by Andrew Pilcher

Interlude

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In the 1950s, the BBC had a monopoly on TV. There was one channel and no competition until ITV began in 1956. So it didn’t have to try too hard. TV was on for maybe five or six hours a day and shut down for an hour at 6pm so you could put the kids to bed. Even those few scant hours didn’t get filled, there was plenty of time left over between programmes for pre-recorded interludes to be required to fill the gaps.

One of the most famous was The Potters Wheel – it was so popular that even people of my generation, born ten years too late to have ever seen it, had heard of it. It even spawned its own reality show this year.

The other fave was The Kitten. The set up was simple enough, a camera was pointed at a white kitten who was playing on a set with a chair, a waste paper bin, a bowl of milk and a ball of wool. It was the world’s first cat video. Click here to see the whole film.

by Andrew Pilcher

Behind the sofa

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This strip brought forth a lot of comments from my reglar readers – some had never heard of the phrase ‘behind the sofa’, while others brought forth memories of hiding from the monsters that appeared on the television in Doctor Who.

My period of hiding from the monsters would have been during Patrick Troughton’s reign as the Second Doctor. His main foes at the time were the Ice Warriors, the sibilant martians who pioneered Darth Vader’s respiratory problems – just the sound of their raspy breath would scare the willies out of me. The sofa was on legs so hiding behind it didn’t give the four-year-old me much protection from the space lizards in screen, so instead I hid in the dining room and waited for the hissing to stop.

Of course, Doctor Who was at its best when it scared you just when you weren’t expecting it. The one that really disturbed me was in Jon Pertwee’s second series. The Nestene Consciousness had returned, an entity with the power to control and animate anything made out of plastic. Normally it would send out showroom dummies to do its dirty business – creepy enough in themselves – but this time round it had spread its influence to household items and furniture. Remember those egg-shaped chrome and PVC chairs that were all the rage in the early 70s? We had one of those. So did a disposable guest actor in the show. The chair came to life and swallowed him like a fly in a venus fly trap. I didn’t sit in that chair again for a good two years.

 

by Andrew Pilcher

Squirt 3

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Normally a sequence like this would end of Smudge’s waal, but this time around I had a better topper, with Smudge trying to turn the tables on Smith and failing.

by Andrew Pilcher

Squirt 2

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by Andrew Pilcher

Paving Slabs

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This will be familiar to anyone who has lived for any amount of time in Tunbridge Wells. The town had its own brickworks, which produced a particular kind of hard wearing red brick that turned out to be perfect for paving sidewalks with. Therefore, where most town would have used paving slabs, Tunbridge Wells had block paving. It has its advantages and its disadvantages. The advantages are that it looks great and it means that workment can reach the services underneathe the pavement by simply lifting the bricks and replacing them when they’re done. The disadvantages are that the bricklaying skills of the Victorian workmen that originally laid the pavements have nigh-on vanished in the 21st Century, and no-one has yet invented an app that can help today’s workmen lay new ones, and that every time it rains, a loose brick can mean you get a squirt of muddy water up the inside of your trouser leg when you step on it.

by Andrew Pilcher

The Grand Total

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by Andrew Pilcher

Mu-u-um!

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Admit it, you’ve always wanted to do this to one of those annoying brats at the supermarket checkout, but you know that his would be the result.

by Andrew Pilcher

This is what they want

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Back to the plot after Friday’s hiatus. And it’s time to fill the screen with kittens. And who can compain about that?

Published two days late, though I don’t rememeber what the crisis was that caused the delay. It acsued the other two strips that week to follow on consecutive days.

by Andrew Pilcher

Script

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This is a screen shot of the kind of script I used to write for the cartoon strip ‘Millie’ in the Daily Mirror for five years in the early 1990s. In those days I would have written the script on a black and white Mac SE, one of those all-in-one Macs with a screen the size of a smartphone, printed out two copies, kept one for myself and sent the other off to the cartoons and crosswords editor of MGN newspapers. He’d edit it, send the edited copy to the artist Roger Mahoney (now drawing Andy Capp) and six weeks later it would appear in the paper, sandwiched between The Perishers and Garth, and next to Russell Grant’s horoscopes.

This is very much how I would do it – while some of the writers in the Mirror would just supply dialogue and leave the artist to work out the layout I had been very much indoctrinated into the DC Comics method of working, having joined the London Cartoon Centre a few years beforehand and come under the influence of a lot of DC and Marvel A-Listers, in particular David Lloyd, Alan Moore and Paul Neary. I overwrote my panel descriptions in the same way that Alan Moore did, and was very much a subscriber to his auteur theory of comics.

It’s a Friday the Thirteenth strip today, so the dialogue I’ve used is exactly the same as I’ve used in every other Friday 13th strip.

by Andrew Pilcher

Cage your babies

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The views expressed in this comic strip are those of the cats and not necessarily those of the author. Actually, maybe they are – up to three minutes before I started drawing it I was planning on having the third panel showing a kitten with a semi automatic rifle and Smith and Jones appealing for self-defence for kittens. But there are quite enough nutters running around with guns and no sense of responsibility at the moment, so I toned the appeal down to one for play pens, or, as cats would see them, baby prisons. Sometimes its best not to let your characters dictate the plot for you…