The Magic Faraway Tree film writer: “The problem for kids now is that they don’t know how to be bored”

This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.

Simon Farnaby has a story about the time his work on the Paddington films led to him sharing a scene with the Queen. “I told her, ‘You’re a good actress, ma’am,’” recalls Farnaby, who played a palace footman in the Paddington-themed sketch to celebrate the 2022 Platinum Jubilee. “And she said, ‘I do it all the time, you see.’” Farnaby, assuming that she was being metaphorical, replied, “‘Oh, you mean playing the part of the Queen?’ She went, ‘No, I am the Queen’. Then she looked at me like I was an idiot and pointed at where Paddington was supposed to be sitting and said, ‘He’s not real, but I am. I’m the Queen!’”

There is a chance that you may not recognise Simon Farnaby with his trousers on. The writer and actor is best known for his role in the BBC sitcom Ghosts, in which he played the spirit of a Conservative MP doomed to haunt the afterlife in his pants. The comedy ended in 2023 after five series, but it was recently announced that it is being revived as a movie. “We knocked it on the head at its height,” says Farnaby. “But I think we were just not finished with Ghosts. We thought about a stage show for a bit and then eventually had a great idea for a movie. It’s the right sort of different flavour to the TV show.”

Crowd-pleasing family films are familiar territory for Farnaby. Over the past decade he has carved out a niche for the silly cinema that delights kids and entertains adults. There was his work co-writing Paddington 2, which briefly toppled Citizen Kane as the best reviewed movie of all time. But there’s also Roald Dahl prequel Wonka, the sugary box-office smash starring Timothée Chalamet (Farnaby co-wrote with Paddington director Paul King). Now Farnaby is climbing The Magic Faraway Tree, another charming screen adaptation of a cherished childhood classic.

Published in 1939, Enid Blyton’s Faraway Tree books are short, whimsical tales about three children whose discovery of an enchanted tree leads to them travelling to magical lands. Farnaby didn’t read the books as a child but he was reading them to his three-year-old daughter Eve, now 12, when he was offered the script. “I loved the fulfilment of finding a tree with all these crazy characters who lived there,” he says. “My daughter really laughed at Saucepan Man. He’s just a man who mishears everything because he is covered in saucepans. There’s so much silliness there!”

Still, Farnaby struggled to find a “hook” for the adaptation. “I knew I wanted to do something with a modern family because the mum and dad aren’t really in the books. There’s a mention of a dad who’s been to the pub and had too many drinks. So I had to invent a dad character that wasn’t an alcoholic.” His eureka moment came during lockdown which Farnaby and his wife, actor Claire Keelan, spent watching “endless repeats” of the 1970s sitcom The Good Life. “I thought, ‘What if they were a family who lived in the city but they had lost everything and had to move to the countryside?’ What if they had to live The Good Life?”

That playful fish-out-of-water clash between big-city convenience and rural rustic living also allowed Farnaby to poke fun at how addicted children are to screens. In the film, Claire Foy’s upbeat mother Polly and Andrew Garfield’s hippy dad Tim hope that their move to a country cottage will lead to their perpetually online kids discovering the joys of books and nature. The kids are appalled. “I am going to bed and I hope I never wake up,” screams teenager Beth (Delilah Bennett-Cardy), whose request for wi-fi results in an unintelligible farmer, played by Farnaby, presenting his wife (Keelan).

The nearby Faraway Tree, populated by colourful characters like Nicola Coughlan’s earnest fairy Silky and Jessica Gunning’s booming Dame Washalot, represents a return to a more playful, imaginative childhood. “The problem for kids now is that they don’t know how to be bored,” says Farnaby.

He fondly recalls a childhood where he and friends would ride their bikes through the woods and imagine they were travelling to distant countries. “Having nothing to do is valuable,” he says, “because you find things to do with your brain. You can’t do that if you’re constantly stimulated.” Does he restrict his daughter’s screen time? “Yeah. My wife has a time limit on her devices. It’s 45 minutes maximum and then the screaming starts!”

The tastes of children have also changed. Brain-rotting short-form video content from platforms like YouTube and TikTok are increasingly supplanting books, TV shows and film, but Farnaby isn’t concerned about the future of children’s cinema. “I’m more worried about indie film. But it feels like going to the cinema is one of the things that families still do together.” By his own admission, though, this optimism could be coloured by the fact that he has co-written Wonka and Paddington 2. “It did feel like every family in the UK went to see them.”

Such success often leads people to ask Farnaby what the secret is to writing a hit children’s movie. But there is no secret, he says. Making people of all ages laugh is merely an “instinct, a mad alchemy” that he has honed from his years working on family comedies like CBBC sketch show Horrible Histories and the Sky sitcom Yonderland. “The best kind of laughs are universal,” he says, “because it’s hard to make everyone laugh.” He does however credit the birth of his daughter in 2014 for broadening his approach to comedy and “changing who I wanted to entertain”.

“It’s like what I was saying with Saucepan Man,” he explains. “It helped me see that there’s a simplicity to comedy, that sometimes you can overcomplicate things. Something as daft as a man made of saucepans mishearing things can make kids laugh like a drain.”

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