Dirty Bertie 6 – Crackers!

Alan MacDonald's Dirty Bertie Crackers is a Christmas comedy for 6 year olds, and it starts with a nativity audition done in a pirate hat.

What happens

Bertie comes into the kitchen in a pirate hat and an eyepatch, waving a cutlass, because it's audition day. His mum points out that there aren't any pirates in the Christmas story.

Bertie's view is that there could be. Instead of everyone just following a star, you could have a big battle between the pirates and the robbers. Everyone's seen it before anyway.

He does not get to be a king. He gets one line, on page fifteen, as a shepherd, while Know-All Nick gets a gold crown and a solo.

So Bertie has an idea. What if the shepherds had a real sheepdog? Miss Darling says they don't have one. She does not, however, say no. And in Bertie's head, not saying no is the same as saying yes.

Whiffer comes to the nativity play.

The lovely thing about this one is that Bertie's logic is always completely watertight and always wrong. He counts his imaginary sheep and finds one missing. He decides that the best moment to test a dog's reaction to singing is during the quiet bit. Your reader will see the disaster coming a good while before Bertie does, which is most of the joy.

The second story has his dad turning up in a red suit and a cotton wool beard to run Santa's Grotto at the school fair, and asking Bertie to be his elf. That goes about as well as you'd expect.

Chapters are short, there's loads of dialogue and the pages turn quickly, which makes it a decent pick for a reader who's just getting confident on their own.

One small thing. The comedy runs on Bertie and Nick being horrible to each other, so there's a fair bit of shoving, name calling and one line about Nick's face being ugly. The nativity play itself ends in an actual punch-up between the kings and the shepherds, with crowns trampled and a flying sandal. It's played entirely for laughs, and some children will repeat it word for word at school.

What to read next

If this one gets giggles, Bertie's pirate book has him going full swashbuckler on Pirate Day, plus a posh restaurant and a school contest with his dad against Royston Rich.