SHARED OPINION
Lord Snooty may be dead, but Dennis the Menace is still chortling
FRANCIS WHEEN This is the way the Nineties end: exactly as the Fifties did. Cliff Richard is the top- permost of the popperrnost, while the pub- lishing successes of the season are The Beano Book 2000 and The Dandy Book 2000, either of which might be more accu- rately titled Walking with Dinosaurs. Much has been said and written about Sir Cliff's indestructible appeal, but the enduring popularity of the Beano and Dandy seems, to me at least, remarkable.
The reason, Messrs D.C. Thomson would have us believe, is that they have kept themselves up to date. The Millennium Dome appears on the cover of the Dandy annual and in a full-page cartoon inside the Beano book. "00 needs the Millennium Dome? I've found another dome! Hee-hee- hee!' exclaims Dennis the Menace's brat- tish kid sister, Bea, as she decorates the pate of her sleeping papa. There are also references to Anthea Turner, the National Lottery and the Sydney Olympics.
But the quest for topicality is oddly selec- tive. Cow-heel pies, complete with horns protruding from the crust, disappeared from the Desperate Dan strip at the start of the ESE scare and have never returned. (Quite how Dan maintains his splendidly Prescottian physique is not explained: squid and polenta, perhaps?) In the interests of consistency, however, the Beanotown police should long ago have muzzled or even put down the dreaded Gnasher, Den- nis the Menace's mutt, under the terms of the Dangerous Dogs Act. As it is, the only victims of the Major years were Lord Snooty and his pals, killed off in the sum- mer of 1992. 'Maybe it's something to do with John Major's classless society,' the Beano's editor, Euan Kerr, said at the time. 'Snooty is quite out of date, really.'
Where have we heard that before? Ah, yes: 'There is no political development whatever, ... There is no facing of the facts about working-class life, or, indeed, about working life of any description ... The out- look inculcated by all these papers is that of a rather exceptionally stupid member of the Navy League in the year 1910.' Thus George Orwell in his famous and grumpy essay about boys' weeklies. He was writing in 1948, two years after Lord Snooty had his first fight with the Gasworks Gang.
Of course boys' comics are out of date. What both Orwell and Euan Kerr fail to notice is that they always have been — and
that therein lies their charm. Is the allure of P.G. Wodehouse's books in any way dimin- ished by the fact that they are set in a fan- tastical pseudo-Edwardian dreamscape? As Orwell himself acknowledged, 'It was a great day for Mr Wodehouse when he cre- ated Jeeves, and thus escaped from the realm of comedy, which in England always stinks of virtue, into the realm of pure farce.' Why, then, did Orwell come over so earnest when he turned to Chums or the Magnet, suddenly yearning for the pong of social realism?
Frank Richards, the creator of Billy Bunter, was quick to answer Orwell's com- plaint that his stories made no mention of strikes, slumps or unemployment. 'Are these really fit subjects for young people to meditate upon?' Richards demanded. 'Even if making miserable children would make them happy adults, it would not be justifiable. But the truth is that the adult will be all the more miserable if he was mis- erable as a child. Every day of happiness, illusory or otherwise — and most happiness is illusory — is so much to the good.'
The Beano and Dandy still obey Frank Richards's precepts. They are perhaps the last publications in Britain where childhood mayhem is celebrated rather than worried over. Home-school agreements, pre-teen curfews, child-protection officers — all these grim weapons from the Blairite armoury are nowhere to be seen. Burglars still wear striped jerseys and carry sacks marked SWAG; all the most admirable youngsters have pea-shooters and catapults with which to torment swots, sissies and schoolmasters. Most of the stories in the Beano and Dandy could have appeared at any time since the 1930s: like Wodehouse's novels, they are essentially ageless farces with no contempo- rary resonance whatever, in which characters seldom laugh but often 'chortle'.
There has, however, been one hugely sig- nificant change in the past decade or so. As recently as the 1980s, every episode of The
'I voted for Christmas and Jeffrey Archer... Bash Street Kids would end with teacher 'whopping' his oikish pupils, sometimes resorting to a Heath Robinson caning con- traption when his arms were too weary. ('A hundred and eight whacks! This machine is in perfect running order!'). At home, too, a sound slippering from Dad was the inevitable consequence of Dennis the Men- ace's japes. Having always believed that spanking is far too enjoyable to be wasted on children, I do not lament the disappearance of corporal punishment, but its absence from the Beano causes a narrative problem which the editor hasn't yet solved: how can you have a crime without a comeuppance?
'Behave — or else, Dennis!' the Menace's father warns. Or else what? In one recent episode he flattens his dad with a wheelbar- row, ties Walter and the other 'softies' to stakes and then buries them head-down in a compost heap. The paternal wrath is terri- ble to behold: 'I've seen your naughty deeds, laddie — I'm going to make the pun- ishment fit the crime!' Actually, all Dennis has to do by way of atonement is present each of the softies with a small bouquet of flowers. Although the miscreant tries to pre- tend that this is the most shaming fate imag- inable (`Groan! Dad was as good as his word!), few readers will be convinced.
When sentence of death was passed on Lord Snooty, Euan Kerr said that 'our read- ership can't relate to him — his top hat and Eton collar must baffle today's kids'. I doubt that they are any less baffled now. Why does the caneless teacher in The Bash Street Kids wear a mortar-board? And why is Dennis the Menace's mother still allowed to pursue him with a rolling-pin, while his father's only sanction is a community-service order?
The canny bean-counters at D.C. Thom- son will lose no sleep over these mysteries: for the foreseeable future, as for much of the last century, they will be 'chortling' all the way to the bank. The hardback best- sellers' list in last Saturday's Telegraph had the Dandy annual at number nine and the Beano book at number two — outsold only by another veteran, The Guinness Book of Records, and well ahead of more modern titans such as Geri Halliwell, Alex Fergu- son and the blessed Delia Smith. Curiously, the compilers of the Telegraph charts classi- fy both Beano and Dandy as 'non-fiction'. What are they trying to tell us?
Frank Johnson is away.
Previous page
