Fields (though of course two of those giants were British).īut in the 40s and 50s the Brits began to prevail - George Formby, Max Miller, Lupino Lane, Red Skelton, then Terry-Thomas, Sid Field, Frank Randle, Morecambe & Wise, Tony Hancock, Sid James, The Goon Show, Frankie Howerd, Tommy Cooper, Arthur Lucan, Ken Dodd, Harry Secombe, Dickie Henderson and Bruce Forsyth all were immortalised on the pages of Film Fun. Hollywood dominated at first of course: until the late 1930s with the explosion of British comedians on the big screen such as Will Hay, and George Formby, the diet of most British cinema-goers was still US-made movies - Lloyd, Chaplin, Keaton, Laurel, W.C. Picture Fun, Kinema Komic, and Film Picture Stories were just three august organs it absorbed over the years. The magazine's early evolution was chequered - it merged and split and merged again with a regularity that resembled the fluctuating line-up of King Crimson. Brown, Arthur Lucan of Old Mother Riley fame, and a host of others. They were later joined by Abbott & Costello, Joe. In the early decades it was Harold Lloyd and Laurel & Hardy whose antics were recreated in this alternate universe of illustrated slapstick and adventure. Some were not that old - and it was the more recent Film Fun annuals from the 1940s & 50s that resonated with me most.įor these contained a multitude of strips of comedians: TV stars, film stars, icons of both the big screen and the fledgling small screen (BBC TV had only taken off as a mass medium after 1953 of course with the Coronation, and ITV was the new kid on the block from 1955).įilm Fun had been launched way back in 1920 when sound pictures were but a dream in an inventor's eye, but from the start it was comedians that dominated the content, for humour was always the central raison d'etre. Some were too frayed and faded of course, and those I'd ignore, but the sturdier annuals I would feast on in fascination. So when I'd exhausted my latest, up-to-the-minute edition of The Dandy, I'd pull out one of these more antique organs. They sat stacked on our bookshelves like layers of treasures in an archaeological trench, waiting to be rediscovered. These were of course my father's old weeklies, some of which he had saved from his youth. Older, with slightly more antiquated names like The Magnet, Boy's Own, Chums, Picture-Goer, and Film Fun. I later ended up writing for children's television and it was partly the vast repository of the visual comedy found in comics still lurking in my subconscious that I drew on when concocting routines for the Chuckle Brothers and my later CBBC series, Scoop.īut there was another genre of comic that also crept into my cranium. The fact that the weekly ritual of trotting down to the local newsagent with sixpence clasped in my hot anticipatory digits was often the highlight of my week is proof enough that my hunger for the pictorial shenanigans of the Bash Street Kids and Billy Whizz was insatiable. I even sampled the worthier Look and Learn and World of Wonder, for while their strips were more solemn and educational the medicine of their didactic was sweetened by wild and dramatic full-colour pictures of rockets blasting off or Vikings wielding broadswords. Not just the classic fare of the Beano and Dandy but the whole colourful crazed gamut - Buster, Topper, The Beezer, TV Comic, The Eagle, Sparky, Whizzer & Chips, TV 21, Tiger. Like many of my generation I was weaned on comics.
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