I’m delighted to trumpet about an exciting new project which I’m a small part of. My friend Marcus Gipps, an editor at the fantasy and science fiction publisher Gollancz, is a lifelong fan of the Uncle books by J. P.Martin. These are a series of six children’s books published in the 60s and 70s which relates the adventures of a pompous elephant just called “Uncle” who lives in a staggeringly vast castle called Homeward. As well as exploring his own infinitely large house, he must constantly do battle against the anarchist Beaver Hateman who lives in the rival castle of Badfort.

From this brief description it may sound a bit like Babar the elephant, or innumerable other children’s novels. But as soon as you read a page or two of these books, you realise you are in the presence of a startlingly original imagination. The court of Uncle contains a one armed badger who is always there, but seldom speaks. One of the main characters at Badfort is Jellytussle, a creature made entirely of jelly. The family who run Uncle’s art gallery are terrorised by a giant slimy fist which reaches through windows to grab them. The tallest tower in Homeward turns out to contain a Fritzl–like colony of children who have never been outside it. These mindbending jolts just keep on coming. Over the years, the books have picked up a lots of famous admirers including Spike Milligan, Will Self and Neil Gaiman. Best of all, the illustrations are by Quentin Blake, surely the seminal children’s book illustrator of the 20th century.

Surprisingly,despite all this cult success, the books have been out of print for years. tatty old paperback editions now change hands for hundreds of pounds on eBay. Marcus decided it was time to get the books back out in the world  – so he has made a kickstarter to get them published in a single beautifully bound volume.

The kickstarter went to live yesterday (27th March) with a target of £7000 – which it smashed through in four hours flat. So the reissue is definitely going to happen. I’m doing a new drawing of uncle for the book, and writing an introduction. Other drawings and/or introductions will come from Martin Rowson, Neil Gaiman, and others. It will be on high-quality acid free paper. if you buy a copy through the kickstarter there are all kinds of options for goodies you can get with it, starting with getting your name in the thanks when it’s published. The book will cost £30 – which I know is a bit of money, but you’re getting six whole books in one volume for this, plus all the additional material from myself and others.

Follow the link to the Kickstarter to find out more. but, really, I can’t recommend Uncle enough to you. It’s the great lost gem of British children’s literature.

It’s coming up to 10 years since the Blankety Blank Comic Relief sketch, starring Peter Serafinowicz, Matt Lucas, David Williams, Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Sarah Alexander, and Martin Freeman.….

That’s quite a lineup. Me and Kevin Cecil were slightly involved in it – it was very much Peter’s baby, but we were asked to spend a couple of hours throwing in a few extra ideas. Hard to be precise which ones 10 years on, but I’m pretty certain we wrote a lot of the bad tempered exchanges between Martin Freeman’s Johnny Rotten and Simon Pegg’s Freddie Starr.

It feels like a long time ago now for a couple of reasons. Firstly, this cast wasn’t all that famous when this was broadcast. Little Britain wouldn’t appear on the TV until later in 2003. Shaun of the Dead premiered in 2004. That’s why this stellar lineup was tucked away quite late in the evening of Red Nose Day. And because it was quite late, it was allowed to be quite weird. The words “yellow reggae” cracked me up at the time, and still make me laugh now.

But looking at this footage a few days ago, it doesn’t seem nearly as weird as it used to. This brings me to the second reason why it feels like a long time ago: the presence of Johnny Rotten. For the benefit of those too young to remember, Blankety Blank was one of the lightest of light entertainment shows which dominated the early evening schedules in the 1980s. It was built on a fairly flimsy premise– a simple word association game – but that didn’t matter, because it was just an excuse for Terry Wogan to engage in genial chats with half a dozen celebrities at once. The personalities on the show were for the most part well-known faces from other comedy and entertainment shows. With the exception of Kenny Everett they were a safe and cosy bunch. When Peter wrote this Blankety Blank parody in 2003, the mere idea of having the fearless and dangerous Johnny Rotten on a mainstream light entertainment show like Blankety Blank was a preposterous joke.

In 2013, it’s no longer incredible, because it’s already happened. Under his more grown-up real name of John Lydon, the formerly unusable punk god did a whole series of I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here. That culture clash between him and the stars of panto was mined to the full, but this time for real instead of in an unhinged Peter Serafinowicz sketch.

This is just one example of what you might call The March of Absurdity. It’s a real problem for comedy writers. Comedy thrives off barriers and taboos. Then you’ve got an expectation to subvert, and you’re in business. Less barriers means less unwritten codes for comedy to scrape up against. When I was a kid, the Morecambe and Wise show once featured Angela Rippon, a newsreader whose name and face were known to everyone in the country, as one of a line of dancing girls. At the time this was considered utterly mind blowing. A BBC newsreader! Dancing! With just tights on her legs! These days, Children In Need love to get newsreaders dancing. We now expect our newsreaders to fool around in funny costumes. What was once a bold comic idea gradually became the norm. So – it’s a lot less funny.

There’s another one which sticks out in my memory. Me and Kevin wrote a lot of The Armando Iannucci Shows, a Channel 4 series which though it didn’t make a big splash when it aired in 2001 has since become obscure cult viewing. One of the programs follows Armando as he goes to see “Ibiza Uncovered – the Opera.” Ibiza Uncovered was a very trashy late night show, really just an excuse to show lots of flesh. Unthinkable that it could be turned into an opera, so we had great fun writing the lyrics. “The club is charging £20 admission/do they still have the sex show at Manumission?/no, but Paul Oakenfold is on the decks./Oakie, Oakie, Oakie, Oakie, Oakie’s on the decks.” Just a couple of years later, Jerry Springer the Opera was a massive stage hit. Without it, it seems unlikely that the Royal Opera house would have been able to put on an opera about Anna Nicole Smith. Opera about low culture subjects? People are fine with that now. So that sketch couldn’t work if we wrote it today.

When mainstream culture delights in playing the comedy writer’s game of juxtaposing things to get amusing results, it makes it a whole lot harder for people in my profession. What looks crazy and impossible now might just be commonplace in a few years. So, here’s my plea to society and the media: put up more barriers. Be more sober, more serious.  Create more taboos. Make more lines which can’t be crossed. The comedy writers will thank you for it.

I thought I’d better mention the place where theress usually a nice pile of signed copies of my various books. It’s the Cartoon Museum, Little Russell Street, right near the British Museum in London.

I call in every now and then to say hello to the great Alison Brown, who runs the shop at the entrance most days. When I do, I’m always sure to sign whatever they have that’s got my name on it.

As well as their permanent exhibition, they’re currently showing cartoons by HM Bateman. He was one of the very best cartoonists operating in Britain between the wars, and was a very powerful inspiration for me at the age of 13. It was when I encountered his work that I became absolutely certain I wanted to be a cartoonist. I can’t recommend HM Bateman highly enough for anyone who’s remotely interested in cartoons (which I hope includes you).

You can find out more, and order books directly from their shop, here.

Very big news of the gnome front – we are finally able to reveal what we have already been working on for a couple of months now. There is going to be a sequel to last year’s movie Gnomeo and Juliet, called “Gnomeo and Juliet: Sherlock Gnomes”. There’s going to be a major new character. Guess what he’s called.

Me and my writing partner Kevin Cecil are writing the script.

The full news story can be seen here.

Right, let’s have a competition!

I’m giving away a notebook. Not in the spam competition sense, but an actual notebook: a little green thing that I scribbled in when I was coming up with the ideas for my third bunny suicides book, “Dawn of the Bunny Suicides.” It’s got lots of the ideas that made it into the book, captured in their nascent stages (like the picture here) and a few more ideas that didn’t make the final cut. I’ve never given away one of these books before so this is, if nothing else, a unique little piece of bunny suicides memorabilia.

All you have to do to enter is send an e-mail to luckyheathercomic@googlemail.com containing a mailing address, with the words “Bunny competition” in the log line. That’s all. I will post to any address in the world, so you can enter wherever you are.

Closing date for entries is 20 October 2011.

Cheers!