1 APRIL 2000, Page 29

The new Hancock

From Mr Peter Smalley Sir: I must suggest to the usually reliably Michael Vestey that he is wrong about Gra- ham Fellows (Arts, 25 March). Mr Fel- lows's invention, John Shuttleworth, is a horrible British classic, as hideously dull and limitlessly dismal as a wet mid-century Sunday.

If we are to remember with accuracy just how surreally awful life was then for almost everyone — how ponderously prim, sexless, spiteful and ill-looking — we must preserve Graham Fellows in all the appalling splen- dour of his primal scream: his tripe sallow, provincial grotesque, stumbling past the dark satanic mills.

He belongs with Hancock, Sykes and the Glums, hymning the ecstasies of British boredom.

Peter Smalley

55A Old Church Street, London SW3