It’s time we updated fairytales. Why not damsels in armour or knights in distress?

It only really strikes you as an adult, how much we’re all a product of those crucial primary school years. That mannerism you’ve picked up off your favourite teacher; how you’re strange about sell-by dates, like your babysitter was; how you’ll never put a fork upside down in the dishwasher because that’s the way your parents did it. The primary years are the years in which you’re shaping and forming. By secondary school you’re pretty much done; in your 20s the blueprint is totally fixed; and by your 30s you need therapy to undo it all!

During my time on Blue Peter, I met many guests who would tell me how they ended up in their chosen field due to an interest ignited early in life. I’ll always remember interviewing the designer of the Queen Mary II cruise ship, the biggest passenger liner of its kind with no less than five swimming pools and even its own planetarium. I asked him how he came to be where he was today and he told me that he remembered as a child seeing the sinking of the RMS Queen Elizabeth on television and being really affected by it. He knew, there and then, what he wanted to do. There are so many other examples, from childhood ballroom enthusiast Kevin Clifton who became a Strictly star, to racing car driver Lewis Hamilton.

It’s so important to expose our children to experiences, values and morals that we’d like to see in the adults they will eventually become. I remember hearing a woman’s voice on the radio for the first time as a shy little Asian girl and realising that women could be on the radio, too. The more we represent in society, the further all our children will excel. Cliched though it is, you have to see it to be it. There used to be a sitcom called Mind Your Language about an English language school. The characters on it had very thick, exaggerated foreign accents and were often the butt of the jokes. However, my parents were always so proud to see fellow Asians on television that they’d call us from our bedrooms to come and watch, even though we’d look back now and find it offensive.

There weren’t many diverse characters in the books I read, either. There was an international section of my local library, which had about three books in it. And if there was an Asian character in one of them, it might be a little bare-footed girl in a village picking a mango for her mum. As sweet as these stories were, the brown faces in them weren’t that relatable to a girl growing up in 80s London.

When it came to reading books to my own children decades later, it still felt as though things hadn’t moved on perhaps as much as they should have done. Reading the classic fairytales to my two mixed race sons, common themes such as damsels in distress, knights in shining armour, and wicked stepmothers seemed a tad outdated. My eldest son is very sensitive and emotional, while I remember being quite the tomboy. So why not damsels in armour or knights in distress? It’s great for girls to feel empowered and it’s OK for boys to feel able to cry.

A recent YouGov survey found that while 81 per cent of parents want to read fairytales to their children, two thirds of mothers think that damsels in distress are outdated. Over half of parents (58 per cent) think that fairytales under-represent minority groups. And a report last year found that inanimate objects and animals are far more likely to be the main protagonists in children’s books than a character from a minority background.

Ever since I left Blue Peter, I’ve been asked to write children’s books. Ten thousand children’s books are published every year – I didn’t just want to write a book for the sake of it. What could I add to the mix? There are so many great books already out there and so many authors who don’t get the airtime they deserve. But when I noticed that my children weren’t as engaged by the likes of Sleeping Beauty and Snow White as I wanted them to be, I felt that it might be fun to update some of these tales for the 21st century.

Another thing that is massively important to me is humour. There’s a real snobbery in the children’s book world around comic books, which I just don’t understand. Surely, as well as having empathy, altruism and the good values that books can give to our children, we want the adults they become to also have a good sense of humour? Let’s face it, it really does help these days!

The idea of writing laugh-out-loud, subversive and sometimes anarchic stories that impart values of diversity and good moral messages seemed like a no-brainer. So, let me introduce you to some of the characters from the book I ended up writing, Fearless Fairy Tales. There’s Sleeping Brainy, a maths-obsessed girl, who isn’t interested in becoming a princess and instead wants to be Chancellor of the Exchequer; the Boy who Cried Wool, who isn’t afraid to show his emotions; the Pickled Mermaid, the last surviving mermaid, who’s determined to reverse climate change; Cinderella, and her comfy old trainers, who’s not fussed about being hand-picked to marry a prince; Spinocchio, whose nose grows when he reports fake news; and Gretel and Hansel, who are not on equal pay at the sweet shop where they work.

When I read the Ladybird classic Sleeping Beauty to my children, there was a picture of her asleep in a glass case in the forest which the prince finds. It sent a shiver down my spine! As well as being a really creepy image, having a woman on display as though an artefact in a museum to be stared at, presumably just because of her beauty, did not sit well with me. And don’t get me started on being saved by the kiss on the lips by a strange man! Many of these tales are so old they represent a time and a society long gone. For example, Rumpelstiltskin is over 4,000 years old! Don’t get me wrong, it’s not right to erase history. It’s important that we learn from it and these stories are valuable in their own right. What I’m trying to say is, it’s OK to have girls who like pink but boys can like pink, too. The stories I’ve written in no way supersede the classics but are something to be read alongside them.

They’re tongue-in-cheek and not to be taken too seriously. But on some subliminal level, if good messages are filtering through, that can only be a positive thing. How can we take them too seriously when such nonsense exists in them as the character of Trumplestiltskin, a delusional ruler who is bright orange and obsessed with power and money? As I say, we need adults with a sense of humour.

‘Fearless Fairy Tales’ (£14.99) by Konnie Huq and ‘Trumplestiltskin: A Cautionary Tale of Greed, Gold and Ridiculous Hair’ (£5.99) by Konnie Huq & James Farrell, are out now, published by Piccadilly Press