Richard (R): Now at some point over the last ten years or so, JK Rowling quietly became apparently richer than the Queen. So is the woman who created Harry Potter now in the position to say, "Off with his head"? And how has becoming one of the world’s wealthiest people affected somebody who barely a decade ago was a single mother struggling on £70 a week in benefits? Well, we’re going to find out now because JK Rowling, or Jo as she likes to be called, is giving us one of her incredibly rare interviews and it’s live. But first: the fruits of her extraordinary imagination.
[Clip from Goblet of Fire is played]
Richard: And Jo joins us now. I love that clip because it epitomizes for me what’s really good for me about the nature of your books. I mean we’ve [Richard & Judy] just left this, this valley of pain and distress which is bringing up adolescents...
JK Rowling (JK): [Laughs] Oh, good...
R: You're about to enter it, aren’t you?
JK: Yeah, something to look forward to then.
R: It’s just as bad as you think it’s going to be. Erm, but that’s what’s lovely about the sequence of books is that you see Harry turning into a grumpy adolescent and all the others around him going through these adolescent things. You’ve drawn up very accurately, and you don’t have adolescent kids yourself. I mean, is that just based on friends and conversations with friends who have got them?
JK: Well I taught teenagers for a while...
Richard: Of course, of course you did.
JK: They were my favourite age group to teach, in fact. So I think I drew on a bit of that, and I drew on memories of how grumpy we all were when we were teenagers. We weren’t...
Judy (J): Absolutely.
JK: My sister's here to watch this, and she was, she was very grumpy so I drew it on her.
J: Is she older than you or younger?
JK: No, she’s younger, two years younger than me, yeah.
J: Right. I mean, what I want to end - to happen at the end of the whole Harry Potter thing. I want Harry to marry Ginny, (Ginny Weasley) and I want Ron to marry Hermione. And all that and... no, I don’t. Yes, I do. I want Ron to marry Hermione, that’s fine. And I will be so upset if it doesn’t happen but of course the last one at the moment, is at the moment residing in your safe, yeah?
JK: The last, the final chapter is hidden away although it's now changed very slightly.
J: Is it?
JK: Yeah, one character got a reprieve.
R: Oh really?
JK: Yeah.
J: I mean you are, I just...
JK: But I have to say two die that I didn’t intend to die.
J: Oh no, two much loved ones?
JK: Well you know, a price has to be paid.
R: Significant?
JK: We are dealing with pure evil! So they don’t target the extras, do they? They go straight for the main characters... Or I do.
R: We don’t care about extras. You told your husband, obviously. You confided in him all things, and you told him.
JK: Well, not everything, that would be reckless.
R: Well, yes, let's be honest: that would be stupid. But you did tell him which ones were up for the chop. Apparently he shuddered and said, "Oh no, not that one."
JK: He did on one of them, yeah.
R: Listen, all the papers who have been promoting this interview today clearly want us to ask you, "Do you kill off Harry Potter?" It's a ridiculous question because are you likely to say yes or no? I mean, obviously not. You couldn’t possibly answer that but have you ever attempted to do him a little more harm than he’s suffered - I mean in the same way that...
JK: He’s already suffered enough, I mean what...
J: He’s already suffered, he’s been through the mill...
JK: How could I? Every year of his adolescence and childhood he’s saved the wizarding world. And no one believes him, and he...he spends his entire life saving the world, and then next term he’s just back at school being bullied. He's Harry Potter and he's just saved your entire school. And everyone thinks he' just a bit annoying.
R: You know how Doyle just got sick up there with Sherlock Holmes, so he pushed him off the cliff?
JK: Yeah.
R: I'm not asking if you've done that, obviously, but have you been tempted to bump him off because it's just huge...
JK: No, I've never been tempted to kill him off before the end of Book 7 because I've always planned seven books; that's where I want to - I want to finish on seven books.
J: Yeah.
JK: But I can completely understand the mentality of an author who thinks I'm going to kill him off because then there can be no non-author-written sequels, so they call it. So, it will end with me. And, after I'm dead and gone, they won't be able to bring back the character and write a load of...
R: That never struck me before...
JK: Well I mean, Agatha Christie did that with Poirot, didn't she? She wanted to finish him off herself.
J: So, you say you completely understand it, but you're not going to commit yourself?
JK: No, I'm not going to commit myself... I don't want the hate mail apart from anything else.
J: Absolutely. When you started off, when you first thought of the idea of Harry, what started off first? Was it the idea of the magic or the character or boarding school? When you were young, were you a big keen reader of boarding school stories?
JK: I read a few when I was younger...
J: Angela of Brazil?
JK: I never read Angela of Brazil. I read Mallory Towers and they really don't bear reading, do they?
J: No.
JK When I was six I really liked them. But, I think Harry and magic came together so the essential idea was a boy who was a wizard but didn't know - that was the original premise. So I worked back from there and that's where all the back story came from. And there's a LOT of back story. In fact now I'm in Book 7, I realise JUST how much back story there is because there's a lot to explain and a lot to find out.
R: But you must have had to invent the back story further down the line because you couldn't possibly have thought about this massive... in one go...
JK: Oh, no, you couldn't. I've got, I don't know how many characters I've got in play. Something ridiculous... around 200.
R: But did you ever think as you were writing the subsequent books "Oh why did I write that in Book 2? That's screwed me now. I can't write such and such now"?
JK: Yes. I don't think I've ever done that on a really major plot point. But, certainly, a couple of times I've hit a snag and thought, "Oh, I've boxed myself in. If only I'd left something open earlier and I would have been able to find an easier way to wriggle through that hole and I've always found a way... It is a complicated plot.
R: The last book's finished now; the last chapter, as you said, is in your safe?
JK: No the last book's not finished. But, I'm well into it now.
R: But you've written the finale already?
JK: I wrote the final chapter in something like 1990 - no, hang on... I wrote the final chapter in something like 1990.
J: Really? So you knew exactly how the series was going to end?
JK: Well, yeah. Pretty much.
J: Gosh!
JK: Yeah, I've been lambasted about that by a couple of people - I think they thought it was very arrogant of me to write the ending of my seven-book series when I didn't have a publisher and no one has ever heard of me. But I mean when you've got absolutely nothing and no one knows you, you can plan whatever you want... who cares?
J: Absolutely, and the other thing before we ask how you started writing was what struck us all, especially our son who is a mega Harry Potter fan, was when things started to get darker in the books. I think it started in the second one, with the Mudbloods... but it really got very dark in Book 3 with the Dementors and all the of that. Was that something you intended all along or did it just develop?
JK: It is something I intended because as Harry's growing up, these parallel l things are happening - he's getting older and older and more and more skilled as a wizard and simultaneously Voldemort's getting more and more powerful and he's returning to a physical form because, of course, in the first book he's not even a physical entity. But I've always said when people say that to me, and I agree that the books have gotten a lot darker, is that the imagery in the first book where Voldemort appears in the back of Quirrell's head, I still think is one of the creepiest things I've ever written. I really do. And also the image of the cloaked figure drinking the unicorn blood and slithering across the ground, which was done very well in the film - The Philosopher's Stone - I think those are very macabre images. So I don't think that you could say from the first book that I wasn't setting out my stall, really. I was saying that this is a world where some pretty nasty things can happen.
J: Yes. But what I'm saying is that I started to see some parallels from Book 2 between racism, apartheid and genocide and all that sort of stuff.
JK: Yes, of course, that was very conscious. Harry is entering this world, that a lot of us would fantasize would be wonderful - I've got a magic wand and everything will be fabulous. The point is that human nature is human nature, whatever special powers or tarnets you have, so you walk through - you could say through the looking glass. So he walks into this amazing world and it is amazing. But he immediately encounters all the problems he thinks he's left behind.
R: You can run but you can't hide.
JK: Yeah, yes.
(prt 2 in a sec!)