The post-war world of the ‘Beano’ and ‘Dandy’ prevailed for decades but no longer enchants
HELLO, READERS! I’m about to play a prank on that pesky editor. He’s going to give me a slippering for writing too much rubbish about post-war popular culture. But I’ve put this big book of hard sums down the back of my shorts. No sore bottom for me.
After he’s finished, I’m off for a plate of mashed potatoes jammed with fat sausages.
If you don’t know what I’m up to here then you are, most likely, part of the generation that just killed off an institution. I hope you’re proud of yourself. Last week, DC Thomson, the Dundee-based firm behind so many classic British comics, confirmed that, 75 years after first hitting news stands, The Dandy was to cease publication and go digital-only from December.
Various panicky overhauls had already telegraphed the news that the comic was doomed. In 2007, Thomson rebranded the title as (shudder) Dandy Xtreme and pointed the organ towards stories derived from television. Then they changed it back again. These moves were akin to last-minute livery changes on the Hindenburg. The vessel was on its way down. Desperate Dan would eat no more cow pies.
Much of the reporting on the comic’s demise has, reasonably enough, focused on the online virus that is chewing away at the larger print-media entity. But The Dandy and The Beano – its slightly more anarchic Thomson stable-mate – have seemed sadly out-of-date for three or four decades.
Those UK comics were at their prime in the early 1970s. Yet, even then, they seemed to be reporting from an earlier era. Action titles such as Victor and Hotspur remained indecently obsessed with the second World War. Evil “Japs” and icy “Huns” continued to treat sporting British soldiers with unimaginable cruelty. Few contemporary boys objected. The western was dead. Messerschmitts and Spitfires seemed so much more interesting than tomahawks and covered wagons.
What remains peculiar, however, is the extent to which the light-hearted comic characters also lived their lives in a version of the 1940s.
The most beguiling strips in The Beano came from the peculiar brain of the great Leo Baxendale (still with us at 81). No decent person could fail to be amused by the proto-Python craziness of The Bash Street Kids or The Three Bears. There is a knobbly strangeness in the drawings that reveals an impressively anarchic sensibility. But when was all this madness taking place? Baxendale devised those strips in the 1950s and – though little zephyrs of contemporary life slipped in – the characters seemed forever trapped in post-war austerity.
The near-psychotic obsession with sausage and mash spoke of a generation that grew up with rationing. Television rarely figured as a reference point. If “pop stars” appeared they were represented as slightly foolish mop-tops in matching suits.
All mothers stayed in the home. All fathers dressed in sports jackets and worked a conventional eight-hour day. If Dennis the Menace or Minnie the Minx were naughty, they were assaulted with household objects such as slippers or rolled-up newspapers.
Even in the 1970s, this seemed like a dispatch from another era.
There are, of course, shelves of academic texts on the semiotics of the post-war British comic. But the best commentary on the genre can be found within the pages of Viz. First published in 1979, though not properly popular for another 20 years, the naughty, politically incorrect magazine still incorporates the conventions of DC Thomson comics into its strips. The characters’ names often feature bold rhymes (like Dennis the Menace or Roger Melly the Man on the Telly). They address their fans directly as “readers”.
In a hilarious piece of absurdity that still makes me giggle, stage directions are often expressed in the form of onomatopoeia. “Hides!” “Wallops!” “Sneaks!” Alas, Viz is not as popular as it once was. For many readers, the organ may as well take its reference points from medieval madrigals or the elements of Euclid. The Dandy’s silly, long-archaic conventions now only register with the middle-aged.
It is only right to mourn the passing of a school of British humour that – in its broadness and brashness – deserves mention in the same breath as the films of Norman Wisdom or the jokes of Ken Dodd. But, on reflection, there was something unhealthy about the comics’ refusal to engage with their readers’ universe.
The folk who ran DC Thomson – and the BBC children’s department for that matter – in the 1970s still felt able to demand that their young consumers digest stories set in an idealised, anachronistic world that died before the launch of Sputnik.
It’s right that we no longer force youngster to look backwards in that manner. Nowadays, we offer them the shining modernity of, erm, Harry Potter.
Hang on. Maybe, youth culture hasn’t moved on.