Speechification

My ten year-old son’s latest reason for refusing to get out of bed before eight O’Clock on a school day is a brilliant twelve-part story by Malorie Blackman on BBC7. It’s a nicely told plucky-adolescent-saves-the-world thriller called Hacker and it’s got computers in it but not in an annoying way.

I enjoyed using the theft of £7M by hackers in the story to help me scale the US bank bail-out for the boy: “you know those hackers stole £7M? Well, George Bush wants to give the banks a huge amount of money too, but it’s not 7 million or 70 million or 700 million or even 7 billion or 70 billion but 700 billion dollars!”

Here’s episode one and you can hear the other eleven episodes here on BBC7’s excellent Big Toe Books page until 5 October. It’s well worth bookmarking this page if you have kids: there are always at least half-a-dozen stories to listen to here. Highlights at the moment include Fiddlesticks by Alan Fraser and The Lost Boys’ Appreciation Society by Alan Gibbons.

This entry was posted by by Steve Bowbrick on Saturday, September 27th, 2008 at 1:00 pm . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.