He is a regular contributor to the adult comic Viz, and has created and drawn two of the most popular and long-running strips, The Modern Parents and The Critics, as well as the more recent (and rather less popular) additions of Ferdinand the Foodie and Desert Island Teacher. His work for Viz often tends to satirise various types of self-important or self-righteous middle class people. The Modern Parents, for example, portrays the way a mother and father insist on bringing up their young sons following a doctrine of what they term as 'ethical awareness', much to the detriment of their children.
Fardell is also the author and illustrator of three children's adventure novels ... The Seven Professors of the Far North, published in 2004, The Flight of the Silver Turtle, published in 2006, and The Secret of the Black Moon Moth, published in 2009 ... and a children's picture book, Manfred the Baddie, published 2008.
Fardell lives in Edinburgh with his wife and two children.