Like this father before him, Howard is an ice-cream van man – a master of his craft, with all the local knowledge and subtle skills:“Identifying the best places to stop. Sensing the optimum moment to switch on his signature tune. His ears were acutely attuned to the sound of children laughing. And, more importantly, the sound of children crying.” There’s overt optimism at work in the narrative – in Howard’s quietly contented marriage, in his small kindnesses, and his friendships, and in the series of events that lead to the happy ending. From the group of friends gathering together to support him after Tony’s machinations turn nasty – prompting scenes of collective endeavour so recognisable from romcoms – to the growing success of his new ice cream (‘It didn’t take long for word to spread..’), these are unabashedly ‘feelgood’ tropes.

Victoria Carfantan, director of Champagne Bollinger - UK, says: ‘We are very proud of our long-standing relationship supporting the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction. It is such an important award celebrating some of the most talented names in the genre and I am delighted to extend my congratulations to Matthew Dooley and his novel, Flake, as this year’s winner.’ AO: One of the things I loved about Flake were a couple of throwaway moments that nevertheless implied a kind of wider Dooleyverse. Do you see your stories all fitting together in the same shared universe? Everyman’s Library and Champagne Bollinger today, 1 July, announce Flake by Matthew Dooley (Vintage, Jonathan Cape) as the winner of the 2020 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction. Jasper’s overriding priorities, however, are his pet peeves, each as irrelevant to any sane human being as they are uncompromisingly and passionately pursued. For example, he spent six months in a French prison for trying to convert continental road signs from metric to imperial then painting his results on their signposts. So he’s averse neither to direct confrontation nor overt vandalism, which may well come in handy during the imminent North-West English Ice Cream Wars.(It doesn’t.) Six titles appeared on this year's shortlist including Jenny Offill's Weather (Granta) and House of Trelawney (Bloomsbury) by 2016 winner Hannah Rothschild.The colors are desaturated, veering towards gray tones, and the large amount of panels greatly reduces the pacing, building the sense of stillness (and perhaps loneliness) one may experience up north. The unhurried pacing lends the narration the sense of a documentary speaker, slowly remarking on the quirky stories of the inhabitants of Dobbiston, which gives every unexpected gag time to land. (You can almost imagine Emma Thompson or Stephen Fry doing the audiobook version, since the script has that quietly bemused tone.) Matthew Dooley will be awarded a jeroboam of Bollinger Special Cuvée, a case of Bollinger La Grande Année, and a complete set of the Everyman’s Library P.G. Wodehouse collection. With the current situation not allowing for a physical pig at Hay Festival this year, Dooley has drawn his own humorous interpretation, with himself sat on the pig, bottle of Bollinger in hand. He’ll be joining a long line of witty winners from the past two decades, including Helen Fielding, Ian McEwan, Terry Pratchett and Nina Stibbe. Flake, Matthew Dooley’s debut graphic novel, tells of how this epic battle turns out, and how Howard – helped by the Dobbiston Mountain Rescue team – overcomes every obstacle and triumphs in the end.

Flake tells the story of two rival ice-cream men: Howard, who is meek and happiest hiding in his van doing the crossword; and Tony Augustus – Howard’s half-brother, as it happens – who is intent on building an empire across the region. It is set in the 1980s in the fictional town of Dobbiston, though Dooley admits that it shares much in common with Ormskirk, Lancashire, where he grew up. DOOLEY: Alongside the Cape competition, anthologies were the other thing to get me going. I need a deadline otherwise I won’t do anything, so having a date by which to submit something is a useful motivator. I’d been scratching around doing bits and pieces, not really getting anywhere, wondering if there was much point to bothering with comics. I then saw that Dirty Rotten Comics were taking submissions for a new book and took a punt sending them a silly comic about someone with a balloon for a head. They took it and that was the first of a number of comics they published in subsequent DRCs. Matthew Dooley will be awarded a jeroboam of Bollinger Special Cuvée, a case of Bollinger La Grande Année, and a complete set of the Everyman’s Library P G Wodehouse collection. The award is normally presented at the Hay Festival, which was cancelled this year owing to the coronavirus pandemic.This is not to say the narrative is without sadness: it’s there both in the physical fabric of the rundown town (graffiti, stained walls, broken signs), and the touches of personal unhappiness: Howard’s memories of his father’s brutishness, and a melancholy visit to his mother in her retirement home. But the emotion remains very understated, very British. And just as the greys of the unlovely town are leavened and uplifted by the dreamy pastels of the ice cream vans, so too is the emotion leavened with humour. The trip to the retirement home, for example, is also gently hilarious – as Howard hands out his lollies to the old folks, one elderly lady asks querulously, ‘Do you have one that’s a little warmer?’ Matthew Dooley’s debut graphic novel Flake is a joy ... If it was a film, you could see Bill Forsyth directing it. If it was on TV, you’d file it next to your Detectorists box set. But as it’s a graphic novel, think of Joff Winterhart with a cone and a squirt of strawberry sauce.' Herald Scotland DOOLEY: There are definitely some eccentric characters in flake, but I don’t think they are too far removed from reality. I hope people will recognise character traits of their own. Many of us, me included, are a bit strange and I think much of life is lived in that space between the weird and the boring. I’ve lost count of the days, months, years I’ve given over to quietly pottering around doing something or other that will never amount to much. I think the humanity comes from the fact that we are all caught up in our own small world, it seems massive to us but is all rather inconsequential in the grand scheme of things.