There's something about MAGDA

The comedienne extraordinaire, award-winning memoirist, equality activist, and now children’s book author, Magda Szubanski, never stops evolving and as she contemplates 60, she couldn’t be happier, she tells Juliet Rieden.

- Juliet Rieden

Magda Szubanski is funny. She just has to roll her eyes, strike a pose or – of course – open her mouth and everyone is laughing. Indeed, from the moment she walked into the studio for our exclusive cover shoot, Magda had The Weekly team in stitches. It’s a gift the instinctive comedienne has recently used to brilliant effect in an inspired run of Uber Eats adverts. But Magda is also hilarious in print, as I have just discovered from her new project, the first of a series of laugh-out-loud – I kid you not – children’s books called Timmy the Ticked-Off Pony.

At the heart of the Timmy stories is a study of fame and what it can do to you – which is something Magda knows all about. “They say, write what you know, and really I’ve spent most of my life being various degrees of famous,” she explains. “Timmy is about the perils of shallow fame and being addicted to ‘likes’. I don’t want to sound preachy, but I worry for young people and the intense scrutiny and judgement they are exposed to – including from themselves. I’ve been around fame long enough to know that it cannot fix what’s broken – it can often make it worse. But when fame is built on a solid bedrock of sound values, you can use it to do some great stuff.”

The star of the books – Magda has two more in the works and hopes the series will run and run – who turns into a bit of an anti-star, is self-obsessed, cranky, overconfident, diminutive pony Timmy. And the inspiration for the character is a joke on Magda herself. “A friend of mine who knows me very well – she’s actually the one who came up with that