The Boy Who Got Accidentally Famous

David Baddiel's The Boy Who Got Accidentally Famous is a very funny school story for 8 year olds about the most ordinary boy in Britain going viral by mistake.

What happens

Billy Smith is eleven and ordinary. Properly ordinary. His name is ordinary, his dad is a clerk, his mum manages a company that packs fish (Billy has never established what sort of fish). His baby sister Lisa is ten months old, and the book points out that babies are not generally famous for being extraordinary.

He isn't top of the class or bottom. He isn't good at sport or bad at it. He isn't popular or unpopular. He has exactly two good friends, Rinor and Bo. That's it.

The annoying part is his school. Bracket Wood is extremely ordinary, but a lot of very strange things have happened to other children there. Billy has heard all about them. Nothing remotely interesting has happened to him, ever.

Then a documentary crew arrives to film a series called School Daze.

What follows is some of the best teacher comedy going. Mr Barrington, who is enormously old and can't see through his glasses, spends a full page refusing to accept that "Daze" is a pun. Mr Carter, the head teacher, communicates exclusively in capital letters. The producer has teeth so white the children shield their eyes and describes the show as his baby, which he is generously giving to them.

The whole school is only doing this because the windows are cracked, there aren't enough chairs and the television company has promised them money. Baddiel lets that sit there without making a speech about it.

And then a remix of Billy's extremely boring class presentation gets out, and everything changes. Red carpets. Albums. Actual fame.

The reading experience here is the narrator. He talks straight to you, interrupts himself, apologises for things, adds footnote-ish asides in brackets and occasionally tells you to say something out loud. If your child likes a book that behaves as if it is in the room with them, this one really does.

One line is worth flagging. There's a joke about a nearby school where the machine at the gate gives you a weapon if you haven't brought one. It's a throwaway line from a cross head teacher, and most readers will laugh, though a literal-minded child may ask about it.

What to read next

Ryan Ward, the naughtiest boy in the school, turns up here heckling the producer. He gets a whole book to himself in Head Kid, where he swaps bodies with the strictest head teacher Bracket Wood has ever had, a month before the inspectors arrive.