'Paul Jennings trapped me in his glass elevator as a prank'

What initially sparked the idea to adapt Round the Twist for the stage?

There's an episode of the show where Bronson, the youngest Twist child, is saving up the smell of his socks for 6 months to use it as a weapon. And every time he uses it, he says ‘up the pong!’

One day my mum was changing my nephew's nappy and she went, ‘oh, that's a pongy nappy’. And my brain immediately went, ‘up the pong!’ – that’s the impact that show had on me as a child, it was still right there.

I had also really wanted to make something my whole family could come to see, kids and all, so that was the genesis of the whole thing.

Apart from the iconic theme song, the Round the Twist TV series was fairly light-on in the way of music. Was it hard to adapt into a musical? Or are you the type of person who thinks ‘this could be a musical’ to literally everything?

I think that sometimes I can see something as a musical that other people might not have but I don't think that anything can be musical. The main question that you have to ask when writing a musical is: why does this story sing?

With Round the Twist, all the episodes in the first 2 seasons are based are based on short stories by Paul Jennings, and each episode is unrelated to the other episodes, except for a theme that runs throughout. In the first season, that thread is that there's mysterious music coming from the top of the lighthouse. So, I really felt that music was a part of that story. Then, the way the first season ends is that they sing, and that ends up saving the lighthouse and that was the starting point of feeling like it would work as a musical.

And that theme song is not nothing!

Yeah, exactly. That song goes very deep for a lot of people. I was talking to Andrew Duffield, who wrote the song, and I said, how do you feel about knowing that you can just penetrate people's minds? They hear, ‘have you ever…?’ and that's it!

The TV series was, as you mention, based on stories by kids’ fiction legend Paul Jennings, who’s known for his whacky yet heartfelt portrayals of childhood. What do you love about the way Paul Jennings portrays kids?

I think that Paul is really good at 2 very different things: he’s very, very good at the fun bits of childhood, but also at ‘the strange things that happen’.

He understands the fun parts of being a kid, but he also remembers the not so fun parts when you feel awkward or embarrassed or scared, and his stories do a really great job of looking into those parts of growing up and can deliver them in this uniquely strange way.

I think that’s the magic of Paul Jennings, he can marry that bizarre fun with the heart. He told me a story of this kid that came to him at like a book signing once and said, ‘how do you know what it's like to be me?’

So you were able to connect with (the other) Paul during this process? What was that like?

Yes! He hasn’t lost that sense of humour. I went to visit him a couple of weeks ago with Tamsin West, who played Linda in the first season and sang the theme song. He called me beforehand and said, 'come up to see me in the office when you get here, I have a surprise for you.'

When we arrived, Paul’s wife Marianne sent us up there in this glass elevator they have at the house. We’re halfway between floors and we can just see Paul in the office before the lift suddenly stops and Paul goes ‘oh no, it’s happened again!’

But it turned out he had a remote for the lift and had stopped it deliberately. Never without a twist!

I had a surprise for him as well: there’s an episode of the TV show where the character Linda clones herself and the jumper that she's wearing says ‘Linda’, but the cloning machine mirrors everything so her clone’s jumper says ‘Adnil’. I got Paul and I jumpers that say ‘Paul’ and ‘Luap’.