The Butcher in question is Danny Butcher, a London-based artist-illustrator that I was lucky enough to collaborate with on Videotelling.

I met Danny as a result of a Google image search. It was 2011 and I was looking for images of Guy Goma for a lesson plan on my site Lessonstream.

In case you don’t know, Guy Goma was a humble business studies graduate from the Republic of the Congo. In 2005, he went to the BBC in London for a job interview. As a result of a spectacular case of mistaken identity, he ended up being interviewed live on TV about a subject not of his choice. You can see his BBC interview and lesson plan here.

The “Wrong Guy”, as it came to be known, is still one of my favourite stories for learners of English. And when I found this iconic panic-terror-resignation tryptic, I got kind of excited.

I traced the image to Danny Butcher and discovered that he was as obsessed with Guy Goma as me. Being the generous man that he is, Danny allowed me to use the image in my lesson plan. And thus began a beautiful relationship of late night Skype chats, nonsense conversations, and fruitful collaboration. Sometimes, the internet can be a wonderful place.

I always knew that I would hire Danny to be the illustrator for my book Videotelling. However, I had a small concern: Danny’s mind is the home to a lot of delightfully-freaky dark matter and this often comes out in his work. Would his images be suitable for an educational title?

To give you a taste of his work, look at the Donald Trump collage at the top of the page – a homage to H.R.Giger – one of Danny’s heroes. Other work has featured spacemen with rats for brains, military goldfish, and I’m not even going to mention his London phone box sex reptiles series. Oh dear – I just did. If you would like more evidence of his dark mind, have a look at his website. But don’t worry – the aforementioned sex reptiles have gone.

I’m kidding of course. Danny is a professional and his illustrations for Videotelling are perfect. He did an excellent job of adding new meaning to the stories in the book.

Note: For information on how to place your advance order for the Videotelling paperback, and also get your 20% discount, please subscribe to this site.

Danny has also created a number of high-resolution colour images which look great projected onto the classroom wall. These are excellent for engaging students with the stories in the book.

I’ll be sending these images to everyone who has bought the book. If you bought the book but you don’t get my email updates, drop me a line at jamiekeddie.com

About Danny Butcher

In the world of design, Danny Butcher is well-known for his illustrations, album covers, fliers, posters and videos. Last year, he collaborated with animator David Raitt to produce a series of animations for the British Council’s Shakespeare Lives series. The full individual videos can be seen on The British Council’s site.

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