Hey, kids, there’s a new bear on the block

Soon to be joining the likes of Pooh and Paddington is a onesie-wearing streetwise bear, created by illustrator Sav Akyüz and actor-rapper Ben Bailey Smith (aka Doc Brown)

On a damp January morning, I am on my way to meet Ben Bailey Smith, otherwise known as rapper Doc Brown, and illustrator Sav Akyüz for a coffee in central London. Their friendship is, as they have admitted themselves, an unlikely one. As Smith has said: ‘“Who would put together a Jamaican rapper and a Muslim Turk as best mates?” If there is an answer, it has to be: London. Both are children of immigrants and first-generation Londoners. Smith’s mother is Jamaican, his father British (his sister is the novelist Zadie Smith). Akyüz’s family came from a Turkish mountain village where no one read children’s books. And this fact alone makes our reason for meeting as unlikely as the friendship itself: the two are about to publish a tremendous children’s picture book, I Am Bear, secured, after a keen bidding war, by Walker Books.

When parents take away technology, the kid will want the next best form of entertainment – a bedtime story

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