The Baddies: the wickedly funny picture book from the creators of Zog and Stick Man, now available in paperback!

Product Information

When a little girl moves into a nearby cottage, the Baddies can’t wait to scare her out of her wits. When I first arrive at the Donaldsons’ house, Malcolm gives me a tour, which largely consists of him naming everyone in the family photos on the walls. “This is Jerry and Alastair, our two sons,” he says, pointing at pictures of two men. “Our oldest son Hamish died, which is terribly sad,” he says, voice catching a little.

One thing Donaldson and Scheffler understand after all these years is that kids like to be scared — just not too much.One of my television songs, A SQUASH AND A SQUEEZE, was made into a book in 1993, with illustrations by the wonderful Axel Scheffler. It was great to hold the book in my hand without it vanishing in the air the way the songs did. This prompted me to unearth some plays I’d written for a school reading group, and since then I’ve had 20 plays published. Most children love acting and it’s a tremendous way to improve their reading. Before Malcolm and I had our three sons we used to go busking together and I would write special songs for each country; the best one was in Italian about pasta. Funnily enough, I find it harder to write not in verse, though I feel I am now getting the hang of it! My novel THE GIANTS AND THE JONESES is going to be made into a film by the same team who made the Harry Potter movies, and I have written three books of stories about the anarchic PRINCESS MIRROR-BELLE who appears from the mirror and disrupts the life of an otherwise ordinary eight-year-old. I have just finished writing a novel for teenagers.

Well, we don’t usually have people in our books at all,” says Donaldson, meaning that their collaborations are usually animal- (and Gruffalo) based. I really enjoy writing verse, even though it can be fiendishly difficult. I used to memorise poems as a child and it means a lot to me when parents tell me their child can recite one of my books. When a little girl moves into a nearby cottage, the three baddies are practically giddy. They decide to compete to see who can steal the little girl's blue hanky. They are the brains behind dozens of picture books including Room on the Broom, Tabby McTat and, of course, The Gruffalo. One of their latest books together is The Baddies — about a witch, a troll and a ghost who like being bad.

More in Offers

I get a small percentage of the sales price and of course I share that with Axel, or the other illustrators.” Still, compared with other authors, she has clearly made a lot of money. Has she enjoyed spending it? I grew up in a tall Victorian London house with my parents, grandmother, aunt, uncle, younger sister Mary and cat Geoffrey (who was really a prince in disguise. Mary and I would argue about which of us would marry him). Ongoing Covid restrictions, reduced air and freight capacity, high volumes and winter weather conditions are all impacting transportation and local delivery across the globe. It’s not difficult to see elements of Donaldson’s own story in her work. Born into a bohemian family in Hampstead, north London, she grew up in a home that she, her parents and sister shared with her grandmother, uncle and aunt. Her parents encouraged her and her sister “to absolutely be ourselves”, and Donaldson wrote musical versions of fairytales, which the four of them would perform for the extended family. To this day, she thinks of herself as a “performer-author”, and she and Malcolm frequently put on shows of her books; at the time of our interview, they are preparing for a performance at the Edinburgh festival.

Though, she admits, she's running out of creatures for Scheffler to draw. "I do think sometimes about gargoyles or a sphinx or something," she says. "It's getting harder and harder, actually." The ghost tries to scare the little girl in her bedroom — she offers him a warm bath and a cup of tea. It goes deeper than that. The stories should be universal, so if there is a message, it should be for anyone at any time,” she says. She wasn’t unhappy, she adds, just sensitive. “I just couldn’t understand other people, and even when I was about 10 I would always have one little cry every day.” One year her father gave her a poetry compilation, A Book of 1,000 Poems, and she decided to become a poet (she cites Shakesapeare as an influence and has recently written a story in iambic pentameter for the first time).We have sailed past our allotted time by now but I have one last question from my three-year-old: why, at the end of A Squash and a Squeeze, does the pig look angry but the other animals don’t?

Scheffler always likes to add little extras to the illustrations. "I don't mention a cat," Donaldson explains of The Baddies. "But there's a witch's cat with fangs... and a lovely bit where the cat is holding out the spell book for the witch to look at." I ask Scheffler if his and his German-French family’s lives have changed much in Britain since Brexit. “Not so much on a day-to-day basis, but I look at the quality of politicians in this country and it’s incredible. In Germany, it would be unthinkable to have such incompetent, cynical and corrupt people in government. Sorry, I’m getting political,” he says. He tends to read things out loud in what we call his Dylan Thomas voice, this sort of cod Welsh accent, and it always sounds quite good when he does it.” Does she see books as a way for children to learn about the world around them, or an oasis in which they can escape from it?No, no!” cries Donaldson, while Scheffler says simultaneously “Oh that’s a good idea!” He then ponders how he might have pulled that off, Donaldson’s objections notwithstanding: “I should have drawn one of the baddies with that [Boris Johnson] hair.” For his part, Scheffler says he prefers to draw fairy tale stories and fantastical creatures. "I find it easier to illustrate a story like that," he says. "I don't think I'm very good at observing the everyday, modern life." The spark happens when when when the pictures come together with the text in the book," explains Scheffler. "We're very different people and it's amazing that it works so well." The baddies have ended up as a troll, a ghost and a witch, as well as a little girl who isn’t frightened by them at all, and I mention to Donaldson that I think it’s clever how it rightly observes that children are rarely scared by what you expect (my own son, for example was for years inexplicably terrified by the owl in The Gruffalo). “Oh that’s so true. We did a show recently where a child was not fazed at all by the dragon but was so scared of the wind.” What does she think children are looking for in a memorable picture book? “You know, you can’t generalise about young children. I have nine grandchildren and they all have different tastes. But a satisfying ending that isn’t totally predictable is important. And the language.”