Like many other ardent TOGS ( Terry's Old Geezers, for those too young to remember), when Radio 2's Breakfast programme lost Terry Wogan and replaced him with a wild red-headed young man I was tempted to switch channels… but having tuned in to Chris Evans I realised how wrong I was. It was his inspirational idea, five years ago, that gave birth to 500 Words and it is for the final of this great competition that we are all gathered at St James's Palace this morning.
Now, whenever I have the chance (and I don’t often get to talk on Radio 2!) I tell everyone that we must never forget how important reading and storytelling is. I'm sure you'll be doing the same now – telling anybody who will listen how much fun it’s been writing your 500 words. So I thought I should take the Chris Evans Challenge too and write my own 500 Words. I am a tiny bit above the qualifying age, so I have cheated and asked if I may just read my entry out this morning...
I can’t compete with all your brilliant stories, so I’m going to talk about why I think stories themselves are so magical. Before we can write, we tell stories
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Close to home, everyone has family stories – about our parents when they were naughty children; about grandparents living in a different world, without smartphones or YouTube; about families moving home, moving countries and making new stories of their own.
Then there are the old stories handed down through the years - about heroes and heroines; myths and legends and fairy tales. They speak to us today about good and evil, right and wrong, fear and courage ... They are retold time after time and reinvented for the big screen too – Thor, Hercules, Cinderella, Jack the Giant Slayer, Into the Woods, Maleficent - to name but a few…
And we all have our own favourites that we could read over and over again. For me, they were the stories my father read to me – wide-eyed Alice finding herself in Wonderland; the fearless Scarlet Pimpernel deep in the dungeons of the Bastille and Oliver Twist daring to ask for more gruel. I can’t guess yours – maybe Paddington Bear, Hairy Maclary, Harry Potter, Horrid Henry or Matilda?
Like climbing through the Wardrobe into Narnia, stories open doors into different worlds. They stretch our imagination and get our brains buzzing. We fall in love with heroes and heroines and can’t turn the pages fast enough to find out what happens. We meet impossible people, travel to remote places and make hundreds of new friends. We look around with new eyes and recognise Horrid Henry next-door and Professor Snape the Chemistry Teacher in the school down the road.
Whether exotic or every-day, heart-warming or heart-stopping, stories help us to understand our world and the people in it. We can all see the differences in our points of view and backgrounds, but the best stories - just like those old tales - show us what we all have in common, what we all share.
It’s no wonder that, once we have opened that door, we want to tell other people what they're missing. Right back to prehistoric families sitting spellbound around the smoking fire, all the way to the technological interactive miracles of Radio 2, people still love a good story.
So my heartfelt thanks to Chris and everyone at BBC Radio 2 for masterminding this awesome 500 Words competition and inviting me to share the magic! Thank you all very much, and congratulations to all the winners, and keep on writing stories!
I would have dared to say it is not too much, but I agee that what's really matter is tha money goes to a charity!
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