Lockdown sensation Rob Biddulph offers Chichester Children’s BookFest fund-raiser

One of their many, many virtues is that they are so brutally honest.

“If they are bored, they will put their hand up and tell you that they are bored.”

Maybe the best response, though, came during a questions session which he always does at the end of events.

“One of the children put up his hand and said ‘When on earth are you going to stop talking?’”

Not necessarily the response he will be hoping for in Chichester.

Rob is looking forward to a return visit to the city on April 24 to offer a fund-raiser for this year’s Chichester Children’s BookFest.

Rob took part in the festival last year as an author – and is pleased to be back this time for a separate event which will help fund the 2022 BookFest in October.

The team behind it are saving towards the cost of the 5,000-plus books they will be giving to all the children taking part.

“I did a couple of school visits last year as part of the festival, and it was great to have such a lovely responsive bunch of children. And the staff were great too.”

As he says, sometimes it can vary with the staff who sometimes will see a visit from an author as a chance to catch up on marking some homework. But that certainly wasn’t the case on his visits to Bosham and Fishbourne.

“And it was great because there was certainly a sense of release. From September onwards last year for the first time we were allowed to go out and do our thing as authors. All these authors were just flooding out! We were going back out into the real world and from a selfish point of view it’s a really useful thing to do because you get to see what the responses are. The books that I write are picture books and they are designed to be read aloud. For me to go to a school and read my books aloud is a great way of seeing what the children think. You realise which bits aren’t funny enough or which bits are too scary or which bits just aren’t interesting and as I say it’s unbelievable how brutally honest the children can be.

“But it is just a lovely thing to do anyway. I go to all sorts of different schools and I always say at the beginning of my session ‘How many of you get read to at home?’ And you would be amazed that lots of them don’t get read to at all.

“Previously I was official illustrator for World Book Day and part of our remit was to get children reading for pleasure because reading for pleasure is the biggest single indicator of how successful a child’s future is going to be. Reading for pleasure is directly linked into the development of a curious mind so to be able to bring books to children is a wonderful thing to do.”

Rob’s event is at the Free School, Hunston Road, Chichester, PO20 1NP on Sunday, April 24, starting at 2pm. Tickets for Draw with Rob are £10 to include paper and pencil. Tickets are available from TicketSource.

“I started Draw With Rob in lockdown and it became huge. I was sitting there in March 2020. It was a Sunday when I was watching the news and they were saying that schools were going to have to close soon. I’ve got three daughters and I knew how hard it would be to keep them occupied. I was probably thinking more of the parents to be honest at that point. I just thought of what I do when I visit schools and I thought I should do that online and it really worked. I set up a video camera and I did it. I had the idea on the Sunday, recorded it on the Monday put it out on the Tuesday and on the Wednesday I was on the News at Ten. I just can’t believe how crazy it went. Everyone was anxious and then suddenly I was getting all these pictures from joyous children. It just became like a little river of joy in the desert of angst. People gravitated towards it and it became bigger and bigger.”

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