My Cartoon Award

 

Pleased to say I entered a Cartoon Competition , and came in last…

There was no prize for the winner as it was just for fun , but anyone who got no votes was awarded a virtual Crackerjack pencil.

People of a certain age , and older may remember Fridays at five to five for the compendium of comedy, music and games that was BBC tv’s “ Crackerjack” which ran from the late 1950s to sometime in the Seventies ( I think) with hosts including Eamonn Andrews , Leslie Crowther and Ed “Stewpot” Stewart.

I think Stu “Crush a Grape” Francis was part of the ensemble in the later years…

Anyhow , along with all sorts of exciting prizes kids could win like tennis rackets , train sets , cabbages etc everyone got  a Crackerjack Pencil.

Alongside Blue Peter Badges , these seemed to be the most desirable trophies of my formative years.

Unfortunately , I was far too lazy to win either in the natural way , so it pleases me more than I can say to be the recipient of this overdue , but virtual award.

There are so many people I ought to thank , but the kettle is boiling…

Summer Lovin’ Cartoon Exhibition London June 2024

Just some of the brilliant cartoons on display at The Duke of Greenwich from June 6th.

This is a brand new collection following on from the very well received exhibition in the new year.

I’m very honoured to be sharing space with some of the best known names in the business.

Close up of my two entries can be seen below , but do take the time to see the rest if possible , and perhaps enjoy a meal and a drink in very convivial surroundings…

 

It’s Not The Horse’s Mouth

 When I filled in the Careers teacher’s card , I specifically said NO to two things … factories and farm work. The rest of it was open ended. Don’t Really Know… But Life had other ideas…

 

Loraine and me hadn't been together long. I knew she had history . 

 

Years spent on a remote farmstead on top of the Pennines as a child. Herding cattle at four years of age in tiny wellies. Sheep in the kitchen , sort of stuff … but that was long ago.

 

Her dad kept ducks and geese on an allotment , and a goat , and an old yellow Morris,but Loraine had left the countryside for a flat in nearby Doncaster and was training to be a Registered General Nurse .

 

Her urban lifestyle of late night movies and nightclubbing was like a magnet to me , although the only midnight movie we went to together , I managed to sleep through…It's the concept that counts though…isn’t it ?

 

Anyway , we had several blissful months like this , without a whiff of country air ... 

 

It was the early eighties . All over the place people were suddenly buying houses instead of renting. A new age of owner occupation had begun. Loraine bought a house.

 

Along with the house came the usual set up costs. Decoration, furnishing and in this case central heating. It was the latter that Life had been hiding behind.

 

Loraine had to travel to Wakefield to settle a bill connected with the central heating.  

When she returned in the evening she said to me , matter of factly “ I’ve got you a present ... a horse” … Life chuckled ethereally and drew a fat line through my list of life preferences.

 

Did I mention , by the way , that tucked away with the ducks and the geese and the old yellow Morris there was another horse ? 

 

With her dad’s help , Loraine had also acquired a young foal which she called Beauty.

I had so far had very little (i.e. nothing) , to do with horses or livestock of any variety , and I knew even less about old yellow Morris vehicles.

 

Suddenly we were a two horse family. 

 

My new horse , a strawberry roan called Rowdy , was already considered elderly at 22 years of age.Loraine had seen a card in a Wakefield shop window searching for a new home for him. New home or no home . There was no alternative.

 

Loraine rescued Rowdy,as we have since  rescued many other animals. 

I think even she thought he would be an old plodder, a bit like me . The truth was quite different. 

 

Rowdy lived to the ripe old age of 37. His ability to escape from secure stables and fields made him a local legend. Beauty lived another ten years after that.

 

Within a year my urban dream was sandwiched between slices of hay and straw , pockets full of twine and wellington boots became my must have accessories …

 

I was also working in a factory

This version first appeared in The Daily Mirror in January 2023

The Thief of Bad Gags

 

About ten years ago , I contributed a few cartoons to a book which was to be titled “Ell Oh Ell. You Have To Laugh…It Says So”

The editor liked them so much that I was invited to illustrate the entire book , which was a compilation of humorous stories , poems and cartoons.

I tried to add a humorous picture to every other piece , so as not to overload the text with imagery.

I believe that writing should allow readers to use their imaginations , but an odd illustration can effectively break up solid walls of text , which can be tiring to read.

There was one story that I was particularly taken with. Written by a gentleman called Eddie Summers , it introduced us to the haphazard adventures of a couple of hopeless detectives named Bennett and Perry.

Set in a familiar cop show London , they were constantly being sent off to look for clues and meet people in long vanished parts of the old East End. This was the root of Eddie’s message , one which will resonate with many more people in the 2020’s…London ain’t what it was , and every year more remnants of the old communities and traditions fall foul of the developers. 

Bennett and Perry could never lay their hands on the culprits , but they leapt off the page for me , reminding me of Jasper Carrott and Robert Powell , mixed up with Groucho Marx’ quick fire corny gags.

I liked them so much that I contacted Eddie directly and offered to illustrate any future Bennett and Perry stories he produced.

He posted these on a blog for a little while and I contributed a new cartoon which he added to the story.

Great fun, but one day the blog disappeared and we lost contact. Most of the drawings went down with the blog , but I came across two the other day and thought I would commemorate the collaboration.

Both pictures hint at the sometimes surreal quality of the stories , derived from Eddie’s love of American writers S.J.Perelman and Stephen Leacock.

The jokes were frequent and leaned deliberately towards the groan , to the extent that I encouraged Eddie to collect the stories and my illustrations together in a slim volume. He liked the idea of that , but we never got there. I never got to tell him that my proposed title of the collection would be “ The Thief Of BadGags”…I think he would have liked that too…

                                                          “ Leacock Hurls A Question…”

That’s Me In The Corner

 

The picture above is The Johnson Bar at Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese Pub overlooking Fleet Street. 

As if by magic , my Avatar is sitting in the corner on April 6th 2024 , raising a glass of Samuel Smith’s Bitter on the 60th Anniversary of The Cartoonist’s Club of Great Britain.

The Club was born at The Feathers on Fleet Street on April 1st 1960. Sadly, The Feathers no longer exists and but plans were afoot to hold the 60th Bash at The Punch Tavern in April 2020 .

Unfortunately fate, in the form of the Covid Pandemic , bowled everyone a massive googly and events everywhere were cancelled summarily. 

Subsequent attempts to reconvene were scuppered by strikes.

A change of management at The Punch Tavern resulted in changes to the terms and conditions of the club’s booking which were unacceptable so it was decided to move the event to Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese , which has a long and venerable history, with links to the newspaper industry generally , and cartooning specifically.

So from 4pm onwards on 6th April 2024 The Cartoonist’s Club of Great Britain will be celebrating its 60th Birthday Bash…four years late.

I can’t be there in person , but my avatar will have a whale of a time .

If you squint in the half light of the Johnson Bar, as the afternoon eases into evening , you might just catch sight of me .That’s me in the corner…

The Starbeck Orion Magazine

Rare opportunity to see me reading some poems wot I wrote , in Paul Brooke’s new online compendium

“The Starbeck Orion” a sumptuous collection of words and art from around the world…  

https://the880.substack.com/p/the-starbeck-orion-1-7a0?r=33jsyn&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true

My Silent Disco

 

Mozza , Wagga and Baz love it. They came late to the party but their enthusiasm is immense.

Saturday night has always been Disco Nite in my view. 

From the early days when a bloke (always a bloke) sat behind a box which glowed it’s way through a sequence of colours , to my mate Paul’s wall of lights and dry ice , which made dancers into silhouettes in a multi-coloured fog, I have always felt that if the weekend started with Ready Steady Go , it didn’t really get anywhere until the following evening.

Wozza, Bazza and  Mog have come to it from different places. Mog is some sort of physicist and knows everything about Genesis. He has a lot of albums by Yes and Emerson,Lake and Palmer. 

Bazza cut his teeth on Northern Soul but also likes The Jam and Two-Tone Ska. 

Wozza thinks music was invented in 1990.

I guess we could have some lively debates , but we don’t . Our cans are parallel universes. We cut a groove to different tunes but the emotion is powerful and shared.

I am eclectic. I irrigate a course winding from the sixties to yesterday with a selection of craft beers.

Bozza , Mazza and Wiz share a love of the late hour and we can often be found after midnight swaying silently around my disco light. Only on Saturdays , though.