Frank Cottrell-Boyce

Frank Cottrell-Boyce is a screenwriter, novelist and occasional actor. He is best known for his hugely successful children's fiction and for his collaborations with film director Danny Boyle.

When I was in year six, I wrote an essay in class that had some jokes in it. The teacher thought it was funny so she read it out to the class. I still think if she’d told me to read it out, I would have grown up wanting to be a stand-up comedian. But there was something lovely about sitting at the back, watching her get my laughs.

His children's novels: Millions (2004), Framed (2005), Cosmic (2008), Desirable (2008), The Unforgotten Coat (2011), Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Flies Again (2011), Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and the Race Against Time (2012), Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Over the Moon (2013), The Astounding Broccoli Boy (2015) and Sputnik's Guide to Life on Earth have delighted legions of avid readers.

The family of Ian Fleming, who wrote the original Chitty Chitty Bang Bang book rang me up and asked me if I wanted to write the sequels so, I sat down with my kids and they said you're doing it!

I much prefer to writing books, it's a lot harder to write a book than it is to write a screenplay, because when you are writing a screenplay lots of people are ringing you up all the time giving you ideas and you can work with actors and you get a lot of help. It's quite lonely writing a book but when you've finished writing a book... you have written a book and that is like the coolest thing in the world, much, much cooler than writing a movie.

Cottrell-Boyce was the writer of the 2012 Summer Olympics opening ceremony, whose storyline he based on Shakespeare's The Tempest.

A truly inventive screenwriter he has worked on many film projects including: Butterfly Kiss (1995), Welcome to Sarajevo (1997), Hilary and Jackie (1998), The Claim (2000), 24 Hour Party People (2002), Revengers Tragedy (2002), Code 46 (2003), Millions (2004), Grow Your Own (2007) and Goodbye Christopher Robin (2017).

When you are making a film, in the first week, everyone gets a copy of the script and it's white pages, and then in the first few days if you make any changes you rip the white page out and put a yellow page in, a few days later you put a blue page in, and it changes as you go on - so that people can keep track of the changes. By the end of the film you shouldn't have any white pages left.

He has written widely for television, with credits including Coronation Street, Liverpool based soap Brookside and for the spin-off Damon and Debbie. In 2014, Cottrell-Boyce wrote an episode of Doctor Who, titled In the Forest of the Night.  He also wrote the second episode of the tenth series, Smile.

It's not having the ideas, it's picking the idea, ideas are like when you buy a packet of seeds and there's like a million seeds in it, but only a few of them are really to going to grow. So, it's really picking the right ones, and looking after them and making sure you don't forget them.

In January 2018, he was on the victorious Keble College, Oxford University Challenge famous alumni team; he got almost all of the points scored by Keble (total score 240) and was lionized on social media as a consequence; Reading University scored 0 in that game, thus making television history.

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