Michael Rosen's Nice! comes to Theatre Royal Wakefield on beloved author's 80th birthday year

This is the affection the British public has for Rosen and, after all, life is to be cherished – particularly after he spent weeks in intensive care with COVID-19 in 2020. Having survived, he reached the age of 80 in May. More cake.

“I think you make the most of (the day). You also try to make sure that you enjoy as much of it as possible. You can have an attitude of making the most meaning you've got to do lots of work,” he says. “But another attitude I have is: well, how shall I enjoy today? What will I do that will be enjoyable? Just now for lunch, there's a little Turkish cafe around the corner, and I had a very nice salad. And then the lady came out and she said: ‘We just made some cake, would you like some?’ And she said: ‘It's on the house’. She gave me this lovely cake with pistachio purée on it and honey, and it was incredible.”

The Georgian place also often gives him good helping. One time the owner’s son asked: "‘Is it better than chocolate cake?’ He had twigged who I was but he didn't let on until that moment.”

Rosen’s birthday celebrations bring him to Theatre Royal Wakefield on Saturday for the next stop of his tour, Nice!, which charts a lifetime in poetry with the performance of beloved classics including Chocolate Cake itself, Hot Food and No Breathing, along with poems from his new collection Peas On Your Knees.

The show’s name is a reference to the internet meme, or gif – a picture or very brief video segment, often decontextualised, used to reply in online conversations - of Rosen saying the phrase ‘Nice!' when performing Hot Food.

Rosen, who lives in north London, says: “The idea that people know me for pulling a funny face and saying ‘Nice’, it's just crazy and wonderful and lovely. I mean, people stop me in stations, on trains, buses. They hold up their phones and say: ‘Say it! Do the Nice thing!’ And so I perform it for them and they love it.

"One guy stopped me in Chinatown in London and told me I'm very famous in China. I said: ‘Really?’ He said: ‘Yeah, because in China we call you Nice Grandpa.’”

Memes aside, Rosen’s own official YouTube numbers are staggering, with 167,034,124 views and 920,000 subscribers watching his 500 or so videos at the time of writing.

"I'm being realistic in the sense that I know that families and children spend time online,” he says. “So I think, well, how could I make a bridge between online and the books? My son, Joe, he created the YouTube channel and everything I do on there is connected to books, either mine or other people's. And so what I'm doing is hoping that people will go, oh, that's very funny, or that's interesting, or that's sad – and look, there's a book linked to that. They'll find their way to the book, either in school, through libraries, or maybe they'll buy the books, but one way or another, we'll see that I'm making a link between the two.”

At the moment, it is the Government’s National Year of Reading, which aims to tackle the decline in children and young people’s enjoyment of the written word.

The former Children’s Laureate’s tour is also tied to his own new book, Peas on Your Knees: A Life in the Poems of Michael Rosen, which came out yesterday.

It has been a prolific career, featuring more than 200 books, including We’re Going on a Bear Hunt, illustrated by Helen Oxenbury, known to many for the film version, and Sad Book, with pictures by Quentin Blake, which reflected on grief after the author’s son, Eddie, died from meningitis at the age of 19.

Looking back over his career was “terrifying”. He says: “Writing is kind of special because it leaves a trail and if editors and people are interested, you can collect it all up, and that feels very strange. As I say, terrifying in a way because you're looking back not just at your life, but how you viewed things then. It's almost like you're picking up a magnifying glass that you had 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 40 years ago. Because writing is a bit like looking through a magnifying glass, and picking up the same magnifying glass and looking at those things again. So it churns you up to look back at it over a whole lifetime. It does.”

He adds: “I'm sometimes amazed that I could express something so quickly and neatly. Sometimes I think when I write now it's a bit more messy, and I’m somehow quite surprised at how tight and, dare I say, clever… how I could do it.”

It reminds him of an interview he saw with Bob Dylan, who, referring to one of his songs, said something like: “I can't write like that now”. "He said: ‘I don't even quite know how I did write like that’. I was really moved by that because, in a way, that chimed with sometimes the feeling I have. I still perform some poems, very, very early poems that I wrote, because they work, and I do find myself having that same thought that Bob Dylan had: how did I write that?”

It is not as if, he says, writing gets any easier and even with all his experience, he is only more self-critical of his work. He uses the example of Robin Hood's Bay, a poem about a family holiday in North Yorkshire during the late 1950s from the collection You Wait Till I'm Older Than You, published in 1996.

“We ran away from the campsite to Robin Hood's Bay and we got into trouble because they put out search parties looking for us. I have written about it once but I look back at the way I wrote about it, I think, I haven't quite captured my parents' anxiety We went down this disused railway line and they were worried that trains were still running down it and we'd been run over. Those moments of heart-in-mouth things that happen to people, they're quite good to write about with children because danger works very well in children's books – jeopardy and so on – and I thought I haven't really grasped that jeopardy. Do you see? So the challenge is just as great every time you start to write.”

It can’t all be a piece of cake – but there’s plenty around.

Nice! Stories and Rhymes with Michael Rosen is at Theatre Royal Wakefield on Saturday. Tickets: www.theatreroyalwakefield.co.uk