Adrian Edmondson was born in January 1957 and is thus now nearly 67 years old. He has spent around fifteen weeks of his life playing Vyvyan from The Young Ones, much less than 0.5% of his life so far. He enjoyed The Young Ones and remains proud of it, but has not really watched it for forty years. He was embarrassed when, working with Richard Briers around a decade later, the older actor on their first meeting repeated to him, Vyvyan’s famous tirade about the “SO BLOODY NICE” Good Life starring “FELICITY “TREACLE” KENDALL AND RICHARD “SUGAR-FLAVOURED SNOT” BRIERS” from The Young Ones virtually verbatim. They got on alright after that.
He thus discusses his most famous role slightly reluctantly. The book’s chapter on The Young Ones reads simply: “Surely enough’s been said about this over the years.” However, this is immediately followed by a second chapter (in fact, the longest in the book) discussing his memories of the sitcom in detail.
But there are many other things to enjoy in this well-written autobiography. For starters, there’s Ade’s dislike of his own name. The moniker, “Adrian Edmondson” has never exactly tripped easily off the tongue and is awkward to spell. Just as his friend and comedy partner Richard Mayall became “Rik,” Ade planned to change his name to the similar sounding but catchier “Eddie Monsoon” but he missed the paperwork deadline and Adrian (or “Ade”) he remains. “Edina Monsoon” was, of course, the name chosen for his wife Jennifer Saunders’s most famous creation in Absolutely Fabulous.
There is actually very little about Jennifer (in fact, Ade’s second wife who he married in 1985) or their three daughters here. This is fair enough. The couple have long agreed not to discuss each other much in public and besides, she has written her autobiography already (2013’s Bonkers: My Life in Laughs).
We do, however, learn about his childhood spent in Bradford and in many other international trouble-spots, his sometimes strained relationship with his often difficult father, his brief run-ins with corporal punishment at school and less formalised violence on the mean streets of Bradford, his early joyous days with Rik both at Manchester Uni and during his comedy career on The Young Ones, The Comic Strip and Bottom.
He also talks a little about his occasional mental health struggles and about the eventual souring of his relationship with Mayall in the decade before his death, his music career (of less interest to me) and the somewhat higgledy-piggledy nature of his work in the last two decades (Celebrity Masterchef, some music, some drama: Twelfth Night on stage, War and Peace on TV and some comedy: a supporting role in comedy drama, Back To Life).
He may not be a young one anymore, but this remains a good read about a fascinating life and career.
Doon Mackichan is one of Britain’s finest comedy actresses. You might have seen her playing Cathy, the neighbour from hell in the sitcom, Two Doors Down or as Jane Plough, the long-suffering agent of Matt Berry’s wayward actor in Toast of London. She’s also been in Roman-era sitcom, Plebs, I’m Alan Partridge and far too many other things to detail here.
There is more to the title of the book, than simply a suggestive innuendo. Throughout this very readable memoir, each chapter begins with a short character description of the sort an actor might see when considering taking a particular role. In this case, they each sum up a particular “part” which Doon has been forced to adopt at different stages of her life e.g. The Angry Young Feminist, The Stupid Tart, The Deranged Mother and so on.
Her life has had its share of ups and downs. Highs have included her three series on seminal Channel 4 sketch show, Smack The Pony (1999-2003) with Sally Phillips and Fiona Allen, which was one of the most satisfactory experiences of her working life. She also swam the English Channel. Lows have included illness, divorce and one particularly intense family crisis.
A recurrent theme of the book has been the persistent sexism she has encountered throughout her life and career. Boys have treated her badly from the playground onwards. In this, she is certainly sadly anything but unique, although she is refreshingly frank in speaking up about it. The sexism has extended from the inadequate childcare provisions laid on during times when she has had young children to severe restrictions being placed on the types of role she has been allowed to play. Her own Mary Whitehouse Experience was an unpleasant one with the four stars, particularly David Baddiel treating her with arrogance and disdain. A pre-fame Ricky Gervais also comes out of the book badly, making a pushy attempt to land himself a starring role in the all-female Smack The Pony while a famous, dress-wearing male British artist (hmmm…who could that be?) is amongst those who have made inappropriate comments to her. As one of the most prominent women appearing on the brilliant Brass Eye ‘Paedegeddon’ Special, she was demonised by the tabloid press in 2001
Overall, this is an engaging book from a talented actress who one feels could have been bigger than she has been. Doon Mackichan seems angry occasionally. She is right to be so and is certainly angry about the right things.
My Lady Parts, by Doon Mackichan. Published by: Canongate.
At some point after Stargate, but before the Star Wars prequels came Starship Troopers. The most underrated science fiction film of the 1990s made landfall across Earth in 1998. Would you like to know more? Join Chris Hallam as he goes on a bug hunt…
BASIC INSECT
A war correspondent in full futuristic military uniform reports straight to camera from a battle scene. His location is on one of the bug meteors in the Klendathu system, whose deadly inhabitants, the giant insectoid Arachnids have been launching a series of devastating attacks on the Earth.
“It is an ugly planet! A Bug Planet! A planet hostile to life…” he states before he is brutally attacked mid-rant by one of the Arachnids. He does not last long. As if personally insulted by his harsh words about its home world, the monster proceeds to tear him apart in full view of the camera.
“Keep moving! Get out of here NOW!” a passing mobile infantryman – in fact, our hero Johnny Rico (Casper Van Dien) warns the cameraman – and thus in true B-movie style, us. Soon afterwards, another soldier and the cameraman are also attacked by the same creature. So, begins 1997’s science fiction romp, Starship Troopers, directed by Paul Verhoeven and based on Robert A. Heinlein’s 1959 novel of the same name.
MAN VS BROOD
It’s a familiar story. Boy meets girl. Boy joins the Federal Service, where despite the opposition of his wealthy parents, he becomes a ‘Roughneck’ i.e. an infantry man. The girl becomes an ace space pilot, but living an entirely separate life, soon breaks up with the boy.
Okay: admittedly this isn’t a familiar story. It doesn’t really matter. For this is just the beginning. Soon the lives of Johnny and Carmen (Denise Richards) are transformed by the devastating war which erupts between the humans and the Arachnids. The various entanglements between, say, Johnny and fellow Roughneck “Dizzy” (Dina Meyer) soon fade into insignificance as the film becomes increasingly focused on the devastating physical confrontations between man and alien.
Or perhaps we should say “person vs alien”? For despite being directed by Paul Verhoeven, the man who brought the world Basic Instinct and Showgirls, the society in Starship Troopers is refreshingly lacking in prejudice based on gender or, indeed, race. Only the fictional species of giant killer insectoid aliens are treated badly. And criminals. And cows.
This liberal attitude extends to a scene in which many of the cast (including Dina Meyer) stripped off in front of the camera, for a unisex shower scene. Somewhat apprehensive, the young cast reportedly only agreed to this, if director Paul Verhoeven agreed to get naked himself while filming. Verhoeven, then overweight and fast approaching sixty was happy to do so. Thankfully, no images recording Verhoeven’s gesture seem to exist.
Actress Denise Richards who played Johnny’s initial love interest Carmen was crucially absent from this scene: in fact, her character was elsewhere, and it would have made no sense for her to have been involved. This did not stop the film and others such as Wild Things (1998), Drop Dead Gorgeous (1999) and the Bond film, The World Is Not Enough (1999) launching Richards’ career as a major film star and sex symbol of the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Neil Patrick Harris – then, best known for his early Nineties teenage TV role as Doogie Hauser MD – plays Carl, the gang’s slightly geeky friend, who ultimately turns out to be psychic. Harris would achieve true stardom only later. Today, it is he and Richards not Van Dien, Meyer or even established characters like the late Rue ‘Blanche from Golden Girls’ McClanahan and Michael Ironside, who are easily the most famous people in the entire film.
Has Starship Troopers dated? “Hell! Yes Sir!” Some of the CGI inevitably looks less impressive now than it did at the time. And while fighting aliens in space is still very much the stuff of science fiction, a viewer today in the age of Zoom, would be forgiven for not noticing that Carmen’s electronic conversations with her long distance boyfriend, Johnny, were anything unusual when the film was made in the 1990s.
None of these things matter. For at the end of the day, watching Starship Troopers remains an enjoyable experience. The scenes of warriors doing battle as vast hordes of Arachnids can be seen teeming over the horizon remain exhilarating, exciting, gory and fun.
The film is also immeasurably boosted by the series of short, sombrely narrated state propaganda films supposedly created by the ruling regime which appear throughout. Presented in the style of Allied Second World War newsreels, while also attempting to deploy internet-type technology (the web was still young in 1997), these somehow manage to seem both old-fashioned and futuristic at the same time.
They are undeniably intentionally funny but also give us a taste of the kind of society, Johnny Rico and his friends have grown up in. It is a society which is comfortable with child soldiers and which (like the modern USA) is perhaps a little bit too relaxed about preventing its children from getting their hands on guns. It is a society in which criminals are flogged and executed not just publicly, but on live TV. It is a society in which children are urged to stamp on harmless domestic spiders by war-mad teachers driven into a frenzy by government propaganda. And as we learn early on in Johnny’s civics class, it is a society where citizenship and the right to vote are not awarded automatically, but have to be earned.
The human society in the film, Starship Troopers live in an Americanised fascist state.
The question is, is this what creator Robert A Heinlein would have wanted, either for a film based on one of his books or for human society itself?
THE STATE THEY’RE IN
One day, in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands of the early 1940s, one member of the occupying forces decided to play a cruel game to pass the time. He pointed his gun at a small boy. The boy was naturally terrified and had wet himself publicly before the Nazi stopped.
The boy was Paul Verhoeven. And he never forgot it.
More than fifty years later, he directed Starship Troopers, a film which seemed to confuse many reviewers. Some (for example, the late Jeff Vice) seemed to miss the fact that it was set in a fascist state completely. Others did recognise this, but assumed Verhoeven was endorsing fascism.
The celebrated critic Roger Ebert gave the film two out five. “Starship Troopers” is the most violent kiddie movie ever made. I call it a kiddie movie not to be insulting, but to be accurate,” he wrote, clearly deliberately insulting it. “(Verhoeven) wants to depict the world of the future as it might have been visualized in the mind of a kid reading Heinlein in 1956.” The book was actually first published in 1959. Scott Rosenberg, writing in Salon was disappointed for different reasons. It “lacks the courage of the book’s fascist conclusions.”
Let us be clear: there is no doubt whatsoever about Verhoeven’s anti-fascist intentions in the film. Nor is there any doubt that the society he and screenwriter Edward Neumeier conceived is sufficiently right-wing to be considered fascist. The military are completely dominant. There is little evidence of democracy. Corporal and capital punishment are in use. The characters’ uniforms sometimes look fascistic in design too. By the end of the film, Neil Patrick Harris practically looks like a member of the Gestapo.
The satirical elements in the film are intended to give the viewer pause for thought, drawing attention to similarities between the US and this ultra-right-wing state.
On the other hand, it is easy to see how some people might get confused regarding the film’s attitudes to fascism. For one thing, as mentioned, the very worst aspects of fascism: the extreme racism and persecution of minority groups do not seem to exist here. Unlike every other Far Right state everyone seems refreshingly progressive when it comes to gender and race. The girls and boys fight … and shower… side by side. Even though many of the girls suffer excruciating deaths as they are impaled by Arachnids at least, as they do so they can take comfort from the fact that they are doing so on equal terms with the chaps.
It also must be said that things do seem to function pretty well in the world of Starship Troopers. Everything seems to be almost perfectly set up to counter the Arachnid threat. The viewer is forced to ponder whether a more democratic, less military society would be so well prepared to combat an alien menace, particularly if they were more constrained by inhibitions over gender and race.
Actor Michael Ironside, played high school teacher turned Roughneck unit commander, Jean Rasczak recalls being puzzled by Verhoeven’s attitude.
“Why are you doing a right-wing fascist movie?” He asked. Verhoeven replied: “If I tell the world that a right-wing, fascist way of doing things doesn’t work, no one will listen to me.” He continued: “So, I’m going to make a perfect fascist world: everyone is beautiful, everything is shiny, everything has big guns and fancy ships, but it’s only good for killing fucking Bugs!”
HEINLEIN MANOUVRES
Many fans of the book had another objection to the film. They didn’t appreciate the implication that Heinlein was a fascist at all. It seems unlikely Heinlein, who had served in the US Navy, would have appreciated that label either, had he still been alive.
If the novel and film of Starship Troopers are very different, it is perhaps not surprising. The director hadn’t read the book.
“I stopped after two chapters because it was so boring,” Verhoeven admits. “It is really quiet a bad book. I asked Ed Neumeier to tell me the story because I just couldn’t read the thing.”
Starship Troopers represented something of a turning point for Heinlein as he moved from juvenile to adult fiction. There are quite a few differences between the book and the film: there is a lot more technical detail about the troopers’ suits and Heinlein’s years of naval experience are clearly in evidence in the text. But there’s no getting away from politics: Heinlein was, in fact, motivated to write the novel after being inspired by his anger over the moderate Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower’s decision to suspend nuclear testing in 1959. A leftist in his earlier days, by the 1950s, he was clearly firmly on the Right with many of his characters’ words clearly reflecting his own conservative outlook.
The words, “There are no dangerous weapons; there are only dangerous men,” seems like an early formulation of the National Rifle Association’s famously inane but resonant slogan, “guns don’t kill people: people do”. Heinlein is critical of the concept of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and clearly advocates the notion of citizenry and the right to vote are earned through service and combat. He clearly advocates flogging of juvenile delinquents, using a strange analogy about a puppy to illustrate his pointy. His character, Dubois says of the 20th century: “that period was loaded with pre-scientific pseudo-psychological nonsense…half of it fuzzy-headed wishful thinking, half of it rationalized charlatanry.”
It is easy to forget he is writing in the relatively placid USA of the 1950s. Heinlein may not have literally been a fascist, but he certainly had tendencies in that direction. Had he lived to see it, he may not have liked the implication that the society in the film version was fascistic, but it seems unlikely he’d have disagreed with much about how the society functioned in the film.
On the plus side, the book shows few obvious signs of racism at all. This is reasonably unusual for an American book of the mid-20th century and very much to Robert A Heinlein’s credit.
THE RETURN OF RICO
The years rolled by. Robert Heinlein’s status as an author steadily increased. By the time of his death in 1988, the man behind Stranger in a Strange Land and The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress was regularly ranked as one of the “Big Three” best English language science fiction authors alongside Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke. The year 1978, meanwhile, had seen a teenaged Sarah Brightman release the single, ‘I’m In Love With A Starship Trooper’ with Hot Gossip. The following year saw The VCs debut in British comic, 2000AD. Unlike the pop song and as he freely admitted, Gerry Finley-Day’s strip clearly owed a lot to Heinlein’s novel, Starship Troopers.
In the 1990s, a script entitled Bug Hunt At Outpost Nine began to circulate. The script was similar enough to Heinlein’s 1959 book that a decision was to buy the rights and adapt it directly. Paul Verhoeven, the man behind the original science-fiction blockbusters, Robocop and Total Recall was hired to direct.
TOTAL FREEFALL
Although not a flop, Starship Troopers underperformed at the box office. Had it been a success, it might well have become a major movie franchise. This may yet happen there is serious talk of a reboot and a script has been written. As it is, there are sequels (see below) but none made it to US cinema screens.
As it is, 25 years on the film looks better now than it did at the time. It’s true the acting is sometimes ropey – witness Denise Richards’ sudden dramatic recovery from apparent serious injury in the film’s closing scenes – but the film’s depiction of a militaristic American national security state anticipates the struggles of the next decade (the US not fighting Arachnids but Iraqis) and the arguably fascistic tendencies of the Trump Administration (2017-21).
As Paul Verhoeven says: “It’s a very right-wing book. And with the movie we tried, and I think at least partially succeeded, in commenting on that at the same time. It would be eat your cake and have it. All the way through we were fighting with the fascism, the ultra-militarism. All the way through I wanted the audience to be asking, ‘Are these people crazy?’
BOX OUT: HEROES, MARAUDERS AND TRAITORS..
At last! All those spin-offs and sequels in full…
Roughnecks: Starship Troopers Chronicles (1998-1999): A 36-part CGI animated TV series. Paul Verhoeven was executive producer and featuring characters (although not the voices) from the film such as Johnny and Dizzy. Ended after being beset with bugs…er… I mean production problems.
Starship Troopers 2: Hero of the Federation (2004). TV film sequel scripted by the original film’s screenwriter Edward Neumeier (who also wrote Robocop). Richard Burgi, later of Desperate Housewives, stars as Captain V.J Dax. Two-word review: it’s bad.
Starship Troopers 3: Marauder (2008) Casper Van Dien returns as Rico in this straight to DVD effort directed by Neumeier. Perhaps slightly better than Hero of the Federation, but not by much.
Starship Troopers: Invasion (2012) and Starship Troopers: Traitor of Mars (2017) Japanese computer animated films. Surprisingly, Van Dien and Dina Meyer both reprise their roles from the 1997 film in the second of these, Traitors of Mars.
This year, 2022, marks the 45th anniversary of the Galaxy’s Greatest Comic, 2000AD. Excellent news as this is, one sad, though inevitable consequence of the comic’s longevity, has simply been that so many of its talented creators have inevitably started to die off. Massimo Belardinelli, Steve Dillon, Brett Ewins, Ron Smith and Garry Leach have all been amongst the talented artists to depart in recent years. Another, Garry Leach, died in March 2022. In 2018, we lost Carlos Ezquerra, at the age of seventy. This book is a fitting monument to the prolific Spanish comic artist’s work.
It’s easy to forget that Ezquerra, who drew lots of very violent images in his time, started off working for girls’ comics like Mirabelle and Valentine. I was interested to see the examples from this period included here, although it’s clear ‘King Carlos’ was yet to establish his own distinctive style at that point. Ezquerra really came of age on the war comic, Battle in the 1970s. On strips like Rat Pack and Major Eazy, we can see the Ezquerra we know and love emerging for the first time. Now living in Britain, Ezquerra was now collaborating with writers like John Wagner. He also worked on the controversial, Action, a comic famously so violent that according to legend it was banned (it actually wasn’t).
Carlos Ezquerra will be probably always be most famous for creating two legendary sci-fi stories: Judge Dredd and Strontium Dog. The creation of Dredd has always been overshadowed by controversy. Having played a major role in defining the visual look of both Dredd himself (Ezquerra drew inspiration from his own memories of Franco’s Spain) and Mega City One, Ezquerra was enraged when the first ever Judge Dredd story was published in 2000AD Prog 2 in 1977, illustrated by a different artist, the then teenaged Mike McMahon. Ezquerra didn’t begrudge McMahon (himself a significant talent) at all, but was furious not to get to produce the futuristic lawman’s debut. The reasons why this happened are still disputed. Such was his anger, Ezquerra refused to draw Dredd for several years. In the meantime, he did other work for 2000AD, notably the comic’s own adaptation of Harry Harrison’s light-hearted Stainless Steal Rat and illustrated Gerry Finley Day’s war/horror crossover, Fiends of the Eastern Front. He also created the mutant bounty hunter, Johnny Alpha for the John Wagner story, Strontium Dog in 1978. Still annoyed about the Dredd snub, Ezquerra had created the best story in 2000AD’s short-lived sister comic, Star Lord. Star Lord merged into 2000AD anyway a few months later. Ezquerra drew pages and pages of Strontium Dog for 2000AD during the next decade. Characters from the strip illustrate the cover of this volume.
Ezquerra refused to kill Alpha off, however, and refused to work on the character’s epic story, The Final Solution which was illustrated by Simon Harrison and Colin MacNeil instead. His instincts proved sound. 2000AD soon realised killing Alpha off had been a dreadful mistake. Ezquerra illustrated the revived Strontium Dog in the 21st century. Ezquerra had, in the meantime, finally made his Judge Dredd debut in spectacular style. The Dredd mega-epic, The Apocalypse War ran in 2000AD for the first six months of 1982. Produced almost exactly midway through Ezqerra”s life, it is perhaps his greatest achievement. Ezquerra continued to provide art for both Dredd and Strontium Dog until his final days. The man himself may be gone but the legend of ‘King Carlos’ will never be forgotten.
The Art of Carlos Ezquerra. Published by: Rebellion. Available: now.
The Beano comic is now so old that there is now almost no one left alive in the UK who could not have potentially read it as a child.
The acclaimed children’s illustrator, Shirley Hughes, who died last month aged 94 apparently retained some memories of comics which “predated The Dandy and Beano.” Such people must be a rarity today. Besides even Hughes would have only just celebrated her eleventh birthday when the first Beano arrived in July 1938.
This book provides a decent and comprehensive history of Britain’s longest running comic authored by the appropriately named Iain McLaughlin, a onetime editor of The Beano himself.
This is as the title states, an unofficial history, however, and its worth mentioning that there are no images included from any issues of The Beano in this book at all. Such pictures as there are are mostly restricted to some fairly dry images of former contributors, statues of iconic characters such as Minnie the Minx and a cover which manages to evoke memories of the comic without actually including any pictures of characters at all. One wonders if there was some behind-the-scenes wrangling over this, perhaps explaining why the book was delayed from its original scheduled 2021 publication date.
It’s worth emphasising: this is still a solid, informative read. However, if you want to revisit the adventures of your favourite Beano characters be they Dennis the Menace, General Jumbo or Baby Face Finlayson, you’ll have to look elsewhere. There are no snapshots from Beano stories or even cover images inside.
Which Beano do you remember? Very old readers might just remember the very first Beanos featuring the likes of Big Eggo, Pansy Potter: The Strongman’s Daughter and Lord Snooty and his Pals. The new comic was one of three titles launched by Dundee-based publisher DC Thomson in the immediate pre-war era. The first, The Dandy (1937) featuring Korky the Cat and Desperate Dan was The Beano’s companion and rival until it folded in 2012 after an impressive 75-year run. The third comic, The Magic (1939), in contrast, never took off. Launched barely forty days before Hitler invaded Poland, the outbreak of the Second World War effectively finished The Magic off although it shared an annual with The Beano (‘The Magic-Beano Book’) for some years after its official closure in 1941.
Perhaps like my father’s generation, you’re old enough to remember The Beano’s 1950s golden age, a brilliant period for the comic which saw the launch of many of its most famous characters including Dennis the Menace, Minnie the Minx, Roger the Dodger, the now politically incorrect Little Plum and, best of all, The Bash Street Kids which originally appeared under the Hemingway-esque moniker, When The Bell Rings.
All of these stories were still going when I myself started getting the comic in the mid-1980s now joined by the likes of Billy Whizz, Smudge and Ball Boy and as time wore on, Ivy The Terrible and Calamity James.
This is a good story about a comic which has lasted a phenomenal 84 years. Hopefully your own memories of The Beano are vivid enough that you won’t need to see pictures of Biffo the Bear, Plug or Les Pretend in order to enjoy this.
They wouldn’t call a children’s comic, Krazy, these days. But in 1976, they did. And for 79 fun-filled issues, the short-lived British comic which played host to the Krazy Gang, Cheeky, Pongo Snodgrass and Hit Kid was genuinely one of the funniest and most anarchic titles around. One particular highlight was Trevor Metcalfe’s Batman spoof, Birdman & Chicken AKA Dick Lane and Mick Mason AKA The Krazy Crusaders. in many ways, a forerunner to Bananaman which made its first appearance in DC Thomson’s Nutty very soon afterwards, every one of the hapless avian superhero duo’s adventures against foes as diverse as The Giggler, Dr .Doom, Sour-Puss, The Puzzler and The Tremble Twins. The stories begin in full colour but end up in black and white. A particular highlight is Metcalfe’s penchant for alliterative captions particularly when producing one of the story’s many cliff-hangers, for example, “Will the ruthless rogue really wreck our rash raiders on the rocks?” or “Next week – our superstars search for a scheming scalliwag – the Scarecrow!” In short: over forty years old, but still lots of fun.
The year 2022 marks the 45th birthday of 2000AD.. And let’s clear up any confusion from the start: this refers to the popular weekly science fiction comic, 2000AD (which started in 1977) as opposed to the actual year, 2000AD (which started in the year 2000). I hope that’s clear.
Back in the pre-Star Wars, halcyon days of 1977, 2000AD burst onto the nation’s newspaper shelves, transforming the world of British comics forever. Over the next 2,000 or so issues (or progs, as they are known in 2000AD-world), tens of thousands of pages of sci-fi and fantasy featuring everything from Mega-City lawman, Judge Dredd (“I am the law!”), eternal warrior of Nu Earth Rogue Trooper, intergalactic Hoop girl, Halo Jones, mysterious alien weirdo Nemesis and his deadly human foe Torquemada (“be pure, be vigilant, behave!”), so-called “Celtic Conan”, Slaine, master of the Warp Spasm (“and he didn’t think it too many”) and countless other thrills, all courtesy of editor of the Galaxy’s Greatest Comic, Tharg the Mighty have appeared and indeed continues to do so today.
And now, in the highly unlikely event you’ve missed anything, this new, comprehensive, fully illustrated new encyclopaedia is here to get you fully up-to-speed. covering everything from Ace Trucking Company to Zippy Couriers, from Anderson PSI to Zenith.
So, if you don’t know your Ro-Busters from your Robohunters, your Wulf Sternhammers from your Wolfie Smiths, your Joe Dredds from your Joe Pineapples or your Gronks from your Grobbendonks, then this is the perfect book for you..
The pandemic has turned many comedians into authors.
It’s perfectly understandable. With many of the usual avenues of expression closed off to them, the lockdowns have provided a golden opportunity for many comics with a story to tell to finally put their words on paper. For many, it was either that or start a podcast. Little wonder then that, the Christmas 2021 books market is overflowing with comedy biographies. Harry Hill’s new autobiography is a weightier tome than his previous literary works, Harry Hill’s Whopping Great Joke Book, Harry Hill’s Fun Book or Harry Hill’s Bumper Book of Bloopers. But Fight! is a great read and I’d actually rank it alongside Bob Mortimer’s …And Away! as one of the very best comedy-themed books of the year.
As Harry himself admits, however, he is not for everyone. Chris Tarrant and Keeley Hawes are amongst those famous names who Harry has encountered who have not taken to his unique sense of humour. I myself have often been amazed how even during the long reign of Harry Hill’s TV Burp as one of the most consistently funny shows on British TV of the 2000s, a surprising number of people, many of whom I would have otherwise said had a good sense of humour suddenly became insufferably snooty whenever Harry’s name was mentioned. If you are one of those people, chances are, neither this book or even this review will be for you. Kindly go elsewhere.
For the rest of us, this is a treat, often funny, particularly in its early stages and revealing. Harry, after all, has a story to tell.
Today, with his winged collar, NHS spectacles and distinctly eccentric appearance, Harry Hill’s comic persona although well-established is hard to define. He looks like a middle-aged Bash Street Kid. Back in the 1970s, he was Matthew Hall, a bright young teenager busily engaged in developing smoke bombs and other homemade explosives with his other bored, science-obsessed school friends in rural Kent. “My interest in science was largely a by-product of pyromania,” he admits now, but it led directly to a medical career, something he abandoned only in the early 1990s as his love for performing live comedy took over. As Harry himself might reflect, “what were the chances of that happening eh?”
His accounts of his medical career make fascinating reading. Although he does not seem to be one of those comedians with an obvious dark side, his experiences as a doctor (including an excruciating sequence in which he makes a hash of informing a young husband that his wife had died unexpectedly) along with the premature deaths of a number of his old friends have obviously given him an appreciation of the fact that life is short.
He has also clearly retained a treasure trove of memories and physical relics of his comedy career. It is interesting to learn that he often collaborated with the likes of Alastair McGowan and Stewart Lee in the 1990s: not names one would obviously associate with him now. By the end of the decade, he was a familiar face on Channel 4. Between 2001 and 2012, he enjoyed his biggest ever success with over 160 episodes of ITV’s Saturday evening “sideways look at the week’s television,” TV Burp. The build-up to the show’s commercial breaks during which a staged fight between two often very surreal rivals, incidentally, explains the book’s title. Such showdowns included; “the Archbishop of Canterbury versus the Footballers’ Wives,” “a paw versus a claw” and “who is the best vegetarian: Heather Mills or Hitler?” During the last of these skirmishes, Harry can be clearly heard shouting, “come on, Hitler!”
In the end, the strain of trawling through hours of often terrible TV to find a few nuggets of comedy gold proved too much for Harry and the other writers and the show ended. Nothing else he has done has ever proven quite as successful. Harry proves unafraid to mention his lesser successes, which include Alien Fun Capsule (essentially a less popular version of TV Burp), Harry Hill’s Tea Time (an enjoyable but little seen Sky One show) or the fun but not especially commercial 2013 Harry Hill Movie featuring Julie Walters, Sheridan Smith and pop rock band, The Magic Numbers.
He also does not shy away from mentioning his few outright failures either: these include his short-lived X-Factor-themed musical, I Can’t Sing and disastrous stints presenting Capital Radio, an attempt to revive Matthew Kelly’s Stars In Their Eyes or the filming of a never-aired pilot of an unpromising Beadle’s About style prank show. That said, his failure to mention anything about the character Professor Branestawm or his sixteen series narrating home video clips show, You’ve Been Framed! (as far as I noticed anyway) is more surprising, however, particularly as neither of these were obvious failures. He’s has a busy life: perhaps he just forgot to mention them?
Ultimately, it is a book and a career to be proud of. Now 57, what does the future hold for the onetime Doctor Matthew Hall?
Well, there’s only one way to find out…
Book review: Fight! – Thirty Years Not Quite At The Top, by Harry Hill. Published by: Hodder Studio. Available: now.
The cover of Jimmy Carr’s book (or at least, the cover on the edition I have) shows Jimmy Carr symbolically removing a depressed version of his own face, revealing the more familiar, grinning version of the comedian underneath. The picture illustrates a central theme of the book: how twenty-two years ago, Jimmy transformed himself by abandoning his well-paid but unsatisfactory marketing job at Shell, ultimately becoming the very successful comedian and TV personality we all know today. Carr became, he argues, a much happier person as a result. Here, he argues, you can do the same, not necessarily by becoming a stand-up comedian (a career move which obviously wouldn’t suit everyone) but by identifying what you really want from life and going for it.
In many ways, the cover image would would work just as well if the two faces were reversed. For while the book is by no means deadly serious (on the contrary, there are lots of jokes throughout) this is Jimmy Carr, the host of 8 Out of 10 Cats with a silly laugh, revealing the more serious version of himself. The funny-man is revealing the more serious man behind the mask, not the other way round.
It should be a good read. Whether you personally like him or not, Jimmy Carr is a very clever and successful man with an interesting story to tell. He is perhaps not quite as funny on the page as he is as a performer, but he is not far off it.
Some of the publicity for this book describes it as Carr’s “first autobiography”. It isn’t. And this is the problem. When Carr does open up about his personal life and about his occasional struggles with mental health: his grief over the death of his mother, his hatred for his estranged father, the details of how he established his comedy career, his struggles with dyslexia, his panic attacks on stage, the book is very interesting. But this only goes so far. We learn very little about his childhood or about why he fell out with his father. There is nothing about his recent hair transplant. The book actually takes the form of a self-help book. A self-help book filled with quotations from other people, jokes, swearing and anecdotes from Carr’s own life.
Being a self-help book is not in itself a problem. Jimmy Carr has had a successful life and he wants to help others to be successful too. This is perfectly commendable.
The problem is that while some of his advice is useful much of it sounds like meaningless guff regurgitated from a thousand therapy sessions. He often spends a lot of time saying a lot which amounts to very little. Carr has done well in life and has worked hard for it. Fair enough. But he is almost evangelical in his conviction that his own formula for success can be easily transposed to everyone else.
“No one can beat you at being you…Look at society and ask ‘what am I bringing to the party?…Make your own choices, just don’t not think about it…You can have anything, but you can’t have everything…When you win, you win, but you lose you learn.” It is often difficult to square banal platitudes such as this with the more cynical persona Jimmy Carr projects on stage and on TV.
In truth, of course, it is just that: a persona. As with other darker comics such as Frankie Boyle, Carr jokes about disability, incest and rape. But this is not him. It is humour and designed to shock.
Even so, I suspect he has a few ethical blind spots. He includes ‘climate change’ on a list of things which we should not worry about as we have no control over them. The arguments in defence of some of his more controversial jokes do not really stand up to scrutiny. He knows better than to attempt to defend his involvement in a tax avoidance scheme before 2012. The scandal came close to destroying his career and he has now paid back all the money he owed. But he has never really explained why he thought it was okay in the first place.
Despite all this, I like Jimmy Carr. I have seen him live and have interviewed him once. Over the last twenty years, he has been one of our best and most consistent comedians. A great biography will probably be published about him one day. But I suspect it won’t be written by him.
Book review: Jimmy Carr – Before & Laughter. A Life-Changing Book. Published by: Quercus Publishing.
Book review: A Class Act, Life as a Working-Class Man in a Middle-Class World, by Rob Beckett. Published by: Harper Collins. Available: now.
Now in his mid-thirties, Rob Beckett is a comedy success story, a popular stand-up, podcaster and a familiar TV face from shows like Mock The Week, 8 Out of 10 Cats and Taskmaster. He is also something of a rarity on the British comedy circuit in that he hails from a genuinely working-class background. This is his story, not a straightforward autobiography but a look at how his life and career have been affected by his past.
Judging by his own (and, indeed, probably many people’s) criteria, Beckett passes what he himself calls, ‘the Working-Class Test’ (perhaps this should be renamed, ‘The Beckett List?) with flying colours. He grew up in south-east London. His father worked as a driver: first driving vans, then petrol tankers, then a London taxi cab, His mum is known as ‘Big Suze’. He spent his 16th birthday at Crayford dog-racing track. He didn’t eat an avocado until he was 31. On the other hand, there is a darker side to all this. At his first ever Parents’ Evening at school, his parents were told straight that “he’s never going to be a high achiever or a high flier.”
Despite this, these experiences have left him not so much angry as conflicted. The book’s cover which shows him smartly dressed and cheerfully enjoying an expensive drink while simultaneously clearly about to tuck into a plate of bangers and mash while seated in a greasy spoon café, comically reflect his mixed feelings. His background has clearly caused him no small measure of awkwardness in the past. After an early comedy success winning a trip to Adelaide after securing the Best Newcomer award at Edinburgh ten years ago, Beckett found himself stuck there with no money left to enjoy the city at all. In a later incident, after being invited to a swanky party hosted by Jimmy Carr he found himself mocked by other guests for arriving with a few cans of beers in a plastic bag. Although he gets on well with his warm and supportive family, he admits to having been occasionally been embarrassed by their behaviour. It’s true, one or two of his issues can be attributed to other things: he recognises he was self-conscious about his weight for many years. A few elements of his parents’ behaviour sound like they might be more to do with general eccentricity or old age than anything else. But he is right to recognise that most of these problems have been down to class.
Today, Rob Beckett recognises he is definitely middle-class himself. His wife is middle-class: for one thing, she had never eaten fried chicken before meeting him. He also recognises his daughters will grow up to be much posher than he is. Occasionally his insecurities return. Most dramatically, it took a near nervous breakdown shortly before lockdown to make him realise his continued success did not depend on him taking literally every job he was offered. Even as a successful comedian who had been commissioned to write this book, he admits it took him a while to realise he wasn’t being needlessly financially reckless to even consider buying himself a new laptop rather than awkwardly sharing the computer his wife was using to home school the children during lockdown.
He frequently seems amazed he is writing a book at all. And no wonder. His father didn’t even read a book until he was 43. The book in question was The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, in fact, written by Sue Townsend, a woman from a far poorer background than the Becketts.
Like her, Rob Beckett has come a very long way from where he started out from. But then, perhaps not so far, at the same time.
Josh Widdicombe must be one of the busiest comedians working in Britain today. In the week before I wrote this review, I spotted him on Who Do You Think You Are?, the newly-revived Blankety Blank and, as always, appeared alongside Adam Hills and Alex Brooker on Channel 4’s Friday night hit, The Last Leg. And that’s without me even checking properly: goodness knows how many times he’s cropped up on Dave in that time, perhaps on a repeat of his own panel show, Hypothetical or on an old episode of Taskmaster.
This book isn’t a full-blown autobiography, however. It is the story of Josh’s youth growing up in Dartmoor as told through the TV he watched, specifically during the decade of the 1990s. As someone who watched a lot of TV myself during this period (and who still does), this format is very appealing to me. Many of the shows Josh watched were the ones I watched too. Josh can at least justify his childhood TV addiction on the grounds that he grew up in a remote sparsely populated area of Devon. I, however, grew up in Peterborough: not exactly a hub of culture but a busy enough, populous (new) town. What was my excuse?
Anyway, Josh begins by discussing Gus Honeybun. Gus was a regional ITV children’s puppet famous to anyone growing up in the south-west of England at almost any point during the last four decades of the 20th century but wholly unfamiliar to me and the vast silent majority of the world who grew up anywhere else or at any other time. The only reason I’d ever heard of Gus before at all, is because I moved to Devon in my twenties in the 2000s (presumably the exact opposite of what Josh himself did) and have had people talk to me about this great, mythical, winking TV birthday bunny since.
Any young viewers who, like myself, grew up in the area covered by the Anglia ITV franchise during the Eighties were lumbered with a frenzied waving TV puppet called ‘B.C.’ during this period. ‘B.C.’ stood for ‘Birthday Club’ which was also not entirely accidentally, the name of the short segments of TV, ‘B.C.’ himself appeared on, often with Norwich-based presenter, Helen McDermott. Unlike Gus Honeybun whose identity was entirely unambiguous, I am genuinely unsure what animal ‘B.C.’ was supposed to be. Some sort of wildcat? Perhaps a leopard? Maybe even a giraffe? He really doesn’t look anything like either of these. Occasionally, ‘B.C.’ would be absent because “he’s on his holidays today” (translation: he’s in the washing machine). At any rate, as with the solar eclipse of August 1999, I suspect the south-west got the best of it here. ‘B.C.’ may as well have stood for “Bored Children.”
Anyway, this is only one of many items on TV discussed here. Others include:
Neighbours: Like Josh, I too, was a huge fan of the Australian soap for a fairly short period. However, I am over six years older than him (he was born in 1983, I was born at the end of 1976) and here it really shows. I’d largely lost interest by the time he got into it. Despite us both remembering Todd Landers being run over, there is little cross-over (he doesn’t mention ‘Plain Jane Super Brain,’ the tragic death of Daphne Clarke or Dr. Clive Gibbons dressing up in a gorilla outfit at all). His discussion of a horrendously racist 1996 storyline in which the character Julie Martin accuses her new Chinese neighbours of killing and barbecuing her missing dog (which I’d never heard about) is grimly fascinating though. As is the ‘Big Break’ chapter which details just some of the horrors of Jim Davidson’s career.
Ghostwatch: Unlike Josh (and many others) I never thought this notorious dramatised ‘live broadcast from a real haunted house’ was actually real. Although as he points out, knowing it isn’t real does nothing to diminish just how terrifying it is to watch even today. Or brilliantly made. Even the bit where Michael Parkinson gets possessed.
The Simpsons and I’m Alan Partridge: These chapters are essentially songs of praise about the brilliance of 1990s TV comedy. I am in full agreement.
GamesMaster: I watched it too. And, happily, Josh’s household was so far behind that his memories of 1990s computer games sit happily with my memories of 1980s ones.
In short, I enjoyed the book and would highly recommend it. I agree wholeheartedly with him about some things: Election ’97 was a joyous and memorable night. The death of Diana was a genuinely tragic and shocking event, but by time of her funeral it had descended into a distasteful grief-fest which much of the population (myself and Josh himself included) felt wholly isolated from.
I disagree with him about other things. The Spice Girls certainly were not “the greatest pop band of all time.” And on points of factual accuracy: nobody ever died of a drug overdose on Grange Hill (Zammo, the school heroin addict never died while Danny Kendall’s death in the series was not drug-related). He talks about the early Eighties Andrew Davies-scripted Schools programme, ‘Badger Girl’ as if it was made in the Nineties. And Tony Blair famously never once sent an email while in Downing Street.
There was too much football talk in the book for me, but for this he cannot be faulted. He was and is a football fan. It would be unreasonable not to expect him to discuss it.
There are chapters on many 1990s TV shows here, amongst them, Gladiators, Knightmare, You Bet!, TFI Friday, 999, The X-Files and Eldorado. There are no chapters on Twin Peaks, Our Friends in the North, Prime Suspect, Inspector Morse, Cracker or Queer as Folk. But so what? There are no chapters on Baywatch, Hollyoaks, The Darling Buds of May, Friends, Byker Grove, South Park or Sweet Valley High either. You cannot write about everything.
Who does he think he is? Josh Widdicombe is a fine comic writer and as Adam Hills would put it, “the pride of Dartmoor.”
At the age of 56, Bob had complained of increased breathlessness as he approached a new tour with his old comedy partner, Jim Moir, better known as Vic Reeves. The prognosis was bad: Bob had a serious heart condition and the tour was cancelled as he underwent triple bypass surgery. Happily, the operation was a success and Bob escaped the horrifying prospect that in common with fellow comedians, Eric Morecombe or Rik Mayall before him or Sean Hughes, Jeremy Hardy or Sean Lock in the years since, he might die while still in his fifties.
Now, like one of the fish he and Paul Whitehouse routinely returns to the water after catching them on their popular BBC series, Gone Fishing, Bob feels he has been given a second chance at life. The years since have seen further acclaimed appearances outwitting David Mitchell on panel show, Would I Lie To You?, a series victory on Taskmaster, launching his Athletico Mince podcast with Andy Dawson, appearing in the aforementioned Gone Fishing and now writing this enjoyable autobiography.
It isn’t all laughs. In addition to his more recent health issues, his father was killed in a car accident when he was just seven and Bob accidentally burnt down the family home after experimenting with a firework indoors soon afterwards. He also fought and successfully overcame both depression and acute shyness while still a young man. But this definitely isn’t a gloomy memoir either: quite the opposite. Bob is a modest man and clearly much more intelligent than he sometimes pretends. He has a good turn of phrase (he describes his old friend, Paul Whitehouse as resembling “a walnut on a stick”) and successfully qualified as a solicitor, practicing for some years in the 1980s. He never even refers to the fact that he won the fiercely competitive series Taskmaster, an omission it is impossible to imagine say, Richard Herring or Ed Gamble ever making.
He lives up to his reputation as a loveable eccentric, for example, extolling the benefits of always having some ‘pocket meats’ on his person (an unhygienic-sounding habit which along with years of heavy smoking and sugary tea, presumably contributed to his heart issues). He remembers his years growing up in 1970s Middlesbrough with real affection. On two occasions in the book, he stages his own little game of Would I Lie To You? inviting the reader to identify which of his anecdotes from both his Middlesbrough days and his later legal career are true and which are false. Frustratingly, he never reveals the answers. I would hazard a guess that nearly all of them really happened. But who can ever really be sure with him?
His career in comedy came about initially entirely by chance as he stumbled into a venue playing host to an early live performance of Vic Reeves’ Big Night Out in 1988, after seeking solace after discovering he was being cheated on by a girlfriend earlier that very same day. Bob became a regular member of the audience before gradually getting drawn into the show itself. By the time, the catchphrase-heavy show (“what’s on the end of the stick, Vic?”, “Vic! I’ve fallen,” “You wouldn’t let it lie…”) made its sensational transition to Channel 4 in 1990, Bob was Vic’s co-star. This would remain the case for most of the next thirty years, with Bob only frequently embarking on solo projects or working with someone else in recent years. Although occasionally hampered by his inability to act – notably on the early 21st century revival of Randall and Hopkirk and on the later enjoyable sitcom, House of Fools – Bob has rarely been off our screens for long, winning a cult following with shows such as Catterick and mass audiences in his and Vic’s biggest popular success, the frequently hilarious comedy panel show, Shooting Stars.
Now in his sixties, he is a now a much-loved, warm-hearted figure with an eccentric, unique and often spectacularly original mind. He is a national treasure.
The 1990s begin! It will prove to be a tough decade for the Galaxy’s Greatest Comic and British comics generally…
January: (Prog 660): The identity of The Dead Man is revealed!
(Prog 662): Dredd strip, Tale of the Dead Man begins (John Wagner/Will Simpson).
(Prog 663): The light-hearted Bix Barton arrives (Pete Milligan/Jim McCarthy).
February: (Prog 665) Chopper – Song of the Surfer ends memorably.
(Prog 667): 13th birthday prog.
March (Prog 669): Five-part Countdown to Necropolis begins (Wagner/Ezquerra).
(Prog 671) New Harlem Heroes arrive (Michael Fleisher/Steve Dillon and Kevin Walker).
Armoured Gideon also debuts (John Tomlinson/Simon Jacob).
April (Prog 673): Universal Soldier begins (Alan McKenzie/Simon Coleby).
(Prog 674): A new Dredd mega-epic, Necropolis (Wagner/Ezquerra). As Dredd takes the Long Walk, Mega City One goes to Hell…
May: (Prog 679): Indigo Prime returns (John Smith/Chris Weston)
June (Prog 682): Strontium Dog returns for the last stage of The Final Solution now illustrated in full colour by Colin MacNeil (replacing Simon Harrison).
(Prog 688): Dredd returns. He has been physically absent from the comic for twenty progs (the longest period ever) even though the Judge Dredd strip (now embroiled in the Necropolis saga) has continued.
July (Prog 687): The shocking climax to Strontium Dog: The Final Solution.
Rogue Trooper (Friday) also finishes its current run (Gibbons/Simpson).
(Prog 688): Slaine the Horned God Book Three begins (Pat Mills/Simon Bisley). It ends in Prog 698 in September.
October (Prog 699(: Dredd mega-epic Necropolis ends.
Prog 700! Price rises to 45p. Paper quality of each issue improves. New stories: Time Flies (Garth Ennis/Philip Bond), Nemesis and Deadlock (Pat Mills/Carl Critchlow), Hewligan’s Haircut (Pete Milligan/Jamie Hewlett) and Anderson: Shamballa (Alan Grant/Arthur Ranson).
December (Prog 707): Hewligan’s Haircut ends. P.J Maybe returns to Judge Dredd.
Annuals: The 14th 2000AD annual and 11th Judge Dredd annual are published. Dredd annual features the story, Top Dog (Wagner/MacNeil) in which Dredd first encounters Strontium Dog, Johnny Alpha. Rogue Trooper appears in his one and only annual. Aside from Judge Dredd and Dan Dare, he is the only 2000AD character to ever get his own annual.
These are the last hardback 2000AD annuals to ever appear. The 2000AD and Dredd annuals revert to a softcover ‘Yearbook’ format for the four years dated 1992 to 1995. After that, they disappear completely.
Elsewhere:
Whizzer and Chips (est: 1969) merges into Buster. The Beezer and Topper join forces. The Beano’s Dennis the Menace and Viz’s Billy the Fish both get their own first ever cartoon TV series.
February: Quantum Leap debuts on BBC Two.
July: A big cinema month in the UK: Back to the Future Part III and Total Recall are big hits. Gremlins 2: The New Batch and Dick Tracy less so.
Revolver, a mature alternative monthly comic first appears. Highlights include Dare, a dark adult spin on the Dan Dare legend by Grant Morrison and Rian Hughes and Rogan Gosh by Peter Milligan and Brendan McCarthy. Revolver folds in January 1991 with some of its stories finishing off in Crisis.
September: Star Trek: The Next Generation arrives on BBC Two. In the US, (where the show has been on since 1987), the acclaimed Best of Both Worlds storyline in which Picard is captured by the Borg airs.
October: Supernatural blockbuster, Ghost opens in the UK.
Judge Dredd The Megazine is launched. It is by far the most successful 2000AD spin-off ever and continues to this day. Early highlights include all-time classic, America (Wagner/MacNeil), the darkly humorous origins story, Young Death (Wagner/Peter Doherty) and Al’s Baby (Wagner/Ezquerra).
Chris Hallam is a freelance writer. Originally from Peterborough, he now lives in Exeter with his wife. He writes for a number of magazines and websites including Yours Retro, Best of British and Comic Scene – in which he wrote about Judge Death, The Ballad of Halo Jones, Dan Dare, The Eagle, Metalzoic and Alan Moore’s Watchmen. In the past, he wrote for Metro.co.uk, Radio Times, DVD Monthly, Zarjaz, Infinity, The Companion and Geeky Monkey. He co-wrote the book, Secret Exeter (with Tim Isaac) and A-Z of Exeter – People, Places, History. He also provided all the written content for the 2014 annuals for The Smurfs, Furbys and Star Wars Clone Wars as well as for sections of the 2014 South Park annual and all the 2015 Transformers annual.
January (Prog 610): Zippy Couriers goes into business (Hilary Robinson/Graham Higgins)
Dredd: Our Man in Hondo (John Wagner/Colin MacNeil)
March (Prog 615): 12th birthday issue.
May: (Prog 626): Slaine: The Horned God begins (Pat Mills/Simon Bisley). Also: Zenith: Phase Three (Morrison/Yeowell).
July (Prog 635): Arthur Ranson makes his Anderson PSI debut.
September (Prog 643): Mark Millar makes his 2000AD debut scripting a Tharg’s Futureshock.
October (Prog 647): Simon Harrison’s work on Strontium Dog: The Final Solution ends. Colin MacNeil picks up the story in 1990.
November: Prog 650!: The new Rogue Trooper (Friiday) debuts (Dave Gibbons/Will Simpson). The mysterious Dead Man begins (Wagner/John Higgins). Slaine: The Horned God Book Two begins. Zenith Phase Three resumes. Three out of five stories are now in full colour. The cover price rises to 40p.
(Prog 654): Chopper: Song of the Surfer begins (Wagner/MacNeil).
Elsewhere:
Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s Jack the Ripper saga, From Hell, first appears this year.
March: Quantum Leap arrives on US TV. It hits BBC Two in 1990.
June: In a big year for blockbusters and sequels, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade gets the first crack of the whip.
August: Tim Burton’s heavily hyped Batman hits cinemas.
The ‘original’ Dan Dare returns to The (new) Eagle.
September: Fast Forward, a new comic/magazine based around BBC TV is launched.
October: James Cameron’s The Abyss sinks without trace at the box office. Star Trek V: The Final Frontier boldly goes nowhere.
November: Back to the Future Part II imagines what the world might be like in the year, 2015.
Red Dwarf gets a new look for its third series. Robert Llewellyn (Kryten) and Hattie Hayridge (the new Holly) join the cast.
December: Who you gonna call? Ghostbusters II hits UK cinemas. It proves less popular than the original.
The current series of Doctor Who ends. As with Indiana Jones and Ghostbusters, it will not return until the 21st century.
Chris Hallam is a freelance writer. Originally from Peterborough, he now lives in Exeter with his wife. He writes for a number of magazines and websites including The Companion, Yours Retro, Best of British and Comic Scene – in which he wrote about Judge Death, The Ballad of Halo Jones, Dan Dare, The Eagle, Metalzoic and Alan Moore’s Watchmen. In the past, he wrote for Metro.co.uk, Radio Times, DVD Monthly. Zarjaz, Infinity, The Companion and Geeky Monkey. He co-wrote the book, Secret Exeter (with Tim Isaac) and A-Z of Exeter – People, Places, History. He also provided all the written content for the 2014 annuals for The Smurfs, Furbys and Star Wars Clone Wars as well as for sections of the 2014 South Park annual and all the 2015 Transformers annual.
January: (Progs 557/558): Nemesis Book 7 The Two Torquemadas ends (Pat Mills/John Hickleton) ends and is followed immediately by Book 8: Purity’s Story (Mills/David Roach).
(Progs 558-559): Zenith returns in a two-episode interlude (Grant Morrison/Steve Yeowell).
February: (Prog 560): Strontium Dog returns in Stone Killers (Grant/Ezquerra).
(Prog 561): First Hap Hazard (Steve Dillon).
March: (Prog 566): First Tyranny Rex (John Smith/Steve Dillon).
Flux, John Brosnan’s occasional movies feature first appears.
April: (Prog 568): Rogue Trooper is back in Hit (Simon Geller/Steve Dillon).
(Prog 570): Dredd Mega-epic Oz comes to an end.
(Prog 571): Luke Kirby debuts in the unusual (but great) 2000AD strip, Summer Magic (Alan McKenzie/John Ridgway).
May: (Prog 573): After ten years, Carlos Ezquerra draws his last Strontium Dog (he returns to it much later).
(Prog 576): Bad Company II: The Krool Heart begins (Peter Milligan/Brett Ewins/Jim McCarthy) begins.
July: (Prog 581): ABC Warriors adventure, The Black Hole ends (Mills/Simon Bisley/SMS).
(Prog 585) Peter Milligan’s Tribal Memories begins.
First ever Judge Dredd Mega-Special is published.
August: (Prog 586): Nemesis, Book 9: Deathbringer (Mills/Hickleton).
(Prog 589): New look: 2000AD cover goes all glossy and shiny! Four colour pages are added – the second episode of Judge Dredd: Twister (art by John Ridgway) now goes into full colour after being black and white for part one (a Wizard of Oz reference). Zenith returns and Slaine The King begins properly (Pat Mills/Glenn Fabry). Perhaps unsurprisingly, the cover price rises to 35p.
November: Prog 600! Strontium Dog: The Final Solution begins (Alan Grant/Simon Harrison).
(Prog 601): Special one-off Bad Company story, Simply. Art is produced in four and half hours by Brett Ewins and Brendan McCarthy to raise money for charity.
December:
The first ever 2000AD Winter Special is published. It includes new adventures for Dredd, Anderson, Zenith, Strontium Dog and Summer Magic’s Luke Kirby and an Alan Moore scripted Rogue Trooper reprinted from the 2000AD annual 1984.
Elsewhere:
Transvision Vamp release a song, ‘Hanging With Halo Jones.’
January: War comic Battle (est: 1974) merges into The Eagle.
February: Robocop goes on general release in the UK.
Comedy sci-fi Red Dwarf debuts on BBC Two. It’s arrival is almost entirely unnoticed.
March: Alan Moore and Brian Bolland’s Batman graphic novel, The Killing Joke is published.
Rob Reiner’s movie fantasy, The Princess Bride is released. Now a much-loved classic, it flops on its original release.
May: Starship Troopers author, Robert E. Heinlein dies, aged eighty.
July: Japanese anime, Akira is released in Japan (in UK in 1991).
September: Crisis, a new fortnightly comic begins. It aims to be e political and slightly more mature version of 2000AD. Early stories include Third World War (Mills/Ezquerra) and The New Statesmen (John Smith/Jim Baikie). The comic runs for 63 issues before folding in 1991.
Arnold Schwarzenegger sci-fi movie, The Running Man is released in the UK.
October: Deadline, a monthly comic/magazine is launched. Unlike Crisis, it is not directly connected to 2000AD but is started by 2000AD artists, Steve Dillon and Brett Ewins. A fun combination of comic stories and articles, Deadline continues until 1995. The story, Tank Girl is a major success, later spawning a feature film and launching the career of young Jamie Hewlett, future co-creator of virtual band, Gorillaz with Blur’s Damon Albarn.
Charles Dance genetic engineering drama, First Born arrives on BBC One.
Another science-fiction comic, Wildcat is launched. It survives for only twelve issues, ending in March 1989.
December: Fantasy film, Willow is released in the UK. It flops.
Chris Hallam is a freelance writer. Originally from Peterborough, he now lives in Exeter with his wife. He writes for a number of magazines and websites including Yours Retro, Best of British and Comic Scene – in which he wrote about Judge Death, The Ballad of Halo Jones, Dan Dare, The Eagle, Metalzoic and Alan Moore’s Watchmen. In the past, he wrote for Metro.co.uk, Radio Times, DVD Monthly, The Companion, Infinity, Zarjaz and Geeky Monkey. He co-wrote the book, Secret Exeter (with Tim Isaac) and A-Z of Exeter – People, Places, History. He also provided all the written content for the 2014 annuals for The Smurfs, Furbys and Star Wars Clone Wars as well as for sections of the 2014 South Park annual and all the 2015 Transformers annual.
Forty years ago, in May 1978, Starlord came to Earth. “A new wild era of sci-fi starts here!” the front page of the new comic promised and on early evidence, it seemed to deliver, promising a weekly offering of British comic strip excellence likely to endure well into the 1980s and beyond.
Starlord was bold. It was exciting. It was a bit like 2000AD.
Ultimately, Starlord’s star shone brightly, but only briefly. The last issue, only the 22nd, appeared that October. Readers who had bought every issue from the start would have spent 12p a week during 1978, adding up to a grand total of £2.64. This is slightly less than one copy of 2000AD costs today.
What went wrong for the Galaxy’s OTHER greatest comic? We take a look back…
The same.Only different…
Starlord was supposed to be 2000AD’s older brother: indeed, perhaps a slightly posher brother who had picked up certain airs after attending the local grammar school. Eight of its pages were in full colour – a lot for the time – and at 12p, it was actually more expensive than 2000AD, which was a mere 9p.
2000AD, which was also edited by Kelvin Gosnell, had started just over a year before. Although a success – Judge Dredd was enjoying his first major epic storyline in ‘The Cursed Earth’ during the brief era of Starlord – there is little doubt looking back: Starlord was, for a while, the better of the two comics.
Just as 2000AD had Tharg the Mighty as editor, Starlord had Starlord himself, an alien humanoid with something of the look of Shakin’ Stevens about him. Unlike Tharg, Starlord had an important and urgent message for humans everywhere. “Hail, Star-Troopers,” he declared in the first of his “starzines,” “I have escaped the satanic forces of the INTERSTELLAR FEDERATION…to bring you A DIRE WARNING!”
Yes! Earth was under threat and a crash course in interstellar survival offered the only hope for survival. The comic’s stories were thus “Starlord Survival Blueprints” while the range of six badges given away with issue one were “Starlord Star-Squad Equipment.” Rather alarmingly, Starlord warned of the badges: “DO NOT place it on your skin, as the badge is made from a special metal mined on AXIS 1A you could develop a skin disorder, putting you out of combat”! Issue 2, incidentally, included a free space calculator offered to the reader with the warning: “Use it! It could save your life!”
Like a series of tweets written by an increasingly unbalanced 21st world leader, the use of capital letters grew more frequent as Starlord’s tone grew increasingly shrill. “I have seen the Gronks swarming in the star-spawned outer reaches of space – a sure sign of inter-Galactic disaster!…THE ENEMY IS MASSING TO STRIKE!” Finally, Starlord evoked the memory of a line from the 1951 film, ‘The Thing From Another World,’ which ended with an appeal to “Watch the skies!” “REMEMBER TROOPERS, STICK WITH ME,” urged Starlord. “AND WATCH THE STARS!”
How long could Starlord have maintained this perpetual state of high alert and frantic calls for vigilance for? Sadly, we never got the chance to find out.
Time after time
According to Starlord’s Survival Blueprints, the story ‘Planet of the Damned,” “toughens your endurance as your strength is tested to the very limit!” In fact, this description turned out to be surprisingly accurate. The first ever story in the comic was a hoary tale of nonsense based on what might happen to survivors lost in the midst of the mysterious Bermuda Triangle. In short, they got transported to another dimension. The story held over from its original planned home in 2000AD was the weakest of the new line-up. A test of endurance indeed…
Things improved somewhat with Timequake in which London tramp steamer skipper and working-class hero James Blocker inadvertently causes World War III. He then gets the opportunity to undo his error thanks to the intervention of a Star Trek type organisation called Time Control made up of recruits from Earth’s past and future ranging from the Roman era to the 40th century. This is all after we are told ‘Lyon Sprague’ invented time travel in the year 1997. But, of course, we all remember that…
The characters including Blocker (“M-me? Y-you’re round the flamin’ twist!”) were all pretty dull but there were lots of fun moments in Timequake. There were the frog-like Droon, Time Control’s enemy who inspired Brian Bolland to do an excellent cover for issue 2. “Human scum! You’re the last survivors!” one Droon says (as with Star Trek’s the Borg, the plural and singular are the same). “We have destroyed every one of your accursed sub-stations from 1978 backwards! And now we Droon destroy you!”
The next Timequake story envisaged a Nazi future created by a maniac who turned out to be real-life senior Nazi Martin Bornmann in disguise, but the follow-up in which another defunct empire, this time the Incas, took over the future, rather suggested inspiration was starting to dry up, despite some excellent visuals from Ian Kennedy.
But the best Starlord strips were yet to come…
Alpha male
John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra’s Strontium Dog introduced us to the world of 2180 and mutant bounty hunter Johnny Alpha, a man warped by the impact of a Neutron War thirty years earlier (neutron bombs which kill people while leaving buildings and property relatively intact being briefly a fashionable but terrifying possibliity in 1978).
Johnny Alpha, as extensive captions inform us, has been given white eyes but mind-reading powers by his mutation. Like all mutants, however, he is shunned by society, forced to work as a bounty hunter: an SD or Search/Destroy agent. In common, anti-mutant parlance they are known as “strontium dogs”.
Originally conceived as a New York taxi driver type, Alpha’s sidekick ultimately became Wulf Sternhammer, a formidable but benevolent Viking. “Comrades ve are, Johnny! Vere you go, Wulf go!” Wulf argues, explaining why he sticks with Alpha, despite his own non-mutant status. “A skull to crack with the happy stick und Vulf is fine!”
Strontium Dog provided Starlord with its first cover hero and many of the comic’s best moments: a space pirate attack, a giant, but irritable and slightly deaf computer called McIntyre and a creature called the Gronk, a timid creature, who lives in a box and has a mouth in its stomach.
Is this one of the same Gronks Starlord was on about “swarming in the star-spawned outer reaches of space” before? It was never really made clear.
Big jobs
Finally, there was Ro-Busters. Rejecting an initial bizarre idea from someone else about wounded Second World War veterans developing superpowers, writer Pat Mills instead created droids Ro-Jaws and Hammerstein (get it?) who are rescued from destruction by billionaire Howard Quartz (known as “Mr Ten Percent” as 90% of his actual body parts have been mechanically replaced in a bid to cheat death) to form a new international rescue organisation in the late 21st century. With the robots dealing with such trifles as a hole emerging in the trans-Atlantic tunnel and an organised robot uprising, this soon became very much “Thunderbirds with robots”. Ultimately, however, it was the likeable characters of Ro-Jaws and Hammerstein themselves, rather than the overall android international recue concept which would prove most enduring.
Two become one
There was more. Some brilliant covers: “It’s Planet Earth’s last day for this is the day of the clone. The day of Clone Wars!” There was another major strip, Mind Wars (“my brain is a time-bomb programmed to destroy all human life!”) and a brilliant one-off about a man, Sheldon and his ultimately deadly dream house.
But in October 1978, Starlord delivered his final message. “EARTH IS SAVED! The Int. Stell. Fed have abandoned their plans to attack and destroy us.” And there was other more news: “This is it! The big one! Two sci-fi greats unite in a giant leap for mankind!” Starlord – or at least, some of Starlord – was merging into its sister title, 2000AD.
Why had Starlord failed? Some argue it was doomed from an early stage.
“Starlord had been the creation of Kelvin Gosnell,” Steve MacManus wrote later. “His initial concept was a monthly science-fiction title that would sit comfortably alongside magazines such as Omni and Metal Hurlant. Both these titles were printed on glossy magazine paper and were aimed at fans of science-fiction stories and comic strips”. It was envisaged as an aspirational magazine packed with stories and sci-fi features which a 2000AD reader’s older brother might enjoy.
Sadly, all of these admirable plans soon went out the window.
“Out of the blue, management had decreed that the frequency should be weekly, not monthly,” MacManus explains. “This single change more or less ruined the title’s chances of establishing itself as a serious science-fiction magazine.”
The altered situation also caused problems for Ro-Busters’ author, Pat Mills.
“After writing it as a twelve-page self-contained story, there was a change of plan and the story was cut down to six pages an episode. This leads to all kinds of pacing problems,” Mills explains. And these were problems which he didn’t have time to fix. “A pity, because I knew the new format was wrong for it, and it’s why I started to lose interest in the series.”
MacManus soon found himself frustrated to be writing Starlord’s comparatively juvenile starzines. Although it often sold better than 2000AD, its similarity to the Galaxy’s Greatest Comic essentially doomed it to failure.
“Starlord was still a relatively unknown quantity to the five thousand odd newsagents who stocked comics and magazines at the time,” muses Steve MacManus. “whereas they’d had a year to grow accustomed to 2000AD.”
So that was it. The final cover proclaimed: “Starlord’s ship is waiting to carry him beyond the stars!” “Now that your future is assured, I must return to the spaceways for the Gronks are calling and I cannot let them down.” Yes. The Gronks again.
He concluded: “And so, it is farewell for the last time, my friends! But keep watching the stars, for one day I may return!”
This hasn’t happened.
Afterlife
Actually, in a way, Starlord did return: in three annuals dated 1980, 1981 and 1982. All three were a pale shadow of the short-lived comic which had spawned them: a monochrome assortment of below par Strontium Dog and Mind Wars episodes, random short stories (“Ghost Hunter”) and scientific features (“Telephone lines in space”) and a few stories which had never been in the original comic (“Jimmi From Jupiter”).
2000AD and Starlord became 2000AD and Tornado in 1979 when another short-lived sister comic merged into it. In 1980, it became just 2000AD again. It has just been 2000AD ever since. Very unusually for a British comic it survived the whole of the 1980s and 1990s without ever merging again with anyone else.
Timequake returned briefly in 2000AD in 1979 but never appeared again. The other characters have enjoyed a rich post-Starlord afterlife, however. Although Ro-Busters ended in 1979, the characters Ro-Jaws and Hammerstein have appeared in the strips Nemesis the Warlock and particularly The ABC Warriors up to this day. Hammerstein even appeared in the 1990s Judge Dredd film. Strontium Dog too, still continues.
In short, forty years on, Starlord’s legacy continues.
Alan Moore is the undisputed bearded Northampton-based God of the British comics realm. Yet he has been notoriously prickly on the subject of adaptations of his own work. He has declined to even watch any of the four major films directly based on his comics and in recent years has in recent years refused any payment. But is he right to do so? Is The Watchmen really in the same League as the Extraordinary Gentlemen? Is the film of V From Vendetta really From Hell? Chris Hallam checks it out…
In 1977, Alan Moore, then a twenty-four-year old employee of the Northampton gas board decided to quit his job and try to pursue a career as a comic writer instead. The timing, to some, might have seemed odd. Moore was not rich and was married with a baby on the way. But for Moore it was a “now or never” moment: “I knew that if I didn’t give up the job” (which he hated) “and make some sort of stab at an artistic career before the baby was born that…I knew I wouldn’t have been up for it once I had those big imploring eyes staring up at me,” he said later. “So, I quit.”
The gamble paid off. First, it was just a few cartoons in heavy metal magazines and the odd Tharg’s Futureshock for the new science fiction comic 2000AD. But then the trickle turned into a flood. Soon came V For Vendetta in Warrior, The Ballad of Halo Jones and then, amongst many other things, Watchmen, perhaps the most acclaimed graphic novel ever made. Alan Moore was perhaps the biggest name in British comics to emerge in the Eighties.
Soon inevitably people began to talk of filming his works and Moore was initially keen enough. A film, Return of the Swamp Thing (1989), based on a DC strip by Moore was filmed. But early plans for a V For Vendetta TV series and a film of Watchmen faltered. The timing was not yet right.
But by the start of the 21st century, following the success of Blade and The X-Men, filmmakers began filming every comic they could get their hands on: Road To Perdition, Ghost World, A History of Violence and TV’s The Walking Dead have all been consequences of this trend.
But the four attempts to film Alan Moore’s works in the first decade of the millennium had somewhat mixed results. And they would not make their creator happy at all.
“The idea that there is something prestigious about having your work made into a film, that is something which infuriates me because it seems to be something that everybody else in the industry absolutely believes.” Alan Moore.
A Ripping Yarn?
The comic: From Hell (1989-1996) produced with illustrator Eddie Campbell.
The film: From Hell (2001) directed by the Hughes Brothers and starring Jonny Depp, Heather Graham, Jason Flemying, Ian Holm, Robbie Coltrane, Sir Ian Richardson.
In print:
Moore’s take on the notorious Jack the Ripper case is probably one of Moore’s less accessible stories. At one point, for example, it draws a rather strange connection between the 1888 Whitechapel murders and the conception of Adolf Hitler in Austria-Hungary, two events which admittedly must have occurred at about the same time. From Hell thus seemed rather an odd choice for the big screen treatment.
On screen:
The Hughes’ Brothers broke with the original story early on choosing to make the story a whodunnit (something Moore had gone out of his way to avoid doing) and by viewing it from the perspective of Inspector Abberline (Johnny Depp’s performance virtually identical to his turn as Ichabod Crane in Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow in 1999), rather than from the viewpoint of the Ripper himself, who in the graphic novel is identified early on as Sir William Gull (Ian Holm).
Moore’s view:
As Moore’s biographer Lance Parkin has written, Moore’s approach to his films was more one of indifference than outright hostility at this stage. He accepted payment for the film and was apparently pleased by the casting of actress Heather Graham as she had had a small part in one of his favourite TV series, Twin Peaks. But having recognized it was not going to be very similar to the original story early on, Moore distanced himself from the film and has never bothered to watch it.
Verdict:
“I’d be quite happy if they made Carry On Ripping. It’s not my book, it’s their film.” Moore’s verdict is correct. From Hell is a silly over the top film full of clichés and bad acting.
A League Of Their Own?
“Mr. Alan Moore, author and former circus exhibit (as ‘The What-Is-It from Borneo’), is chiefly famed for his chapbooks produced with the younger reader in mind. He astounded the Penny Dreadful world with such noted pamphlets as ‘A Child’s Garden of Venereal Horrors’ (1864), and ‘Cocaine and Rowing: The Sure way to Health’ (1872) before inheriting a Cumbrian jute mill and, in 1904, expiring of Scorn.”Author description of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (illustrated by Kevin O’Neill, 1999-2007).
The film: Directed by Stephen Norrington (2003) this starred Sir Sean Connery, Shane West, Jason Flemyng, Peta Wilson and Stuart Townsend.
In print: Not to be confused with the 1960 classic British movie crime caper starring Jack Hawkins or the early 21st century Royston Vasey-based dark BBC comedy series (both actually just called The League of Gentlemen), this witty Victorian pastiche was reportedly optioned before artist Kevin O’Neill had even finished drawing the first issue. Bringing together the cream of Victorian fiction – Captain Nemo, the Invisible Man, Allan Quatermain and Jekyll and Hyde amongst others – into a formidable superhero-style team, this should have been perfect for the big screen. In theory…
On screen: A commercial success, LXG (as some promotions referred to it) was an unruly disaster and probably the worst Moore adaptation yet made. Minor changes were made such as the introduction of characters Tom Sawyer and Dorian Gray to the line-up (there were also issues affecting the copyright of the Invisible Man’s character: in the end “an” rather than “the” invisible man appeared). But these seemed unimportant next to the fact the film as a whole, was a complete travesty of the original. It was also a notoriously bad shoot with Sir Sean Connery (playing King Solomon’s Mines star Quatermain) falling out with director Stephen “Blade” Norrington. According to some reports, the two men came to blows. Connery, a screen legend then in his seventies, vowed never to be in a film again. He never has. Norrington has never directed any films since either.
Moore’s view: Worse was to come as a lawsuit was brought against the film alleging it had plagiarized another script called Cast Of Characters. Moore, who had never wanted the film anyway was cross questioned for hours based on the suggestion that he had only written the comic as a front to disguise the film’s supposed unoriginality. The case was settled out of court but in the meantime Moore was understandably very annoyed indeed.
Verdict: A film already apparently guilty of the crime of ending Sean Connery’s long film career, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen also turned Alan Moore off film versions of his comics forever. Not that he was ever exactly super keen anyway…
Remember, Remember…
The comic: V For Vendetta (1982-1989), art by David Lloyd (and Tony Weare).
The film: 2006 film directed by James McTeigue, written by the Wachowskis and starring Natalie Portman, Hugo Weaving, Stephen Fry and the late John Hurt amongst others.
In print:
A chilling portrait of a futuristic Britain that has succumbed to fascism after a limited nuclear war has destroyed much of the rest of the world, the “hero” (if hero, he be) is V, a mysterious masked Jacobin vigilante prone to speaking in strange verse, nasty practical jokes and setting up impressive and time-consuming domino displays for his own amusement. But who exactly is he? And can he save young Evey Hammond from the dark forces which threaten to engulf her?
On screen:
One big problem with filming V For Vendetta was the story’s obsession with the concept of November 5th. Virtually everyone outside the UK is unfamiliar with Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plot and so a short sequence explaining the idea was added for the benefit of our American cousins. The nuclear war of the original is replaced by a backstory involving a devastating epidemic but generally the film is surprisingly faithful to the original. This is, after all, a film in which the hero is a terrorist who blows up underground trains which was released only a few months after the July 2005 bombings. In short, some bits don’t work that well – V’s strange rhetoric doesn’t always work on screen and the Benny Hill like sequences in the TV show seem a bit odd. Other elements such as Stephen Rea’s performance as an investigating officer and the near perfect recreation of the powerful ‘Valerie’ sequence from the comic, work brilliantly.
Moore’s view: Although artist David Lloyd enthusiastically endorsed the film, Moore disassociated himself entirely even went going so far as getting his own name removed from the credits. He also expressed anger (apparently still without having seen it) that the Wachowskis had used his story to (he argued) satirize Bush era America, rather than maintaining the Thatcher-era anti-fascist perspective of the original.
Verdict: Although not a complete triumph by any means, V For Vendetta was reasonably well received by most audiences and critics. It’s certainly interesting enough that you can’t help wishing Moore would lift-up his own self-imposed mask for a moment and take a sneaky peak at it.
Manhattan Transfer
The comic: Moore’s masterpiece completed with artist Dave Gibbons between 1986 and 1987.
The film was directed by Zach Snyder in 2009 starred Billy Crudup, Patrick Wilson, Matthew Goode and Jeffery Dean Morgan.
Summary: A brilliant and complex saga which transformed the world of comics forever, The Watchman incorporates superheroes, pirates, nuclear apocalypse and an all-powerful blue man who likes sitting around in space.
On screen: After a fan-pleasing, superbly made title sequence in which we get to see such sights as Dr. Manhattan meeting President Kennedy (before The Comedian, played by Jeffery Dean Morgan helps assassinate him), this does a largely faithful job of translating Moore’s vision to the big screen. It’s not perfect: Matthew Goode’s Ozymandias is a bit too obviously villainous from the outset and many other scenes seem unnecessarily violent. But some sequences– the creation of Dr. Manhattan, for example – are, like the Valerie sequence in V For Vendetta – transferred perfectly from the comic. Dean Morgan is especially well cast as the ultra-conservative Comedian, a man who despite no obvious super powers, successfully wins the Vietnam War for the US, kills JFK, and prevents the Watergate Scandal from happening. The three-and-a-half-hour DVD extended version even incorporates animated Tales of the Black Freighter sequences into the film, pirate stories which even somewhat overwhelmed the narrative in the original comic.
Some viewers might be left wondering: would deliberately unleashing a sudden massive unexplained explosion really would be the best way to defuse a Cold War superpower stand-off. They might also ask: Did Richard Nixon really look like that? Or if Dr. Manhattan is genuinely quite annoying. But hey! These are mostly failings of the comic, not the film.
Moore’s view: Terry Gilliam had originally planned to direct The Watchmen in the Eighties with Arnold Schwarzenegger tipped to play Dr. Manhattan, Robin Williams, the sinister Rorschach, Jamie Lee Curtis the Silk Specter and Richard Gere, Nite Owl. Gilliam was ultimately unhappy with Sam Hamm’s script which saw Ozymandias travelling back in time to prevent Dr. Manhattan’s creation, thus changing the course of the Cold War and ultimately saving the world. The project fell apart. Twenty years later, it was resurrected, by which time Moore was dead against it.
Verdict: Probably the best film adapted from Moore’s works. A shame he hasn’t seen it really. He’s not alone though: although not an outright flop, The Watchman disappointed at the box office.
Faith No Moore
The Watchmen did not mark the end of TV and movie versions of Alan Moore’s comic stories. We haven’t even mentioned Constantine (2005) starring Keanu Reeves and future Oscar winners Rachel Weitz and Tilda Swinton which was based on a character Moore had created for DC. The reasonably well-received film spawned a short-lived TV series starring Matt Ryan and will soon appear in animated TV form. There is talk of rebooting The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and a TV series of The Watchmen is in development.
Perhaps most significantly The Killing Joke, an animated film version of Moore’s celebrated Batman story produced with Brian Boland in 1988 was released in 2016. Reviews were bad.
Whatever, we may think of the movie and TV versions of the works of Alan Moore, however, one thing is clear: forty years after he started to build a career in comics, he is powerless to stop other people making films of his work.
How soon is too soon to write about the history of a particular time or place?
Following on from his earlier three excellent volumes which took us from the start of the 1970s to the dawn of the new millennium, Alwyn Turner’s new book picks up the English story at the time of New Labour’s second massive General Election victory in 2001 before dropping us off again at the time of David Cameron’s surprise narrow win in 2015. The stage is set for the divisive Brexit battles of the last five years and for the divisive leadership of the Labour Party by Jeremy Corbyn after 2015, but the narrative clearly stops before getting to either. Turner’s book is packed full of reminders of this eventful and turbulent period. Who now remembers Pastygate? Cleggmania? Russell Brand’s dialogue with Ed Miliband or Robert Kilroy Silk’s thwarted battle to take over UKIP? Viewed from the perspective of the current Coronavirus pandemic which, writing in July 2021, has thus far totally dominated the third decade of the 21st century, Turner’s social history of this busy and already seemingly historically quite distant fourteen year period already seems very welcome.
It is not all about politics, of course. As before, Turner takes a good look too at changes in society as viewed through the prism of TV, literature and other developments. No doubt he will one day have much to say about the recent Euro 2020 Finals and subsequent race row. Here, for example, we get a thorough comparison between the different styles of comedians, Jimmy Carr and Roy Chubby Brown. Both are edgy and deliberately tackle sensitive subjects for their humour. Carr, is however, middle-class and Cambridge-educated while Brown never conceals his working-class origins. Carr is frequently on TV, while Brown, although popular, is never allowed on. But, as Turner points out, it is not simply a matter of class. Carr is deliberately careful, firstly never to go too far or to appear as if he is endorsing any (or most) of the dark things he talks about. Brown is much less cautious. He frequently pushes his jokes into genuinely uneasy territory and occasionally seems to be making crowd-pleasing anti-immigration points which totally lack any comedic punchline. Whereas Carr clearly has a carefully constructed stage persona, it is unclear where the stage Chubby Brown begins and the real Chubby Brown ends.
Class comes up a fair bit in the book. Turner identifies a definite resurgence in the popularity of posher folk in public life during this period. Some are obvious: TV chefs such as Nigella Lawson, Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall, Chris Martin of Coldplay, the rise of Boris Johnson and David Cameron, the last becoming the first Tory leader to come from a public school background in forty years in 2005. Others are less obvious: musician Lily Allen was privately educated as were Gemma Collins and some of her other The Only Way is Essex companions. Even Labour’s Andy Burnham went to Cambridge.
The underrated Russell T. Davies 2003 TV drama, Second Coming in which Christopher Eccleston’s video shop assistant surprisingly claims to be the Son of God and indeed turns out to really be him. The phone hacking scandal. The London 2012 Olympics Opening Ceremony. The rise and fall of George Galloway. The 2011 London riots. The Jimmy Saville affair and other scandals. The TV show, Life on Mars. All these topics are revisited by Turner in intelligent and readable fashion.
Other interesting nuggets of information also come in the footnotes. “By 2009 over 9 per cent of Peterborough had come to the city from overseas.” Alexander Armstrong was the first man to play David Cameron in a TV drama in 2007’s The Trial of Tony Blair (aired during Blair’s final months in office). We also get reminders of some of the better jokes of the period in this manner. Frank Skinner’s “George Osborne has two types of friends: the haves and the have yachts.” Or the late Linda Smith’s take on the 2005 Tory election slogan: “Are you sinking like we’re sinking?”
We are also kept informed of the main biscuit preferences of our political leaders, an issue Gordon Brown, a brilliant man, but always uneasy with popular culture, characteristically messed up answering.
There is less about music, although Turner does at one point suggest that the Spice Girls “might have been the last group that really mattered, that meant something beyond record sales and outside their own constituency.”
Turner does well to retain a position of political neutrality here and is especially good at retracing the early machinations on the Labour Left and the Eurosceptic Right which seemed irrelevant at the start of this era but which by the end of it came to seem very important indeed. It is, indeed, a very depressing period for anyone on the liberal left. In 2001, the Lib Dems under their dynamic young leader, Charles Kennedy seemed poised to become the nation’s second party. By 2015, Kennedy was dead and the party wasn’t even registering in third place in terms of either seats or share of the vote. In 2001, Tony Blair won a second huge landslide majority, seemed to have the world at his feet and was one of the most highly regarded political leaders of recent times. Furthermore, no one serious in political life was even remotely contemplating withdrawing from the European Union.
What changed? Read this endlessly fascinating book to find out.
Book review: All In It Together, England in the Early 21st Century, by Alwyn Turner. Published by: Profile Books. Available: now.
Geoff Norcott is that rarest of breeds: a popular and funny right-wing comedian.
Whereas, even only a few years ago, most people would have struggled to name even one living British comedian with conservative views (particularly when the list is shortened further to exclude those who are not openly racist), Norcott has risen to fame largely on the basis of his appearances as the ‘token right-winger’ on the BBC’s excellent topic comedy show, The Mash Report. Ironically, the show was cancelled earlier this year, largely as a result of concerns by nervous BBC execs that, Norcott’s contribution aside, it was too left-wing.
Some would doubtless challenge me for even agreeing to review this book and thus provide the oxygen of publicity to someone who is not only a self-confessed Tory voter but a Brexiteer.
To these people I would point out first that Norcott clearly represents the more acceptable face of the Right. He is clearly not racist at all and in 2019 was appointed as a member of a BBC Diversity Panel with the aim of ensuring the corporation represents a broad cross section of the public’s views. He is also, it must be mentioned, deeply sceptical about the leadership skills of Boris Johnson. This is a definite point in his favour, even if his scepticism was not quite sufficient to prevent him from helping vote Johnson back into power in the December 2019 General Election.
Secondly, I would argue strongly that we shut out voices such as Norcott’s at our peril. Nobody’s life is perfectly typical of anything, but Norcott seems to be a textbook example of the sort of voter Labour could once, perhaps complacently rely on to support them as recently as the 1990s and 2000s but who they have since lost with fatal consequences. With much of Norcott’s assessment of Labour taking the form of critical advice rather than flagrant attacks, he is certainly worth listening to.
By coincidence, me and Geoff Norcott are almost exactly the same age. He was born six days earlier than me in December 1976. Like me, his first ever experience of voting in a General Election as a twenty-year-old was for New Labour in May 1997. He describes his feeling on leaving the voting booth:
“It was probably the first and last time I ever felt total conviction about the party I voted for,” I feel the same. It was a combination of the perhaps misplaced certainties of youth. But it was also, I think, something about the political mood of 1997.
Like me, he returned, perhaps slightly less enthusiastically to voting Labour in 2001. Thereafter, our paths diverge. I came very close to voting Lib Dem in 2005, largely because of my opposition to the war in Iraq (I eventually held my nose and voted for my local Labour candidate who was anti-war, but lost her seat anyway). Norcott doesn’t mention his views on the war, but did vote Lib Dem, partly because like me, he admired their then leader, the late Charles Kennedy, but also as part of a slow journey he was undergoing towards the Tories. In the last four General Elections held since 2010, he voted Conservative. He also voted Leave in 2016.
In truth, Geoff Norcott, although from a traditionally Labour family had been showing conservative instincts from a young age. He had an entirely different upbringing to me. Mine was comfortable and middle-class, his was marred by both poverty and parental divorce. He is sceptical about the welfare system based on his own family experiences and is less enthusiastic than most people are these days about the NHS. He felt endlessly patronised while at Goldsmith College, London in the mid-1990s and has come away with a lifelong scepticism about left-wing middle-class liberals, many of whom frequently serve as targets for his humour today, (for example, on the marches for a second ‘People’s Vote’ on Brexit: “The idea that loads of liberals having a day out in London with chopped kale power salads and terrible chants in some way spoke for the country was laughable”). He has had some tough battles on Twitter. Critics of his appearances on Question Time have variously attacked him for either being rich and self-interested or too common to be on TV. He now seems to be convinced Twitter is a hotbed of left-wing sentiment. I’m not sure it is.
The book takes us through his difficult early years, a brief stint in media sales, his work as a teacher, his time entertaining the troops overseas, a series of personal tragedies a few years ago through to his final success as a successful and reasonably well-known comedian and now author, settled with his family in Cambridgeshire.
Needless to say, I don’t agree with him on many things. He believes the Blair and Brown governments spent too much: I don’t think they did particularly, and even if they had done, this certainly does not explain why the credit crunch happened. His main criticism of people like the Milibands and Keir Starmer seems to be largely based on the fact that they are middle-class and cannot claim any link to working-class people. In my view, this is true but is surely dwarfed by the facts that their opponents men such as David Cameron and Boris Johnson were born into lives of such immense privilege to the extent that these leaders have no knowledge or interest in reducing poverty at all.
I suspect, at root, like many right-wing people, Norcott thinks there is something hypocritical about anyone with money having a social conscience about anything, while his tolerance for rich leaders who openly don’t give a toss about society is much greater. This has never been my view. My horror at the Tory record on homelessness, unemployment and underfunding of the health service has always been sufficient to drive me away me from ever voting for them, particularly when combined with the frequent right-wing tendency (not shared by Norcott himself) to either be racist or to blame many of the weakest and poorest in the world for many of society’s ills.
Geoff Norcott is, of course, now successful enough to be considered middle-class himself and undoubtedly has many left-wing comics amongst his friendship circle. None of which should detract from this sometimes funny, enjoyable and often useful book which is packed with useful phrases such as ,”when you demonise a voter, you lose them forever” which many of us would do well to remember.
Book review: Where Did I Go Right?: How The Left Lost Me, by Geoff Norcott. Published by: Octopus. Available: now.
1951: Dennis the Menace first appears in The Beano, drawn by Scots cartoonist, Davey Law. There is no Gnasher yet and Dennis’s distinctive stripy black and red jumper do not appear for some weeks. He is not yet on the cover but has a half-page black and white story inside the comic. The character and strip have a more real-world feel than many Beano strips which makes it instantly popular. Biffo the Bear remains on the cover where he has been since he knocked The Beano’s original cover star, Big Eggo off in 1948. Eggo (an ostrich) had ruled the roost since The Beano started in 1938.
By a staggering coincidence, a new American comic strip also called ‘Dennis the Menace’ created by Hank Ketcham appears in US newspapers almost exactly simultaneously. The first Beano featuring Dennis was dated 17th March although in practice wold have been available five days earlier: the exact same day the US Dennis debuted! The American Dennis is blonde, has a dog and a neighbour called Mr Wilson. He too, is still going strong as of 2021. He is usually referred to as just ‘Dennis’ when he appears in the UK while the UK version is called, ‘Dennis and Gnasher’ in the US to avoid confusion. Just to be clear, this feature is only about the British Dennis the Menace, although both are now seventy.
1953: Dennis has now been promoted to a full page colour story on The Beano’s back cover. Dennis’s enemy Walter also makes his first appearance (Dennis’s friends, Curly and Pie-Face have already arrived).
In the same year, Minnie the Minx and Little Plum first appear in The Beano while Beryl the Peril appears in the new title, The Topper. Beryl and Minnie are clearly intended to be female versions of Dennis. Beryl and Dennis are both drawn by Davey Law for much of the 1950s. Leo Baxendale, the creator of Minnie and ‘Redskin’ Dennis, Little Plum (amongst many other strips, including The Bash Street Kids) credited Dennis with inspiring him to join The Beano.
1955: The first Dennis the Menace Book or annual appears. Of all the many characters to appear in The Beano over the years, only The Bash Street Kids have been granted the same honour.
1968: Abyssinian Wire-Haired Tripe Hound, Gnasher makes his first appearance as Dennis’s canine companion. The story becomes known as ‘Dennis the Menace and Gnasher’ and later just ‘Dennis and Gnasher’.
1970: Davey Law retires (he dies in 1971). David Sutherland takes over as Dennis’s artist.
1974: Dennis the Menace replaces Biffo the Bear as The Beano’s cover story. He remains there to this day after nearly 47 years, well over half the duration of The Beano’s 83-year run. Increasingly old-fashioned, Biffo ceases to appear regularly in The Beano at all after 1987.
1976: The Dennis the Menace Fan Club begins.
1977: Gnasher’s Tale, a spin-off story begins.
1979: Dennis’s pet pig, Rasher makes his debut appearance. He appears in his own story from 1984 until 1988 and intermittently afterwards.
1986: In a well-publicised storyline, Gnasher briefly goes missing and (though male) returns with a litter of puppies including Gnipper, a puppy with a single large razor-sharp tooth. Gnasher’s Tale is replaced by a new story, Gnasher and Gnipper.
1996: A Dennis the Menace cartoon appears on TV. Voices include Billy Connolly and Hugh Laurie.
1998: Birth of Dennis the Menace’s sister Bea.
2004: Dennis the Menaces surpasses the record previously set by Lord Snooty to become the longest running Beano character ever. Only Minnie the Minx and Roger the Dodger come close to rivalling his longevity.
2009: Another new TV series, Dennis and Gnasher begins. It continues until 2013.
2021: Dennis the Menace celebrates his 70th birthday.
Chris Hallam's World View 