Pete Johnson was born in Winchester. After studying English at Birmingham University, he worked as a teacher, film extra and a journalist before becoming a full-time writer. In this interview he talks to Nikki Gamble about fame, reality TV and his recent novel The TV Time Travellers.

It’s been quite a while since we last had a proper conversation about your writing. 2005, I think. What’s been happening since then?

Well, I’ve been very involved in the Boys into Books initiative. I’ve probably visited about 60 local authorities: Leicester, Sheffield, Liverpool, Hertfordshire, London, to name a few. I think it’s been a really positive initiative and because it has been supported financially by the government, the events are really whizzy. In Leicester we held the event at Leicester City Football Club and all the boys attending were given one of my books at the end of the session.

I know that boys’ reading is something that you have felt strongly about for a long time. Are you happy with project titles such as ‘Boys into Books’? Isn’t there a danger that it reinforces a deficit view of boys and reading?

Well it could do but I’m really happy with the way it’s been executed. Some library authorities have targeted boys very specifically but others have focused more generally on ‘reluctant readers’. They’ve adapted the project to whatever suits local circumstances. I do know that if I have an event the boys will come up to me at the end and ask where they can get the books and whether there are other similar books. I’ve even done an event with a bookseller sitting beside me and the boys will ask where the bookshop is located. When I tell them it’s just a short way down the road they are completely surprised. They haven’t realised that they have a local bookshop and they’ve never been in. It’s true that the internet has had a slight positive impact from that point of view, but in reality you have to bring the books to the boys and not assume that they will find them. . Girls I think are more likely to go into the bookshop.

I also think boys need the status of reading to be raised within the school and within the community. This may sound trivial but I think boys are so image conscious that taking this approach makes a big difference. It makes them aware of what books are about and it puts books into their hands. I don’t think the boys felt they were being targeted with the 'Boys into Books' campaign.. It was just a fun thing to do.

So your latest book is the TV Time Travellers, which deals with the territory of reality television. I know you’ve been concerned about that for a while.

Since we last met reality TV has become even more pervasive. All of the big programmes are reality television shows: Big Brother, Britain’s Got Talent, the X Factor, Strictly Come Dancing, I’m a Celebrity Get me Out of Here, The Apprentice and so on.

I suppose the talent shows are a variation of older shows like Opportunity Knocks or Stars in their Eyes. So why is current reality TV such a concern?

Well they are but they are also more intense about selling ‘the dream’. They promote the idea that you or I, an eight year old son or a twelve year old niece can go along to the next ‘Britain’s Got Talent’ audition and have a chance of winning the ultimate prize. I think in the past there was more of a mystique about fame and how it was achieved. To become an actor, you might have to go to drama school and learn a craft. It took time. But with these reality programmes it’s all very quick. It could be less than a month from applying to performing on television. It’s also changed children’s view on what it means to be famous. The impact, especially on the teenage age group, is huge.

On the other hand, you could argue that it’s made television democratic, but I think the negative aspects outweigh the positive.

In TV Time Travellers, I wanted to look at how reality television tells a story.

 Story is the key word. There’s nothing real about reality TV.

Yes, well you and I can see it. However, I don’t think children do understand it in this way.. I wanted to explore how reality programmes are set up to elicit sympathy, and to initiate conflict, which is the essence of good drama. For instance, on the X Factor the contestants that get to perform in front of Simon Cowell have already passed three auditions. That means that the really bad contestants who arrive all pumped up on the stage have actually been set up to do badly. They are there purely for the entertainment value. In the case of Susan Boyle, she must have sung three times before walking onto that stage, so the judges are going to know that she’s got something special before she stands in front of them. There’s an artifice with the entire presentation. That’s the drama. In the same way the contestants with the sob stories have already told them to researchers. That’s part of the formula as well.

Yes, you can tell from the interviews at the audition stage which contestants are going to be followed through to the live shows. The clues are there in the format, structure and presentation of the programme.

I wanted to explore the phenomenon through the story of five children who are going to take part in a reality programme. In The TV Time Traveller you have one character, Izzy, who wants to take part as a way to improve her life. Lots of children I talk to who don’t have much money often see programmes like this offering as a way out from a difficult life. I think it’s interesting that they see reality TV as a passport out of that life. You then have people like Barney who have a theatrical talent and want to be discovered. Then there are the wild cards like Leo who are selected because they are trouble. The producers are not picking five children who are genuinely interested in World War II and want to find out all about it. They want a situation in which trouble and conflict will arise because then they can show the discipline of the period more dramatically. However, the children are flattered and don’t really understand why they have been picked. That’s how it is with reality television.

It’s the equivalent of the Victorian freak show, setting people up for deliberate spectacle and ridicule.

There is a cruelty.

You mentioned that one view is to see this as democratization of television but that’s illusory. There’s a huge imbalance in the power relationship between the programme producers and the contestants.

Well Simon Cowell would, I’m sure, argue that he’s giving people who wouldn’t otherwise have a hope an opportunity for fame. Of course there’s some truth in that but it’s a disproportionate relationship. He holds all the cards and if he decides he’s had enough the light goes out pretty quickly.

In The TV Time Travellers the producers have written a character for each of the children. So although Zac is the one person who is keen on the history and interested in World War II, they set him up to be voted out. He wants to be there but he has a proscribed role.

I thought the dual narration worked particularly well in this novel. Izzy doesn’t want to be there so we see everything negative about the past like the discipline and the schooling through her eyes. But that’s partially mediated with Zac’s more positive view.

Yes, he rather likes the quiet of the classroom and the discipline. I didn’t want it to be an entirely negative view. I suspect some people wish that schools were a little more like that now.

Well you don’t have to go back to World War II to recognise aspects of that approach to school. It reminds me of my own school days and I was at school in the so-called progressive 1960s.

Yes and I went to a grammar school, teachers wore gowns, you had to stand when they walked into the room and we the cane was still administered as a punishment. But in spite of that I still look back with some affection on that time because I think teachers had more freedom. I remember going for nature walks and knowing the names of the trees, the birds the flora the fauna. We had teachers who were characters and they were wonderful but I suspect they wouldn’t survive the bureaucracy that we have now. So there are things that have been lost. But of course there were negative things about that time as well. The children didn’t have any rights. We had a teacher who would give us triple detention on a whim. You wouldn’t dare to answer the teacher back.

Well, I am afraid I did but I knew what the consequences were.

One of the differences I think is that parents supported the school without question when we were at school. I don’t think that’s the case today. It’s far more likely that a parent will take a child’s side if the school sets a punishment, so the limits are not very clear. I think there’s wooliness about our approach to discipline today.

I wouldn’t like to go back to a time where you did what adults said without because they automatically have a higher authority. I do believe that respect has to be earned.

Well that’s what the book explores. You have fun with the teachers but the teacher’s line is that you always do what she says. She believes that she has to stamp her authority on the children because they are naturally lazy, rude and need taming or training. Other people would say children are innately creative, fair and well meaning and that you have to channel that. There’s a battle between those two approaches. Farmer Benson provides the more nurturing stance in this book.

So we have these two things going on, the production of a reality TV programme and the historical reconstruction of the Second World War. You could have chosen a talent show or a Lord of the Flies type of programme. So why did you settle on a historical programme?

I’ve always been interested in World War II but there are so many great books that have been written about it. You can’t really top Carrie’s War or Goodnight Mister Tom. But I thought it would be interesting to look at that time from a modern perspective.

In a way the past is a fantasy and I think that’s how it works for Zac.

 Well it’s interesting, when I go into school and ask children if they are interested in World War II a lot of hands go up. When I dig a bit deeper and ask them why, they say evacuation, bombing, being away from home. They think it’s a big adventure. It was called the people’s war and I think the particular thing about it was that it impacted on people’s everyday lives in a way that other wars perhaps haven’t. Probably in most roads there is someone who lived through the war, who could talk to the children in school. The pilots were very young; most of them were in their teens. So while the Second World War is far away from the lives of children today, it’s also close.

The irony is that the history lives through the people not the artificial reconstruction of the period.

That’s what we see at the end of the book, the bond that has been formed with the children and the real evacuees. I know when I met evacuees when I was researching the book nothing topped the first hand experience. It seems to me that as a nation we’ve become a lot more interested in the war in the last few years.

Do you think children’s interest comes through school or a public consciousness?

 I don’t think it was as interesting to us in the 70s and 80s. I think the virtues of the time have become more current. When we had the 9/11 tragedy, it was the Blitz spirit that was evoked with the ‘keep calm and carry on’ posters, for instance. I think that war has a resonance for us in these uncertain years.

Does it stop us from properly scrutinising and reflecting on current conflict if the focus is on past wars?

Like Iraq and Afghanistan? Well I think the problem is that there are severe reservations about the justice in those wars. I think the Second World War is probably the only war where we had the moral imperative to act. I don’t think anything else has been quite as clear cut. So I think you can’t teach about current conflict in an inspirational way. When I was researching this book I watched the Humphrey Jennings films ‘Britain Can Take It’ and ‘Listen to Britain’. They were filmed in a very lyrical way. I can’t imagine them making a similar film about the Iraq War.

I think the Second World War has a strong emotional charge and the fact that children were the first to be affected; they were evacuated before the Blitz started. When I talk to children, they are fascinated by the children enjoying their time on the farm. Some did really love it but others had a horrible time – being checked for nits etc.

So once you had the period and you had a context, how did you begin to unpack the story?

I didn’t want to be didactic and the characters are very important for me. In the first draft I just let the stories run around. That’s the fun for me.

When I was reading it, I could hear echoes of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory …

The thing with Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is that the children disappear one by one and that works with the reality TV show. It happens with Big Brother, The X Factor even with shows like The Apprentice. One difference is that in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the children have obvious unpleasant traits, whereas the children in my story have vulnerabilities but they are not awful children. There isn’t a suggestion that they deserve what happens to them.

I suppose Mr Wallack is like Willy Wonka in that he is all knowing. However, Willy Wonka isn’t challenged, whereas in my book the children stand up to Mr Wallack and bring the show down. They are not prepared to see Zac treated so badly for the sake of ratings.

In some ways the book is like a fairy tale. What the children are doing is casting aside everything from the present day and transforming themselves into someone else. It’s a fairy tale fantasy. But… what are they letting themselves in for? Where are they going? The oddness of going to a farmhouse set in 1939 with over twenty TV cameras everywhere. The boys love the idea of outside loos. All of the sudden you are in a different world with a different set of rules.

The tagline is’ expect the unexpected’ so it has a sense of adventure. It’s strange because at the end of the book when I ask children if they would volunteer for a show like this one, over half of them say that they would. When I ask them if they would really do so knowing everything that they have discovered about the manipulation, they still say they would.

What are children’s most common responses to the book?

Children have been quite shocked about the end of the book. We talk quite a lot about the role of Harriet and the fact that she’s acting a part. They are really concerned that people might not be who they appear to be.

Yes, it’s surprising that they react to that so strongly when it’s obviously a ruse that they will be familiar with. On Big Brother they are likely to have seen bogus contestants who turn out to be actors. I think it’s interesting that your book provokes a questioning response where television doesn’t. I suppose in the book they are getting your take on it and they experience events from the inside of a character’s head, whereas on television they are colluding with the producers. So while they are aware of the deception when watching the television, as readers of the book they are also being duped. It’s a genuine surprise.

I also planted the idea that Harriet could be the one who betrayed Leo when he smuggled in the chocolate and mobile phone. We talk quite a lot about why the different characters are selected for the shows. When you look at who they pick and why they are selected, it gives you a very good insight into what the whole show is about.

We talk also about the hidden cameras. Most children think that’s terrible.

When the first Big Brother was screened it seemed quite shocking that the camera would be everywhere. Now it’s commonplace.

Children are also really interested in is the meeting of the real evacuees and the pretend evacuees. A lot of them pick these scenes as their favourite parts of the book. Other’s like the scenes between Zac and his father, one of the sub-plots running through the book. Zac’s father is trying to escape what’s happened. He can’t talk to his son and almost hands him over to an aunt while he goes off to handle his own grief. He’s so overcome with misery and pain that he’s stopped noticing his son. He can’t cope and he throws himself into work. At the end of the book he talks about it and Zac says, ‘I felt it too’.

Which were the first characters that you settled on?

Zac came first. I wanted to have one child that had a real affinity for the period. Then I thought about Leo. He’s a very popular character.

He does break the rules and that’s attractive.

Yes, he’s overwhelmingly popular with girls and boys. The friendship between Zac and Leo doesn’t get off to a good start. When Leo sneaks the mobile phone in Zac admonishes him for destroying the experience but the friendship develops and that’s touching.

As we have two points of view we are privileged with seeing Zac from the outside (Izzy’s perspective) as well as from the inside through his own narration.

Yes, there’s a nice scene when Zac gets the letter from his father that Izzy comforts him. There’s a bond there. Izzy sees him as the vulnerable one and looks out for him.

I have to ask Pete, ‘do you watch reality TV?’

I do.

And do you watch it as a social experiment or for entertainment?

Well this is the paradox. I do love The Apprentice; it’s gripping. I think Britain’s Got Talent is put together brilliantly. But I understand how it is put together and I know that it’s not reality TV. That’s the point isn’t it?

What’s next?

I have a series coming out in September with Stripes called Spook School. The books are comedy horror, which I love. I’m also writing a book called The Vampire Blog.

We look forward to reading them.

Thank you Pete Johnson for talking to Write Away.