As Gibsons brings back Dingbats, the inventor’s children recall their dad’s incredible career | Mojo Nation (2024)

Posted on 29th July 2024By Deej Johnson

Rachel, you’re the daughter of Paul Sellers… Rus and Ben, you’re the sons of Paul Sellers! For those that don’t know the name, who is Paul Sellers in the world of games?
Rachel: In the world of games, dad was the creator of the board game Dingbats. Originally, though, that was a series of word puzzles in The Mail on Sunday…

And that in itself came out in quite an interesting way, did it not?
Rus: Yes! The Mail on Sunday launched just over 40 years ago. They were looking for content to put in it. As luck would have it, dad had met somebody who was involved in putting the newspaper together. They said, “Do you want to put some of your Dingbats in the launch issue?” And happily, it’s been there every Sunday without fail ever since. We kept it going even after dad passed.

Amazing! And, with your permission, I’ll put some pictures of Dingbats in the article here so that people know exactly what we’re talking about! The Dingbats were pretty much an immediate hit, were they not?
Rachel: They were. So much so that we weren’t really prepared for the scale of it! It really resonated with people; Mail on Sunday readers would send in dozens and dozens of their ideas. Piles and piles of readers’ Dingbats were arriving at the house!

Rus: And in fact, we STILL have regular contributors from the Mail on Sunday! Some have been sending them in for 30 years. There’s one guy that’s now in an old people’s home… He still sends something every week; just keeps doing them.

Gosh and golly! I didn’t realise it was such a – well, a viral sensation before a viral sensation existed! So not to get caught in the weeds, but was your dad able to use all those ideas?
Rachel: Quite a lot of them, yes! Dad would usually be able to finesse other people’s ideas into something workable. There was a lot of fine tuning, and dad always made sure people got credit and a £10 book voucher for Waterstone’s. It’s been that way ever since.

That’s absolutely amazing. And I’ve been meaning to ask: where did the name Dingbats come from?
Rus: From typography. As you may know, Dingbats are fonts that have symbols instead of letters. Dad was looking for something expressive for a name… And he liked that word – it sounded a bit crazy, a bit bonkers. They wouldn’t call it Dingbats in America, though, when it got taken up by Parker Brothers. In America, that was seen as a derogatory phrase: “Oh, you’re a dingbat!” So they called it Whatzit?

And let me tidy up some dates here… I think your dad first published a Dingbat in 1980. Why did it not become a game until 1987?!
Rus: I think the answer to that is Trivial Pursuit! Because Trivial Pursuit had been such a huge hit in the years immediately prior to 1987. After that, there was a surge of interest that changed everything in terms of going to people’s houses for dinner and playing games afterwards. And Dingbats was that kind of game.

That makes sense: Trivial Pursuit blazed a trail for others to follow…
Rus: Exactly. And it happened that, at the time dad realised he could do something with it, the chairman of Waddingtons was a man called David Perry. David happened to be a family friend! Knowing Waddingtons was a very celebrated brand, dad went to them and said, “I’ve got this idea”. And it moved pretty quickly after that; it went to London Toy Fair in Earls Court…

Rachel: On dad’s birthday as it happened – January 31st. It was also awarded Game of the Year. And as you know, dad worked very closely with Waddingtons on it. Robin Black-Harris was with them at that time – she worked closely with dad; often coming down here for meetings. They’d be communicating a lot… Dad would give a lot of credit to Robin.

Robin mentioned your dad in an article quite recently, actually. People can read that here. But Ben, let me ask you: after 40 years, Gibsons is bringing Dingbats back as a game: how has that come about?
Ben: As a family, we’d been discussing bringing Dingbats back as a game for some time – so we were thrilled when Gibsons approached us about it. The feel at Gibsons is very right for us: we like the family feel; there’s a very caring approach and we’re looking forward to feeling that energy, that care and attention behind the game.

I can see how that would feel like a great match. Two family companies with vintage brands. I think they’re in their 105th year…
Rus: That’s amazing!

I think 105. They’ve been doing games and jigsaws since 1919. Still a family business too, as you must know: Kate Gibson is the MD…
Rus: Yes. And, actually, when our father first launched Dingbats, it was Gibsons that distributed it for Waddingtons. So it’s kind of poetic to see it come full circle. It was wonderful to get an email from them…

Well, on that, who emailed? Did they say why?
Rus: It was an email from Michael Gibson, the chairman. He said he remembered Dingbats fondly and that they were looking to see if we wanted to do it as a game again. And the minute I saw that email, I wanted to get back to him.

And I see the designer at Gibsons, Lauren Stallard, has made it look swish and really colourful… In terms of the gameplay, how has it changed?
Rachel: Interesting that you should ask that! Gibsons did some research and what they found was that people loved just going through the cards! So in the new version, there isn’t a board. In that respect, it’s more about options in the gameplay… Whether you do one-to-one, play as a group or in teams of people.

Rus: Another thing that’s worth mentioning is that pubs around the country are playing Dingbats as part of their quizzes. They don’t play with a board either; they just present four of them on a sheet every so often. We were already looking internally at three card-game versions of the game without a board. To test them, whenever I went to people’s houses last Christmas, I had a selection of the picture-style Dingbats…

Those with solutions that depend less on words?
Rus: Right. Junior Dingbats we used to call those – because that was the next version we bought out; must be 30, 35 years ago. You didn’t need to read them. In any case, to playtest, I started showing them on an iPad – like a fast fire thing! And when I said to people, “Do you want to play individually or together?”, most people said together! Because then they’re shielded if they get the answer wrong.

Yes – safety in numbers… Which sounds like a Dingbat in his own right!
Rus: Ha! Well, what we found was that people were loving the quick-fire nature of it, firing away in two teams. And not having a board was really liberating because you don’t pause in the same way you did. And that’s important because of how society has changed… We’ve gone from talking about the 15-minute culture, then the three-minute culture then the 15-second culture. Well, it’s sort of like three-seconds now, isn’t it? Which I think is one of the reasons that people don’t want to count along on a board or read huge tomes of instructions.

Quite so! And your dad had another game, did he not? Poetic Justice… So there was that, Dingbats, the foreign editions, a junior edition…
Ben: Right. A junior version, books, travel versions!

I get the sense your dad was a tremendously creative man… What were some of his other creative pursuits?
Rachel: Early on, he was head of art at a school. As well as teaching art, he wrote and directed the school musical. He also used to write jokes for the Eamonn Andrews show on British television. He was on that as well! But for 30 years! he was a cartoonist. As well as Dingbats for the mail on Sunday, he drew the Little Mrs. and the Mr. Men cartoon strips with Roger Hargreaves.

Oh, no way?!
Rachel: Yes! Roger Hargreaves lived a mile up the road… They had the most wonderful friendship and working relationship until, sadly, poor Roger passed away in his fifties.

And your dad started down this path quite young, I take it?
Yes – he had his first cartoon published in the Danceland times when he was 17, and he thought, “This is it!” He knew he’d found his vocation! Then he did a gorgeous cartoon strip – and subsequently a book – on a little knight called Lancelittle. It’s absolutely charming!

There was also a strip called Anyuk and Ayli – or Enoch and Eli – in the Express and the Star newspapers. It was set in England’s Black Country. That was the one of dad’s first cartoon strips and fascinating because – as you may know – the Black Country dialect, in part of the West Midlands, is very localised. Dad could speak it with his brothers. They used to talk in it just for fun but anyone listening in would be at a loss…

Yes. Perhaps worth my saying: that region has such colloquial language and a heavy accent; a great number of words they say wouldn’t appear in any dictionary as such…
Rachel: Yes. And quite a specific sense of humour. In any case, after that cartoon was syndicated, he did a cartoon strip about a husband and wife called Eb and Flo. It started out being somewhat biographical, based on his own parents… Later, it kind of morphed and became more autobiographical: it was more about our mum and him!

In terms of the content, or their look?
Rachel: Both, although I was thinking about the look: Eb grew to look like dad and Flo looked like mum! Ha! Over the 30 years of drawing Eb and Flo, and becoming more skilled is a cartoonist, he would use fewer lines to create a scene or sense of motion. At one time, dad’s cartoons were in about 300 papers around the world. And his cartoons and Dingbats still feature in 100 or so national papers today, including titles in Nairobi and India.

That’s amazing. And I’m sad to bring this up, but your father passed, I think, in 2020. I was sorry to hear that at the time, and I’m sorry now. He was what? 89?
Ben: 89 years old and still working! He never retired and had no plans to do so. And something else you might not know about, Deej, is another complete departure. In around 2007 – when Sudoku was all the rage – dad created a handheld, four-dimensional Sudoku cube. We actually made it out in China; it was magnetic. You had to put it together so that you had a nine-square Sudoku all the way around the outside faces. And if you pulled a face off, it was Sudoku on inside too. Sudoku all the way round with one blank face. It was virtually impossible!

I don’t think I ever saw that. Sounds remarkable! That was manufactured, was it?
Ben: The Mail on Sunday launched it as a reader offer; 20,000 of them, I think. They might have reprinted them another 15,000… The point being that dad never stopped; he was always creating, right to the end. As he always used to say that there was a whole drawer full of other ideas in his studio. And all of his deals were done on trust; none of these convoluted contracts… Just handshake deals, you know?

I do! In fact, my entire career with Mojo Nation exists on the basis of a handshake. Although, looking back, I realise Adam Butler was wearing gloves. So! To wrap this up, folks, let me ask you this: How would you like people to remember your dad?
Rachel: Well, he was certainly one of a kind. He had an infectious creative energy. And although he was a perfectionist and utterly professional in everything he did, he always managed to find fun and humour in pretty much everything.

He was so generous with his time. If anybody had a smidgin of talent, or if they didn’t have any at all, he would find something about them and nurture it. As a result, a lot of the many beautiful notes we had after dad passed were from our age group. To this day, we miss that energy and belief in individuals.

Oh, that’s lovely. What a lovely thing to have said about you.
Rachel: It was a wonderful, wonderful quality. The three of us are forever repeating dad’s little aphorisms… “The art of art is artlessness…”

Ben: “Do the best and leave the rest”!

Rachel: “Find something you love and you’ll never work a day in your life…” Little quotes he’d picked up. And that last one is very true of dad because he absolutely loved what he did. He was too busy living to worry about dying, to be honest.

Brilliant.
Ben: I think people would also remember that his job was to make people laugh and have fun – because that’s a nice job to have. Also, he never lost his curiosity or his attention to detail either. He never cut corners; always did things thoroughly.

Rus: And one other thing I’d like to add is modesty, humbleness. He wasn’t a ‘Look at me’ guy. He could be persuasive and sell an idea, because he had an innate passion… But he was never arrogant and would always put somebody before himself. So the game was more important than him, by way of example. He never tried to put himself forward or turn the spotlight on himself. He was never, “Hey, it’s me!” Very modest.

Brilliant. I’m so sorry I didn’t get to meet him, but thank you for talking to me about him and the comeback of Dingbats. It’s been a genuine joy to talk with you all. Thank you. And all the best with the new edition.

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