THE VERY BAD SHOW! Jan 2011, Melbourne.

JAN 5th – 21st 2011

AUTHOR SIGNING AT BOTH SHOWS ON WED 12TH & WED 19TH JAN!

RMIT Union Arts presents THE VERY BAD BOOK SHOW
Writen and illustrated by Andy Griffiths and Terry Denton.
Adapted & Directed by Lynne Ellis

Warning! RMIT Union Arts present their baddest kids show ever! Meet the bad mummy and daddy, the very rude animals, the blood-sucking Grannies, and the killer koalas from outer space!

Adapted from The Very Bad Book by award winning author Andy Griffiths, this terribly BAD kid’s show contains nothing but very bad stories about very bad characters doing very bad things!

The Production
For 26 years, RMIT Union [Arts] have been producing affordable children’s theatre that fires up the imagination of its young audiences. Adapted & directed by Lynne Ellis, the shows are staged and performed by RMIT University students and have introduced tens of thousands of children to the joys of live theatre, performance and literature. This energetic 2010 production of “The Very Bad Book” brings to life the crazy work of author Andy Griffiths and illustrator Terry Denton – and involves the audience in every step of the adventure. It’s loud, hilarious and inspiring…. for all ages!

Performance Dates

Date: Wed 5th to Friday 21st January, 2011
Time: Two shows daily at 10.30am, 1pm
Venue: RMIT Kaleide Theatre, Building 8, Level 2, 360 Swanston St
Price: $15

Public Season tickets now on sale through the Malthouse Ticketing Service:
t 9685 5111

Posted on 30 October 2010
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Sunday 31st Oct Healesville Sanctuary: talk & signing

Join me at Healesville Sanctuary on Sunday 31st October for a talk, signing and maybe even a pat of the killer koala … if you dare!
http://www.zoo.org.au/Healesville/News_Events/Wombats_Bums_and_other_%20Tales

Posted on 29 October 2010
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Music to write books by Pt 2: Frontier Psychiatrist – The Avalanches

Posted on 26 October 2010
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Music to write books by Pt 1: Cretin Hop – The Ramones

Posted on 24 October 2010
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Postcard from the South Island of New Zealand (Sat 9-Sun 17th Oct)

We arrived in Christchurch mid Saturday afternoon and after renting a car and collecting an extra suitcase full of brochures about where to stay and what to do on the South Island, we checked in at the Windsor Hotel. It didn’t take long to discover the Avon river, a charming little grass-banked stream that winds its way through the town. We spent the next hour having stick-and-leaf boat races from one side of a bridge to the other. From there we went into the city: lots of cracked buildings, piles of rubble and closed streets due to the recent earthquake and ongoing aftershocks.

The next day we drove out of Christchurch up through Governer’s Pass. Amazing views across the town and out to the snow-capped Southern Alps. We headed for the town of Akaroa, nestled deep in the heart of an old vast volcanic crater. As we descended so did an enormous storm that didn’t let up the whole time we were there. We checked into a cosy waterfront apartment at the Akaroa Village Inn and settled in for a ringside view of the heavy rain, wild winds and heaving ocean.

The next morning, in what seemed like a break in the storm, I attempted to go for a run but before I’d even made it up the hill past the dramatically sloping cemetery surrounded by white tape and HAZARD signs (“many of the headstones and monuments in this cemetery are unstable due to the recent earthquakes”) I was driven back to the apartment by a fresh onslaught of freezing wind and rain.

After almost getting blown off the wharf checking whether Jill and Sarah’s planned nature cruise was cancelled (it was) we hightailed it out there and headed south towards Queenstown through the central Otago region. We’d been promised breathtaking scenery, but nothing prepared us for the sight of the incredibly intense blue water of Lake Tepako. With dramatic snow covered mountains all around it, it seemed too beautiful and too pure to even be real. It was hard to drag ourselves away from it, but then a few hills away we came across the Lake Pukaki which was just as amazing all over again.

Okay. The south island really had our attention now and it didn’t let up all the way to Queenstown. Deer, sheep, lambs, alpacas, reindeer, cows, calves, snow covered mountains, blue rivers and even bluer lakes, long white clouds, sun drenched fields and mysterious dark valleys. As we drew close to Queenstown we travelled across a high canyon and saw the Kawarau Bridge, a well known bungy jumping place. We pulled up and walked out onto the bridge. One look at the rusty red steelwork was enough to send a shiver through me. The river was a long, long way below. The idea of jumping from the tiny wooden platform was gave me vertigo just thinking about it, but it was closely followed by another thought: could I do it? No. Did I need to do it? No. What would it prove? Nothing. So you don’t want or need to do it? No. What if the jolt wrenched my leg out of its socket? What if my eyeballs flew out of my head? And of course, what if the rope broke? What sort of person would want to risk all that, I wondered as we drove away. Well, my sort of person, as it turned out … I just didn’t know that yet.

We arrived in Queenstown as the sun was setting. If there’s a more beautiful town in the world I’d sure like to see it. Located on the edge of the glacial Lake Wakatipu, and surrounded by the snow capped Remarkables glowing pink in the sunset, it’s one of the most beautiful towns I’ve ever seen. We check into the Alexis apartments on the Frankton arm of the lake and go in search of food.

The next morning we awoke to brilliant sunshine and headed back to the Kawarau bridge to watch the bungee jumpers. The first girl dived without hesitation. Her friend hesitated for a number of minutes before taking the plunge. A young man walked up, faced away and dived backwards. A red haired girl jumped, clutching at imaginary handholds all the way down. All the while I was sizing it up. Did I want to try? No way. Nevertheless I found myself rehearsing it in my imagination. But it wasn’t until we left and drove to the perfectly persevered gold mining town of Arrowtown for lunch that I realized I wasn’t going to be able to leave Queenstown without jumping off that damn bridge and that I might as well get it over with sooner rather than later.

We drove back and despite a few minutes of dithering soon found myself in a harness and having a rope tied around my ankles and then climbing into the cage, out onto the ledge and inching my way forward on the platform. I was grimly resigned to jumping but still not sure how on earth I was actually going to be able to. From here the view down was dizzying, the rescue dinghy an impossibly long way below, the grey water impossibly far away. A female crew member—ominously called ‘Killa’—is holding onto my belt but pushing me forward until my toes hang out over the edge. It’s all getting a bit uncomfortably serious. No backing out now. She gets me to breathe deeply, makes me smile for the cameras, suggests I look straight ahead rather than down and begins to count: 3 … 2 … 1 … It’s horrible standing there but it begins to dawn on me that it’s going to be less horrible to jump than to stand there and just think about jumping so I just do it.

The rush is intense: the fall pushes all the air from my lungs as I accelerate faster and faster towards the river until before I know it, I’m heading back up again, weightlessly bouncing through the air until I can grab onto the pole being offered by the dinghy crew which they use to pull me into the boat. A weird mixture of relief and exhilaration now replace the grim dread of the build up. I suspect this won’t be the last time I do this, but for now one jump is quite enough.

We returned to Queenstown, took a gondolier ride up Bob’s Peak and spent a happy few hours riding toboggans down the luge track and enjoying the endlessly astonishing panorama of lake and mountain below us while a helicopters and paragliders floated past our heads. Later, back at the lake, Sarah found a rope hanging from a tree and had some good old fashioned swinging-on-a-rope-hanging-from-a-tree fun. There’s an extreme sport for everyone in Queenstown. Inspired by the cruisey spaciousness of the South Island and the fact that radio stations were getting pretty hard to find, we burned a cruisey mix CD featuring all New Zealand artists for the next day’s driving:

Abu Dhabi: Split Enz
Bold As Brass: Split Enz
Charlie: Split Enz
Chocolate Cake: Crowded House
Counting The Beat: The Swingers
Fall at Your Feet: Crowded House
Four Seasons in One Day: Crowded House
Heavenly Pop Hit: The Chills
House With a Hundred Rooms: The Chills
I Got You: Split Enz
I Love My Leather Jacket: The Chills
It’s Only Natural: Crowded House
Look for the Good In Others: The Chills
Mr Moon: Headless chickens
My Mistake: Split Enz
Oncoming Day: The Chills
Shark Attack: Split Enz
She Got Body She Got Soul: Split Enz
This Is the Way: The Chills
Weather with You: Crowded House
Wet Blanket: The Chills

Wednesday found us back on the road, again driving north and headed for the West coast. But first we had to stop at a great place called Puzzling World and tackle the Great Maze: 1.5 kilometres of wooden corridors. You had to go in and try to find four towers—one at each corner. We found three of them in forty minutes, but it was starting to look like we were going to have to spend the entire day trying to work out how to get to the fourth tower so we had to bail through an emergency exit. The other major feature of Puzzling world is the hall of illusions and it is truly impressive. If Salvador Dali and MC Escher got together to design a fun park it would no doubt look a lot like this. A fabulous gallery of holograms, pictures of people whose eyes follow you around the room, water that flows uphill, rooms that seriously challenge your sense of balance, size and distance … all that sort of annoyingly mysterious stuff. It’s kind of like being drunk but without the hangover.

We spent the rest of the day driving through another wonderland of mountains, lakes, rainforest, waterfalls, bridges and way-too-blue rivers until we came to the Franz Josef glacier. Now I’ve got to confess I didn’t really get just how stupidly big and powerful glaciers are, or even really what they are until I came face to face with the Franz Josef glacier, an immense frozen river of blue ice that flows downhill at the rate of up to one metre a day, pushing massive amounts of rock and stone ahead of it. You can’t go right up to them in case they push a massive amount of rock on top of your head, but you can get close enough to get a very good sense of how awesomely powerful they are. Out here we also met New Zealand’s keas: big fluffy green parrots that took a great interest in us and allowed us to get very close to them. We later found out that they can be quite a nuisance and are fond of stripping the rubber from windscreen wipers, but we thought they were just being friendly. We had some great Indian food for dinner and then headed out in the dark to find a glowworm dell up the hill from the Terrace motel where we were staying. As we left the motel a policeman on foot patrol said, ‘good evening…off to see the glow worms are you?’ It was like he was all over everything that happened in that town … even the glow worms. We stumbled up a hill not quite sure where we were going until we saw a collection of tiny blue lights in the undergrowth at the side of the track. Kneeling down to get a closer look we could see a number of delicate web-like chandeliers surrounding tiny blue dots of bioluminescence. In the space of a few hours we’d gone from witnessing one of the biggest and most powerful things on the planet to what surely has to be one of the smallest and most delicate.

On Thursday we headed up the stunning West coast road to Greymouth and then inland across the Lewis Pass. I swear I’ve never seen so many rivers in one day. At one stop Sarah and Jill were throwing rocks into the water to try and splash me while I filled my water bottle. ‘Stop it!’ I told them. ‘A rock in the head could really spoil the holiday!’ ‘Not for us,’ said Sarah, lobbing another rock.

We finally made it to Kaikoura on the east coast, about halfway between Kaikoura and Picton. Today we listened to a new non-NZ mix:

The ballad of Tom Jones: Space
Blitzkrieg Bop: The Beautiful South
Blitzkrieg Bop: The Ramones
Bohemian Like You: The Dandy Warhols
Bohemian Rhapsody: Queen
Bow Wow: The Fiery Furnaces
Come Back To Camden: Morrissey
Creep: Frank Bennett
Creep: Radiohead
Frontier Psychiatrist: The Avalanches
Heart of Glass: Blondie
It’s True That We Love One Another: The White Stripes
The last of of the famous international playboys: Morrissey
Little Room: The White Stripes
More Than a Feeling: Boston
The Nosebleed Section: Hilltop Hoods
Ramona: Beck
Sexx Laws: Beck
Sleeping bag: Beck
Teenage dirtbag: Wheatus
This Is Carbootechnoodiscotechnobooto: Bentley Rythm Ace
Well Did You Evah!: Iggy Pop & Debbie Harry

Kaikoura is very close to a deep sea trench where sperm whales like to feed and on Friday morning Jill and Sarah went on a whale watching cruise. I would have liked to go with them but after the intense sea-sickness I suffered a few months back in Hawaii on a manta ray night dive, there’s no way I’m ever getting on any boat that I don’t absolutely have to ever again. I went for a run over the spectacular limestone cliffs instead. Jill and Sarah came back happy after braving a heaving sea and spotting two whales. Later on we visited the Kaikoura seal colony which looked for all the world like a bunch of fat waterproof dogs lying around on the rocks sunning themselves and scratching. After that we saw a very entertaining sheep shearing demonstration and bought some blue cod from one of the caravans that sell and cook fresh fish by the side of the road. That evening we went along to the Mayfair Kaikoura Community theatre: a bright pink building that was showing ‘Tomorrow when the war began’ which I’d been keen to catch up with. Pretty much every kid in town seemed to have the same idea. What a scene! The theatre was going off with lots of excited children laughing and swapping seats and chucking lollies and generally having a great time … and the movie hadn’t even started! They kept on having a great time even when it did start until one of the women running the theatre came in and yelled “QUIET!” and everybody became instantly quiet and stayed that way until intermission when they all made dash for the kiosk to get fresh supplies of lollies to throw at each other. I thought it was a great test and tribute to the power of the film that it held the attention of such an excited bunch of kids of all different ages the whole time. Or maybe they were just scared of the lady. Either way it was a great night.

On Saturday we pointed the RAV4 towards Picton and drove up the coast past lots more seal colonies and great scenery. Picton was windy and we took shelter in the Aquarium where we saw some very strange fish including Red Gurnards which crawl around with sensory feelers growing out of their pectoral fins, and a scallop that did a strange clapping swim to get away from a starfish. After checking out an enormous second hand store where we got a bargain on a set of Brady Bunch dvds, we went on long walk around the harbour to Bob’s bay and practiced some more stone throwing. The next morning we had to get up at 5.00am for Jill and Sarah to catch the ferry to Wellington, and for me to return to Christchurch to begin the New Zealand leg of The Very Bad Book tour.

To be continued…

Posted on 20 October 2010
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New Zealand event: Auckland

Thurs 21st October: Auckland
6.00pm A Family Evening with Andy Griffiths. Takapuna Public Library, The Strand, Takapuna.
Contact Belynda Smith, Phone: (09) 486 8464 email: belyndas@shorelibaries.co.nz

Posted on 18 October 2010
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The very Bad tour

Thanks to everyone who came along to the Australian Very Bad Book tour events during September and helped to make it the very biggest and very baddest tour ever! It was great to meet you all and to hear how much you’ve been enjoying our silly books.

There’s one event left tomorrow morning in Melbourne at the opening of Readings newly expanded St Kilda store in Acland Street at 10.30am: www.readings.com.au/event/a-special-st-kilda-shop-opening-event-andy-griffiths-for-the-kids

There’s lots of photos from the tour on my new facebook page: www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=190400&id=184636141888

Also some podcasts of radio interviews: ABC PERTH: http://blogs.abc.net.au/nsw/2010/09/the-killer-koala-from-outer-space-visits-the-abc-studios.html?site=sydney&program=702_evenings
ABC SYDNEY: www.abc.net.au/local/audio/2010/09/15/3012688.htm

And if you didn’t get along to the events you can view a whole heap of video from one of my talks on my youtube channel: www.youtube.com/user/AndyGriffithsBooks

You can also follow me on Twitter: twitter.com/AndyGBooks

Next stop: New Zealand (18th-22nd October)! Event details to follow very soon.

Posted on 2 October 2010
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