coast was clear.”

This is an atmospheric piece, a short vignette wherein not a great deal happens, but what does happen is captured in words in a wonderfully evocative fashion. The narrator is “mudlarking”, exploring the tidal zone of the river Thames with his father in search of treasures of flotsam and jetsam, an occupation as old as London. Once it was a way for the poor to scratch a living, now it’s the domain of hobbyists and urban explorers.

As a fog comes in, the narrator encounters a mysterious stranger who hands him an old clay pipe, and he is suddenly transported through time to an earlier age, before the noise of traffic. He is saved when he drops the pipe in fear of the mysterious stranger (“‘Proper peasouper’ came a whisper right in my ear, though I could see nothing. ‘You don’t want to be out in those, all sorts of brigands and cutpurses and vagabonds about…’ A cold finger that stank of seaweed touched my cheek.”) and returns to the same time zone as his father.

There’s an evocation of things Dickensian in this piece, the mysterious stranger bringing to mind both Pip’s first, and last, encounter with Magwitch, and the sudden change in sounds as the narrator slips through time. Fergus brings in all the senses – smell, sound and touch particularly, to really summon up a feeling of place and heighten the eeriness of the scene.

This was read by Raleigh Ritchie, aka Jacob Anderson, aka Grey Worm from Game of Thrones. It’s a little let down by sound problems with the microphone, there’s a bit of pop on the audio which they fix in subsequent reading by swapping to a different mike. Which is a shame, because this is a story that begs to be read aloud. Try the BBC Drama Company reading instead, or do so yourself in front of a log fire on a winter’s night, preferably in a big leather armchair.

The Great Cookie Quest by Ben Bailey

Bronze Winner 2016, Age 11-13

“Mum arrives to see me draining a bottle of milk over my open mouth and face to remove the taste of liver. Grounded for attempted cookie theft and making a mess.”

I mentioned in the intro to the first of this series that the boys quite often tended towards comic or action stories. Fergus above proves a nice exception with his atmospheric writing, Ben here gives a masterclass in comic writing.

Written in a clipped, diary-entry style, this piece describes the narrator’s increasingly elaborate and over-the-top attempts to sneak into the cookie jar. Starting with simple attempts to creep into the kitchen un-noticed and ending with misuse of dynamite (“not my best idea”), Ben uses understatement and repetition to great effect – each day ending with progressively longer groundings for progressively larger misdemeanours, for example. And, of course, there’s a comic twist, or perhaps punchline, at the end.

Read by Warwick Davies (Professor Flitwick from Harry Potter and pretty much every small person role for George Lucas ever) who gives it truly excellent comic inflection and timing. His glee for the final line, and the great audience reaction as they anticipate what they know is coming, is true joy to listen to. Go and do it, now.

The Grannies Who Flew to The Moon by Katie Denyer

Silver Winner 2016, Age 5-9 category

“The re-entry to Earth was even scarier than the launch and the jaffa cakes melted but the woolly parachute worked perfectly. The ladies landed in Grimsby, tired but happy.”

Having said before that the boys tend towards comedy and the girls tend towards atmosphere and emotion, not only has Fergus already proved me wrong with his story of the Smoking Pipe, here Katie also proves me wrong with a comic story of two old ladies who build a home-made rocket (christened “Tea Cake”) in order to break their monotony of living in a care home in Grimsby.

There’s a touch of Wallace and Gromit: A Grand Day Out here, with a rocket with homely British touches such as essential supplies of Jaffa Cakes and mint imperials, and a knitted re-entry parachute. There are some lovely character touches too. The two old ladies are “Dirty Gertie” because of her love of running through muddy puddles on Park Runs, and “Messy Bessie” due to her careless use of chocolate milkshakes. There’s the disagreement between the two about who is more fanciable – Professor Brian Cox or George Clooney. There is the comic reaction of Major Tim Peake aboard the ISS, looking out the window and seeing a pink rocket with two old ladies pass by. There’s the glorious idea that these two travel in this fantasy world to escape the boredom of a rest home (and perhaps we as older readers are left wondering if, like Calvin, these are simply escapes from reality into an imaginary world). I feel that there’s a potential series of adventures for Messy Bessie and Dirty Gertie. Perhaps pirates, dinosaurs, mountaineers and so on.

This was read by mo-cap maestro Andy Serkis (Gollum, Kong, Planet of the Apes, possibly once or twice actually as himself), and he reads it with great glee, really relishing all the little details and specifics that Katie gives the story. Good fun.

The Sands of Time by Clara Cowan

Silver Winner 2016, Age 10-13

“She just sits there. Indifferent. Her frail, wrinkled hands tremble, oblivious to the world around her. She looks at me blankly as though she doesn’t know me. Maybe she doesn’t anymore.”

Something I keep returning to in these discussions are how varied in tone all the different entries are. And the six winners from each year only ever scratch the surface, the other 44 finalists usually include yet more pieces, from Homeric style poems about a war between birds and beasts, musings on disability, comic spy stories, pieces written from the point of view of a water droplet on a window and other inanimate objects and all sorts of other fascinating ideas. There are nearly always some really moving pieces concerning old age or loss, and this is a lovely example of such a one.

The story begins from the point of view of a young girl, Kathyrn, out for a family picnic at the beach, but in the back of her head there is a nagging sense of wrongness. All sorts of details such as the old car, the sandwiches, her father, are picked out, but as she drifts out to sea on her lilo a mist descends, and her family vanish, no-one replying as she call out to them.

Switch viewpoints, and the narrator is a young girl visiting her grandmother, Kathryn, who is in a care home and lost to dementia, no longer recognising her own grand-daughter. In an attempt to engage, the grand-daughter finds some old photographs to share, including some of grandmother Kathryn as a young girl on the beach with her family. Is there a flicker of recognition from Kathryn when she is shown the photo?

It’s a beautiful tale, read by Tom Hiddlestone (Loki, The Night Manager etc.) with great sensitivity. I love how the two halves feed into each other, I love the two viewpoints and I love the raw emotional power of the story. Shut up I’m not crying you’re crying.

Poor Pig’s Revenge by Evie Fowler

Gold Winner 2016, Age 5-9

“He fumed. He outraged. He was no longer pink. He was an angry red. That is very unusual for a PIG to be bright red.”

And again we veer to a completely different place emotionally and stylistically. Evie’s writing style is very distinctive, and this is one of the few stories that speaks directly to the reader, which is quite unusual, you’d think maybe there’d be more like that. It tells the sorry story of Lil Piggy the pig who unwittingly wanders into a butcher’s shop, which reads more like a whole supermarket of butchery with aisles of different meat products. When he meets the butcher himself (called “TimTim”) the penny has dropped that the place is stocked with his friends and relatives, and the pig goes berserk, licking the butcher to death. That, in itself, is a great and peculiar death, but then the pig chops the butcher up and replaces the meat products with butcher meat products.

The shop is closed due to “cannibalism and mystery”, but the story ends on an ominous note – Lil Piggy is out there taking revenge on all butchers and meat-eaters, and you might be next….

This is read by Julie Walters (Do I need to? Well, I guess non-Brits will know her best as Mrs Weasley, but she’s been in pretty much anything to do with Victoria Wood and a host of others). Her ability to do both comedy and dark serves this tale really well, as it veers between surreal farce and black, black humour. Evie has a unique writing style that conversationally addresses the reader, and Julie Walters brings that to life well, working with the audience to bring a very different slant to the story than you can get if you read it. What I think really sells this particular piece is how it starts out one way, but dips a trotter into some quite horrific goings on, and it’s entertaining to think of a child’s imagination dreaming up such things.

e-Courtroom.com by Ned Marshall

Gold Winnner 2017, Age 10-13

“Oh no, oh no. 500 words just isn't enough to prove my innocence, and I'm already down to 482. Well, my name is Jacob Carter as you already know. I’m a young man. I'm innocent.”

What’s great about this competition is the varied formats and inventive uses that some of the contestants put to 500 words (I’ve said that before. I’ll say it again). This one does all sorts of things well.

It’s told in a series of, effectively, tweets. Jacob Carter has 500 words to plead for his life and garner enough votes of innocent from the public to get a retrial, otherwise he will be killed by lethal injection for a murder that he says he didn’t commit. As the story goes on, Jacob gradually manages to persuade his jury that he is innocent of the crime, that he is taking the blame for something his brother Dominic did when drunk. Eventually equal numbers of people have declared him #innocent as have declared him #guilty, a hung jury enough to get a retrial. Jacob desperately tries to use up his remaining word count, but the last two words deliver a devastating twist.

This… is sheer genius in my opinion and definitely one of my favourite of all 500 words stories. It has a Black Mirror-esque feel to the Trial by Twitter aspect, something that doesn’t feel a million miles away from the way people express very strong opinions and judgments on the medium already. It plays with format, written as a series of messages, and it takes the 500 word limit and makes it a feature. Added to this, Ned has given each of the respondents a different voice; some are abrupt and judgemental, others verbose and thoughtful, and all have believable reasons for their responses. And then there’s the wonderful twist at the end.

This is about the only one I’d recommend listening to the BBC Drama Company version rather than the celebrity final version. Nick Jonas does an okay job, but to my mind he lets the last two words drop, whereas the Drama Company reader really endows them with the power that they need. Plus I like how the Drama Company reader gives @Braveheart_ a Scottish accent; Jonas reads everyone in the same voice. And finally, on the live version they add in a sound effect, I think the generic iPhone message alert tone, when each respondent sends their message, but the sound recording loses it from one side of the stage. It’s a shame, because this is a great piece of writing.

And that’s it for the 2016 winners. This one was broadcast from Shakespeare’s Globe, which is open air, and consequently there are some sound issues with the readings, both wind noise and background traffic and planes, which is a shame because I think all of these stories are among the best 500 Words entries of all time. Warwick and his reading of the Cookie Quest ranks as one of the best readings as well.