Taylor made

THERE’S an excellent reason GP Taylor visits 200 schools a year, free of charge, to promote reading. “Without reading,” says the best-selling, millionaire author, “I would be languishing in Durham Jail.”

In some interviews, finding the facts, or the quote – or, indeed, anything of interest – is like looking for oil on the moon. Interviewing GP Taylor, by contrast, is like a holiday with The Beverly Hillbillies. With this GP, nothing is general practice.

“For me, reading was life changing,” he says, his voice whizzing like a car round a race track.

“I grew up on a council estate (in Scarborough) and there were no books. When I learnt to read it took me into a different world. My parents were deaf and we had no books in the house.

My dad had a few, but not the sort you’d give to your child. I grew up visually – I got into films in a big way, and that has influenced my writing.”

So school, for a boy who couldn’t read, must have been hard?

“I bullied two of the brightest kids in my class,” he says, bluntly. “One who was good at English and one good at maths, and that’s how I got through. Then I got to the exams and I couldn’t do it.”

You’re taught in journalism school to not interrupt when you’ve asked a question.

Sometimes, that’s easier said than done.

“I was expelled three times from school,” he says.

“Once after running away when a teacher dressed me as a fairy, second time for setting fire to a teacher’s desk…”

Why?

“…Just for fun. And the third time was dying my hair red and working in a nightclub as a bouncer…”

A bouncer?

“Well I’d left home at 15…”

Permanently?

“I went back and forwards. I was living in a flat and had to support myself through college.

I worked at a nightclub collecting glasses – because I was a big lad they put me on the door.”

More law enforcement was to come. After moving to London and becoming a roadie for, among others, the Sex Pistols – “You don’t think about the reputation,” he says, “because you’re living in London and they’re just normal people that you know” – he returned to Yorkshire to become a policeman.

After ten years, he was beaten up by 30 men outside a Pickering pub. “I arrested one of them in the pub and 30 came out and did me,”

he says. He lost, permanently, 63 per cent of hearing in his right ear and dislocated his hip.

“The force said I was no longer fit to be a police officer,” he says. “I couldn’t run any more.”

The former bouncer, roadie, and copper had, though, already been ordained as an Anglican minister, after starting a theology degree at Durham University, aged 34. Told you GP didn’t stand for general practice. Aged 45, he sold his motorbike and self-published his first book, Shadowmancer. It has sold more than 20 million copies worldwide.

“The biggest risk I ever took,” he says. “I did it because I was having a midlife crisis, and it was cheaper than having an affair.”

Six books later, he has written, and devised, the DoppleGanger Chronicles.

Devised? Yes, devised: the book is printed on creamcoloured pages, to keep them interesting, and the pages are black-bordered, to keep a child’s eye on the page, and to mimic a computer screen. More importantly, almost every page is decorated with pictures and scenery, which fire imagination and paint images on mental canvas.

It is published by Americans, as British publishers thought it too expensive. Fans have been importing the book online; one signed copy sold for £900. The concept, he hopes, will whizz books into the future. “We are up against TV, video games, the internet,” he says. “We need to take books out of the 19th Century.”

And, it seems, it’s working. At North Ormesby Primary School, Middlesbrough, teachers are amazed at the book’s effect. This on children whose home literature rarely goes past “an Argos catalogue and the Yellow Pages”.

“They absolutely love reading now”, says Chris Kemp-Hall, the headmistress. “They will pick up a book and consider reading it – before they wouldn’t entertain it. They’re excited about the fact there’s a world within books.

There has got to be something that sucks them in – just by flicking through they see the variety.

It’s not just words on pages.”

The literary drive sees him in 200 schools a year; every appearance unpaid. “I used to charge between £700 and £1,000, then a school librarian said I was robbing books out of children’s hands,” says Taylor, who gets “100 to 200” emails from children each day. “Now I do it for free. It’s good fun, genuinely rewarding.

I still charge for festivals though.”

The visits take him all over this country, and Ireland, but rarely into London. A county of Yorkshiremen cheers. “We tend to avoid London – every school there has had an author,” he says. “There, you say ‘Does anyone know an author?’ And they say ‘My dad’.”

But, for a born and bred Yorkshireman, one thing has troubled me. In one website interview, he listed his hobbies as “looking at the stars, and eating at The Ivy”, the London restaurant where celebrities convince themselves they are, in fact, famous. A bit fake for a Scarborough lad?

“The Ivy’s fine, but it’s full of people who want to be seen,” says Taylor, who lives near Scarborough with his wife and three children.

“The last time I went, I came out and someone asked for my autograph. I gave him it and he started crying. I asked why and he said ‘I though you were Les Dennis’. The Ivy’s all right – but the Yew Tree Cafe in Scalby (near Scarborough) has better food. Far better food.”

Well there’s a relief. You can take the man out of Yorkshire…