Frank Cottrell Boyce: 'We're in danger of being a society that has a short-term memory'

Author and screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce thinks that storytelling – and books in particular – play an important and underestimated role in knitting together modern society.

Cottrell Boyce was giving the opening keynote speech at the Children's Media Conference in Sheffield, after a successful two years in which he was a key collaborator on Danny Boyle's Olympics opening ceremony, won the 2012 Guardian children's fiction prize, and started as professor of reading at Liverpool Hope university.

"We are the stories that we tell," he said, kicking off with an anecdote about Henry Gustav Molaison, an American patient who had several sections of his brain removed in an attempt to cure his epilepsy, and subsequently became a much-studied medical case.

Molaison could remember functional skills – how to tie his shoelaces for example – but he essentially lived in the present, because he couldn't form new long-term memories. Cottrell Boyce drew a parallel with modern society.

"We're in danger of being a society that has that short-term memory," he said. "We don't know who we are, and we don't know what we're for. I think that can happen, and it's storytellers who can save us from that."

Cottrell Boyce also talked about his role in the Olympics opening ceremony, and widespread expectations beforehand that it would be disappointing at best, and a national embarrassment at worst.

"Why did people think it was going to be rubbish? Because when they tried to imagine what it would be... they imagined it was going to be the Tudors, Churchill, Shakespeare, maybe the Romans. Two world wars and one world cup, basically," he said.

"We discovered that the whole nation collectively had forgotten that they did the industrial revolution. That we invented the modern world! It's not really taught in schools... We are the stories we tell, and sometimes we get bogged down in stale old stories. And the writer's job is to question those stories, and to put new stories in place of those dead, stale old stories."

One example of that: The Return of Colmcille, a two-day festival which was a highlight of Londonderry's year as the City of Culture, and featured a fire-breathing Loch Ness Monster. It was Cottrell Boyce's first commission after the Olympic Games.

The aim was to tell a new (old) story about the city, and remind people that there was more to it than its troubled recent past – while using digital media (a fake sighting of the Loch Ness monster for example) to spread it far and wide.

"I thought, how weird would it be for Saint Columba that we were promoting his story through YouTube, and digital media, and Twitter?" said Cottrell Boyce.

"A book was at the centre of this thing: this big cabaret show with the Undertones in and the Loch Ness monster... It was intimately connected with a book, and so was the Olympics opening ceremony."

A book? Humphrey Jennings' Pandaemonium, which told the story of the industrial revolution in a "visceral" way, and became the inspiration for the opening ceremony.

"It became this huge multimedia-y, Twitter-y global phenomenon," he said. "And it started with a book, which I think is really important."

And also a gift: the book was given to Cottrell Boyce by a friend, and he in turn bought a copy ("for 50 quid!") for Danny Boyle when in the early stages of planning the opening ceremony. He suggested that the gifting element was hugely important, as opposed to simply convening a planning meeting to decide what to do and how.

"If it starts with a meeting, it wouldn't have happened. If you do that, you end up with Viva Forever!" said Cottrell Boyce, drawing laughter from the audience. "Or Viva Six Weeks..."

But he returned to books. "Books are so central to it. There's a really specific reason for that, which is that all the great ideas come from the edge: the margins, the eccentric, the disenfranchised," he said.

"Books can be written by anybody... Only books really capture those voices. Only books really have all the voices. Everything else is really translation, but the books have all the voices in the room."

Cottrell Boyce also warned that some elements of modern culture risk losing these voices, and the essence of storytelling. "Sometimes I look at celebrity magazines and reality TV, and it seems to be like a version of Henry Gustav Molaison," he said.

"I can see something that's going through the motions, and has the macabre galvanic twitchings of some kind of ghostly memory of what a story should be. 'It should have a row in it, so let's do one. It should have sex in it so let's have some'. But it never really adds up."

Cottrell Boyce was also asked about the way more children are using apps, playing games and using other forms of digital media alongside reading books, and whether this is a threat or a boost for storytelling.

"It's all storytelling isn't it?" he said. "And they talk to each other, so it's about passing on stories. It's all stories, and I think it's all great. And I also think it's the same kids that read who play those games. It's not that games are stopping some kids from reading."

However, Cottrell Boyce did warn of the dangers of losing some elements around reading, such as seeing it as purely a solitary experience rather than a social one.

"A lot of the pleasure of reading is listening to somebody read to you," he said. "There are also key reading experiences that are social. Some of my children's generation had that with Harry Potter: they were all reading it on the same night."