Publishers Weekly - October 9, 2014

Fifty-eight years ago a man called Michael Bond bought a small bear, writes Karen Jankel.

He named the bear Paddington after the London railway station. Almost six decades later Paddington is about to make his film debut.

The man who made that impulse purchase all those years ago is my father and, at the time, he was a television cameraman at the BBC. He was also an aspiring writer and seeing the bear on his mantelpiece sparked an idea and he began to write. He didn’t set out to write anything specific, but after only ten days, he realised he’d completed a book–A Bear Called Paddington was published by William Collins in 1958.

Paddington™ and Paddington Bear™ ©Paddington and Company

Limited/Studiocanal S.A. 2014

His first book did so well
that Bond continued to write
about his bear from Darkest
Peru and by 1965, with six
Paddington titles under his
belt and several translations,
he felt confident enough to
give up his job with the BBC.
By 1975 Paddington had his
own television series. Animation
hadn’t reached the sophisticated
levels of today, but the relatively
simple technique developed by

The fact that he didn’t consciously write for children is almost certainly one of the reasons that his books are so successful. The stories have a level of sophistication that makes them appeal to a wide age range. Children enjoy the scrapes that Paddington gets into, while parents can take pleasure from the witty dialogue.

the inspired animator Ivor Wood worked perfectly for Paddington. The five-minute episodes, produced by FilmFair, combined the three dimensional Paddington puppet with drawn two dimensional backgrounds and other characters. However, while the concept might have been simple, the execution certainly wasn’t and the labour-intensive process of creating 25 frames for every second of animation meant that the episodes were costly to make. Thus the first Paddington merchandise deals were struck in order to finance the making of the series.