Issue 36The magazine of the Professional Cartoonists’ Organisation (FECO UK)FOGHORN

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Royston, Pete, Kipper, Robert

Without wanting to blow our own trumpet too much (the neighbours tend to complain) the PCO was once again well represented at The Big Draw, held this year in St Pancras International, with the theme of ‘Transports of Delight.’ Arriving shortly after the first workshop was underway, I immediately donned the official PCO T-shirt of Delight, a rather fetching red number. It certainly looked the business, and since we were positioned near an impres-sively draughty entrance, T-shirt numbers ran dangerously low as several members at-tempted to put 5 on at once to avoid hypo-

thermia. Highlight of the day was the ‘Battle of the Cartoonists’. I won’t lie to you, we didn’t win, but it was a valiant effort by our team, Robert Duncan, Royston Robertson, Kip-per Williams and captain Pete Dredge. The ‘First Class Gags’ design was inspired and I won’t say we should have won, but we should have. Everyone agreed with me. Ev-eryone wearing red shirts anyway. (Actually, all of the banners were top quality, with the Independent a deserving winner.) The PCO also organised the all-day car-toon and drawing workshops, run by Paul

Hardman, Robert Duncan, Chichi Parish, Terry Christien and myself. Any available large space (blank walls, concourse pillars, some of the heavier cartoonists) was turned into a gallery to proudly display the trans-port-themed cartoons, comic strips and char-acters produced. My “Creating First Class Comic Strips” workshop was fun to do, as always, and produced some quality work from quite a few attendees who, thanks to the microphone provided, could actually hear my instructions (including the slightly loud and embarrassing “How do you switch this thing off?”) All in all, an enjoyable day. I’ve got the T-shirt to prove it.

NEWS

The magazine of the Professional Cartoonists’ Organisation (FECO UK)

FOGHORNFOGHORN Issue 36

Published in Great Britain by theProfessional Cartoonists’Organisation (FECO UK)

PCO PatronsLibby Purves Andrew Marr

Foghorn EditorBill Stott

tel: +44 (0) 160 646002email: billstott@lineone.net

Foghorn Sub-EditorRoger Penwill

tel: +44 (0) 1584 711854email: roger@penwill.com

Foghorn Layout/DesignTim Harries

tel: + 44 (0) 1633 780293email: foghorn@procartoonists.org

PCO Press Officeemail: media@procartoonists.org

Web infoPCO (FECO UK) website:

www.procartoonists.orgBLOGHORN

www.procartoonists.blogspot.com

Front Cover: Noel FordBack Cover: Mike Turner

Foghorn (Online) ISSN 1759-6440

Tickets please! The Big Draw has been and gone. Tim Harries went and wrote.

The PCO’s banner. To see the cartoons featured, go to www.procartoonists.org

Is it just me (folk say that when they know damn well it isn’t just them) or do I detect slightly less freneticism in what the retail brigade call the “run-up” to Christmas? True, there are Crimbo ads on telly, including ones about scented Christmas candles fea-turing the “eternal aromas of the Fes-tive season” which presumably will be wafting about the place anyway, so why buy candles... but thanks to the City Grabbers, we’re all slightly more borassic than last year.

Never mind! Here’s your tiny Yuletide candle, smelling slightly of Mad-den, Dredge, Ford, Dowland, Dawbarn, Turner, and the Foghorn Produc-tion Team, eternal aromas indeed and very difficult to shift without a Jumbo bottle of Airwick.

Bill Stott, Foghorn Editor

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BLOGHORN

The PCO’s featured Artist of the Month for November 2008 was cartoonist and illustra-tor, Kate Taylor. Yorkshire-based Kate’s work has appeared worldwide in books and magazines for a wide variety of clients. Like many cartoon-ists, her work appears in many markets. Her clients include Sainsburys, Yorkshire Electricity, Honda, BBC, The Daily Mirror, The Sunday Times, Exley Publications and Pearson Education.

Matt Buck, Bloghorn Ed

Who had the original idea for a Giles retrospective? As soon as the Giles collection arrived at the British Cartoon Archive in 2005 it was clear that we needed to celebrate with a London exhibition, and the Cartoon Museum was the most appropriate place to hold it. We have spent the last eighteen months cataloguing and digitising Giles’ enormous collection of artwork, corre-spondence, and ephemera. This exhibi-tion puts on display some of the things we have found.

How long has it taken to put the Giles exhibition together? In a sense it has taken five years, as it was in 2003 that we began looking at the possibility of giving the Giles collec-tion a permanent home in Canterbury, and making it accessible to the public and to researchers. The collection was in storage for ten years after Giles’ death in 1995, and it was always our aim to make the artwork available for exhibition and dis-play once it reached the British Cartoon Archive. The actual exhibition planning and selection, and the writing of the cata-logue, took about six months.

How did the University of Kent get in-volved? We’ve been interested in the Giles col-lection for a long time. The University’s cartoon archive was set up in 1973, and after Giles’ death in 1995 the archivist ap-proached the Cartoon Trustees, to whom Giles left his collection, with the sugges-tion that his artwork should come to Kent. At the time they had hopes that the collec-tion might remain in East Anglia, where Giles lived and worked, but when we approached them again they were happy to donate the collection to us. A second exhibition – “Giles: Drawn to Suffolk”

– is opening in Ipswich on November 8, and we do hope that a permanent display of Giles material may one day be estab-lished in Ipswich, where he had a studio for many years.

What does promoting the work of a cartoonist who has died achieve? I hope that it brings the enjoyment of his work to new audiences, and gives existing fans a new insight into how he worked, by displaying his original artwork. Giles’ correspondence does include letters from other cartoonists and illustrators, express-ing admiration for the way that he could arrange complex scenes in a simple visual way, so I hope that present-day cartoon-ists can learn something from seeing his work. He could draw cartoons of the Fam-ily where there is action across the whole frame, or on different floors of the house, but the focus is never lost.

To read the complete interview go to http://procartoonists.blogspot.com.

Giles: One of the Family is at the Cartoon Museum, 35 Little Russell Street, London from 5 November – 15 February 2009

Bloghorn interviews Nick Hiley, curator of the exhibition Giles: One of the Family which is now on at the Cartoon Museum in central London.

© Express Syndication/ British Cartoon Archive

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REVIEWS

OddlyDistractedby Gerard Whyman

In common with most car-toonists, Gerard Whyman has, by his own admis-sion, a ‘rather odd view of the world.’ This view is delightfully explored in ‘Oddly Distracted’, a compilation of over 180 of Ger’s cartoons from the pages of Punch, Reader’s Digest, The Spectator, The Oldie and others, plus a smattering

of Ger’s personal favou-rites that didn’t see print. As well as producing the actual cartoons, Ger’s done a terrific job design-ing and editing the book himself - the layout really adds to the enjoyment of the cartoons. And what a bunch of top-notch car-toons they are. A wide range of subjects get the Ger treatment, from religion (Joseph reading the Michelin guide and complaining to Mary that the inn has

only got one star), to the monarchy (Liz and Phil playing the Royal Wii). There are too many good ‘uns to choose from but amongst my favourites is the High Def Caveman (below). I’m happy to report that Oddly Distracted keeps up the quality throughout, and is a good antidote to the winter blues. Oddly Distracted can be ordered online at http://www.lulu.com/content/3625147

Shakin’ the Ketchup Bot’leEdited by James AlexanderCartoons by Nathan Ariss

The Countryside CartoonJoke Bookby Roger Penwill

The latest book from Roger Penwill collects over 120 of his cartoons from The Countryman magazine, the popular Country cards range and some new material. As you’ve probably guessed by now, the book has a rural theme, but that’s not to say the townies among us can’t enjoy it too. In-deed, Roger explains in his introduction how, after working and liv-ing in London for many years, his subsequent move to the countryside has enabled him to draw humour from both sides of life.

Populated by farmers, pub landlords, aga-own-ers and the occasional rambler, Roger’s car-toons strike a chord with everyone and are, cru-cially, very funny and often delightfully silly; a village fete complete with giant tea-cosy for tea tent. Two farmers standing over a pig pen proclaiming “You don’t get smells like this on the internet”. I could go on but we’d be here all day. Suffice to say, it’s worth a place in anyone’s col-lection.The Countryside Car-toon Joke Book can be ordered from book-shops, Amazon or di-rect from the publisher w w w. m e r l i n u n w i n .co.uk

If you’re a regular viewer of QI, or simply have an interest in all things English Lan-guagey (I’m not sure that’s a real word) this book should appeal to the pedants among us masquerading as cartoonists! Shakin’ the Ketchup Bot’le is billed as a fascinating collection of ideas, anecdotes, observations and some really curious bits culled from QUEST, the magazine of the Queen’s English Society. I wasn’t previ-ously aware of the QES, put upon further investigation, it appears that their aim is to uphold the use of good English, and to encourage the enjoyment of the lan-guage. (And stamp out use of the word ‘languagey’) So, what about the book? Well, it is in-deed a fascinating read, complete with foreword from professional knitwear model Gyles Brandreth, and numerous cartoons throughout the book by PCO member Nathan Ariss adding to the en-joyment and breaking up some of the lon-ger passages of text. At 180 pages, it’s densely packed - the kind of book you read in short bursts for fear that your brain will take in too much information. Brings to mind a Larson gag; “Mr Osborne, may I be excused? My brain is full.”

For information about ordering the book, go to http://www.queens-english-society.com/

All presents and correct. Foghorn reviews new books by the PCO’s Gerard Whyman, Roger Penwill and Nathan Ariss.

“Oh, wow, you got High Definition!”

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FEATURE DENIS DOWLAND

by Denis Dowland

I could just have gazed in wonder at the aurora Borealis but I didn’t have all night; especially at this latitude, and I had a job to do. I hurriedly put the final touch to my camouflage by dint of a deft fall into a suitably deep drift and approached the dimly-lit grotto. I checked the camera; Meca-blitz at full power, colour saturation to bring out the scarlet suit, all that. I came in real close. I clamped the cam-era to my face. It felt good. I kicked the door open and fell into crouch No 6, the one I learnt as a child from Nep-alese monks all those years ago (bit before your time, I’m afraid, the Great Game, you had to be there.) Anyway: ‘GOTCHA!!’ I cried. That made them jump, I can tell you that. I hit the shut-ter as soon as their heads were turned and bagged a dozen shots before they could blink. I knew instantly the other one was Rudolph. The red nose, you see, dead giveaway: ‘And bang to rights, if I may be so bold.’ At this point I deemed it politic to laugh up-roariously for some moments so as to defuse the tension. He did not appear to seize the irony, however. ‘So, we meet at last, my old Santa,’ I contin-

ued in a conspiratorial, if somewhat supercilious tone, ‘or do they still call you Obersturmbannfuhrer Klaus? Hey?’ I could tell that had rattled him. He fumbled with his suit for some time; that’s the trouble with fur trim, the zip always gets stuck. ‘We’re shut for the season,’ he grumbled. ‘Was that camera loaded?’ ‘Just as you are, old boy; and thereby hangs a tail, arf! Arf! Arf! Sorry about that, Ruddie, just my little joke. No hard feelings, eh?’ This one nearly killed me. By the time I had picked myself up Santa had regained some of his composure: ‘If it’s about an order you’re a bit early but we can talk in the office.’ We settled down in a couple of clapped-out chairs in a dank and dusty cubicle. I had expected something a shade more swanky, to be honest. He offered me a can of Coke and a cigarette that melted when I tried to light-up: ‘Chocolate, I’m afraid. EU regulations, mate, sorry.’ ‘It’s awfully quiet in here,’ I observed, ‘where are your dwarves?’ ‘Had to let them go, didn’t I, old skills are useless nowa-days; it’s got to be computers, digital cameras, game consoles, electric gui-

tars, I could show you the letters, most of the stuff from China, costs a bomb all that. Couldn’t get the bastards to do anything anyway: One word out of place, all out; straight to the European Court of so-called Justice, licked ev-erytime. I’ve just got a Polish lad to help with deliveries now. The bloody credit crunch on top of that, I’m near-ly on the straw, man, straight up.’ He picked listlessly at his frayed jacket: ‘Look at this crap,’ he groaned, ‘I’ve been tied to this lousy contract with Coca-Cola since the f***ing twenties. The bastards!’ I felt a creeping sense of unravel-ing and decided to negotiate a tad more aggressively: ‘Look here, pal, I haven’t come all this way to hear a sob story and I don’t give a monkey’s for your industrial relations prob-lems.’ I tapped the camera with a sug-gestive and faintly sleazy gesture, an ancient Mongolian alchemist’s secret tap, acquired at great peril, can’t re-ally say too much about that, not at liberty, you understand, still pretty hush-hush and a delicate matter in the higher echelons of certain powerful, if rather unstable nations’ security ser-

Santa...

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FEATURE DENIS DOWLAND

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vices. I’m talking BIG nations, here, you with me? Top dog, right? Enough said. Although I could say more. A hell of a lot more! There, I’ve said too much already. Where was I? Ah, yes: ‘Just which way do you think your lousy business is going to plummet,’ I continued, ‘when those millions of stinking knife-wielding brats get to hear about you and Rudolph, just an-swer me that?’ He fiddled with his beard for a while: ‘Do you have a figure in mind?’ I managed not to think of Gina Lol-lobrigida but only just: ‘Well, things are a bit tough at the moment and I’m not a hard man,’ I replied soothingly. ‘Where d’you keep your nest egg?’ ‘In a couple of Icelandic banks, actu-ally.’ There was a silence. ‘I thought it’d be handy, like. I could just hop over and...’ ‘I know, I know,’ I said. The sense of unravelling resumed its clammy crawl up my spine. ‘125 quid, and my return flight to London,’ I said. He reeled. Outside a screaming gale was screaming, pale slithering things were slithering. It had been a long day and I was getting lost for words. ‘Good God,’ I thought, ‘This Is An Awful Place!’, which struck me as a particu-larly apt pensée that I might be wise to copyright, one never knows, espe-cially with them fetching capitals. We were standing at the door. I had set-tled for three bags of smarties, eight ounces each of liquorice all-sorts and small round brown things, could be pralines, and a passage on a flat-bottomed barge that plies the guano trade route between Lapland and the Orkneys. ‘Nice to do business be-tween mature adults, for a change.’ he said. We gazed into the howling murk for a minute, then we shook hands (I had tried to push for a pair of mittens as well, but he wouldn’t budge.) ‘One day, son,’ he said half to himself, ‘all this will be melted. Still, mustn’t be downhearted now, must we?’ I tried to think of Dunkirk but it didn’t work. ‘After all, tomorrow is another day.’ I pulled up my collar and started to walk into the gloom: ‘Frankly my dear,’ I spat, ‘I don’t give a damn.’

Random acts of festive humour

“Perhaps we shouldn’t have gift-wrapped the gerbils...?”

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FEATURE GUIDE TO MISTAKES

A huge area this, but in the light of recent developments like Jon-athan Ross and Russell Brand causing the world banking crisis by suggesting that Kate Aidie slept with Sooty, Foghorn feels a certain responsibility to flag up some well-known mistakes, so that [a] PCO members don’t make them, [b] If they do, how to blame somebody else and [c] learn how to make snotty remarks about those in the pooh. [d] Ad-mit that terms like “flag up” are really irritating

1. Radio phone–in pro-grammes. Why are these tolerat-ed? Freedom of information? Or merely to demonstrate that Brian Murgatroyd – retired accountant actually, from Ongar, hello, can you hear me? – is twice as bor-ing as the Expert Panel which has droned on and on for the last hour?

2. Whilst by now America will have a new boss, George W Bush must go down as a huge mistake. Not only did he choose the wrong coun-tries to invade - Andorra or the Isle of Man would have been such pushovers - but he also singularly failed to stop Americans saying “gotten”, or “Shard’ney”

3. Signs dangling in rear windows of cars. Absolutely no – one is interested in you having a little princess or small per-son on board. The transportation arrange-ments of vertically challenged types, royal or otherwise are boring. Also, “on board” refers to boats, not cars.

4. Professional Sportspersons, especially Andy Murray who goes on and on about HIS game, HIS performance and HIS pros-pects in a voice which makes wallpaper give up the ghost and fall off.

5. The politician who says “Let me make this perfectly clear”, then doesn’t.

6. Politicians with daft names, i.e., Adonis, or Miliband. [Inter-estingly, the miliband is a tiny carnivorous South American fish which hangs about bigger fish pretending to remove para-sites, but takes disproportion-ately huge mouthfuls of big fish in the process.]

7. Modern Christmas Carols – you know, the ones sung to tinkly Noel Coward type tunes; the ones utterly lacking any real choral heft, and especially if they’re accompanied by guitars and drums.

8. New Year Resolutions, unless they carry a sensible caveat such as “I resolve to give up smoking, drinking, being idle, grumbling, jealousy, hatred of Claire Balding... a bit.”

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FEATURE NOEL FORD

What is a Cartoonist?Noel Ford asks “Where would we be without Lemmings?”

Silly question? We thought so until it came to defining the nature of the beast for PCO membership purposes. Part of the problem is that there aren’t any qualifications. Hang on! you say. What about that Cartooning Course that confers upon it’s successful students (i.e. those who have paid their full fee and with a grim determination to get value for money have struggled man and woman-fully to the end) the right to append the honorific DIP.CART after their name? Imagine the hard-boiled editor’s response to having that waved under their nose! No, DIP.CART, I’m afraid, belongs with all those other qualifications (no study or examinations necessary) available from your friendly Internet. Incidentally, don’t you, like me, harbour the fond hope that one of these purveyors of bogus medical diplomas might one day find themselves under the knife of one of their customers?Sorry. I digress. So, what is a cartoonist? Is it simply anyone who has drawn a few cartoons? There are enough of those. The riches of cartooning (also promised by some of those courses), has had hoards of hope-fuls charging lemming-like towards the cliff edge… All right. I do know that real lemmings don’t run off cliffs, and that it’s a myth propagated (allegedly: Ed) by Walt Dis-ney. But, quoting from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, ‘When the legend becomes fact, print the legend’ Cartoon-ists have certainly ‘printed’ that legend,. At least five time the number of lemmings that have ever trod this planet, have disap-peared o’er the edge of cartoon cliffs…Sorry, I digress again. No, I’m not trying to avoid the question. So, no, drawing a few cartoons does not qualify anyone to call themselves a car-toonist. Any more than my removing a splinter from my daughter’s finger makes me a paediatrician (those of you who are parents will be relieved to hear). And, no more than the ability to draw cartoon-style illustrations qualifies a graphic de-signer or illustrator, some of whom who don’t know the difference between a cow and a bull (I refer you to the Boddington’s macho character who sports a full set of

bouncing udders) to call themselves car-toonists). We faced this question during a gruel-ling PCO committee meeting. Six hours – longer than some members had ever been without contact with alcohol in one of its manifestations. (Not so, nicotine, but our third-floor room had one of those ornamental balconies, about six inches deep, where we could squeeze Bill Stott while he polluted the pristine air of Bir-mingham.) At the time, we were receiving quite a few applications for membership from talented professional illustrators who, because they produced some work in a cartoon style, believed they were eli-gible. With some of these, the decision was easy but there were borderline cases. It would have been nice to be able to say that although we can’t quite put our fin-ger on what a cartoonist is, we all know one when we see one. Unfortunately, be-ing accountable to our members, we felt we should be more specific (some of our members actually read every word of the

minutes!) So we coined the phrase ‘humour voice’. A cartoonist is someone who possesses this singular quality with which they in-fuse their drawing. A mistake, of course. Some members felt that by ‘humour voice’ we were singling out gag cartoonists. Our members’ forum crackled with the debate. Does this mean that comic artists, work-ing from scripts are not eligible to call themselves cartoonists (even if they want-ed to)? What about caricaturists? In the end, I hope we persuaded everyone that’ humour voice’ is interpreted in more than words. It is that quality which only a real cartoonist can express in a drawing. It may indeed be in the words but can equal-ly be encapsulated within the style and of the artwork and the interpretation of the idea. If you can do that, you’re a cartoon-ist, whether you draw gags, humorous il-lustration, comics or caricature. Next question: Would you want your daughter to marry one?…

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FEATURE BUILDINGS IN THE FOG

Reinforced Concrete

When people look at building mate-rials, very few will aesthetically root for concrete. Visually it doesn’t have a great deal going for it. It’s grey for a start. Not the subtle and varied grey of natural stone but a dull uniform grey. Dee yoo double ell. Until it rains, that is. Then the moisure streaks down it and “depressing” is quickly the next adjective to be added, rapidly fol-lowed by “grim” Northern Europe’s good at rain, so it’s not the best place to expose your concrete. Whilst the Roans built in stone, for some reason one of them invented concrete. His peers called it “stonum dullum et depressus” and quickly sold the inventor as a slave to the ma-

rauding Huns. He obviously failed to convince his new masters of the mer-its of his new material and it pretty much disappeared, as did he. Concrete, as you know, is made of a mix of sand and a bunch (ag-gregate) of small stones cemented together with...er.. cement. The ratio and specification of these elements is

determined by the strength required, how and where it is being used and the final finish and colour, so it does get really, really technical. Adding water to the mix starts a chemical ac-tion in the cement and after 24 hours the concrete has gained most of its strength and after 7 days has nearly all of it. As it’s a chemical process, concrete can set under water; useful for bridges and the Mafia. However, like stone, concrete all on its lonesome is no good at spanning anything; it’s actually worse than stone, which means it is totally use-less at it. At the start of the twentieth century the solution to this inadequa-cy was found. It you add metal bars into the concrete it suddenly gives it the missing tensile strength so it can span gaps very easily and with great aplomb. As a neat quid pro quo concrete also protects the metal bars from the atmosphere and thus delays the unset of rust. If you stretch the metal bars be-fore you place the concrete around it (known as prestressed-concrete) you can place great loads on the beams. You just have to watch out when you knock down such structures as a sud-denly unloaded beam can explode. Next time you flatten a tower block, wear a hard hat. You’ve been offi-cially warned and the relevant risk

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Letters to theEditor

Snail Mail: The Editor, Foghorn Magazine, 7 Birch Grove, Lostock Green, Northwich. CW9 7SS E-mail: billstott@lineone.net

The Gallery

LETTERS TO THE ED

assessment box has been ticked. The French first drew attention this new wonder material, in 1904, when one Auguste Perret designed a block of flats in Paris. To modern eyes it doesn’t look that impressive, but everything has to start somewhere. It’s the the sort of thing you forget to go and look at when you are in Paris, like the Tou-louse Lautrec Ladder Museum. It’s at 25 bis rue Franklin and it’s still there if you are interested. The other significance of Monsieur Perret is that Le Corbusier once worked in his studio. Corb went on to be the master of concrete. I’ve mentioned him before. His influence on more than one generation of architects has been enormous, so much so that he’ll have to the subject of a future piece. Suffice to say here that he made exposed con-crete structure popular ....well at least with some architects. As well as exposing concrete to the outside world, it has been used inter-nally for finished walls. Believe me, because I have been involved in such use in the dim and distant, it is really difficult to do well. It’s therefore also expensive, so after all the cost and ef-fort it’s a real bummer that it’s not bet-ter liked. The concrete panels have to be cast as near to perfection as possible. When the timber or metal shuttering is removed to reveal the panel, con-crete should have reached all the cor-ners, edges and joints; there should be no holes in the surface caused by air bubbles in the concrete and no con-crete should remain stuck to the shutter boards. You can do everything cor-rectly and still have a disaster. Panels that are not good enough have to be quickly knocked down and a new one attempted. It can be a difficult call for the architect to make (Do you delay the building programme by condemning some boarderline panels?). Attempts to patch a dodgy panel are rarely suc-cessful, like cartooning. So maybe it’s only knowing the skill and effort involved that makes me ap-preciate exposed concrete. OK, I’m biased.

Roger Penwill

Aberystwyth StationNuisance Named

Dear Editor, Strolling player and Welsh in - comer Noel Ford recently helped raise loads of cash for the Children in Need ap-peal by threatening to keep on play-ing Shadows tunes to an unsuspect-ing public at Aberystwyth Railway Station. Police are taking no further action.

N. Ford (no relation)Aberystwyth

More children in need

Dear Ed My name is Ashleigh – Marie Fish-wick and I am doing medier studies and I have to do this Personal Studey thing about something personal and I

like cartoons so can you send me a lot so I can wirte about them and that. The ones what I like best are the ones what are carfully colured in.

Hugz, Ashli xxxxxxxxxxx(via email)

Name that toonDear Editor, I sincerely hope you can help me - I’m after the name of a particular cartoonist from the 1930’s. I don’t have any examples of his work to show you, but I’m fairly sure he used to draw with a pen, probably on some sort of paper and his name contains at least one vowel. I can offer no other info. If you cannot help, could you please spend the rest of the day making time consuming and ultimately fruitless enquiries on my behalf. I’m a busy person y’know.

Regards,Major Time-Wayster (retired)

Barking.

Food for thoughtFor attention of The Editor, I’m sure I’m not alone in being thor-oughly fed up reading these so called ‘funny’ spoof letters you print. I don’t know why you can’t simply use the available space to discuss important matters and subjects like (cont. p18)

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CURMUDGEON

Random acts of humour

I met a bloke from the Council the other day –THE Council, that is, not our teeny weeny little Parish Council which only has clout about who’s swine wander the common and eat windfall apples [its usually the two little gits from the barn conversion who’s Dad thinks outdoor karaoke’s a good idea] and which trees we can make Wicker Men from. No, this was a representative of the mighty Shire Council which is responsible for and boss of loads of dead important things like putting spy cameras in wheelie bins and road safety. OK – Pay Attention. The road through the village is twisty and narrow. The speed limit is 40mph. Its used as a rat run by cars and lorries. There’s a riding stables on, well not on but by – on would be silly – the road. There’s a kids’ playground by the road. Far more importantly, there is quite often ME on the road, taking my loopy dog for a walk. Pavement provision is patchy. What there is, holey. The Parish Council have been fanny-

ing about for ages trying to get the mandato-ry speed limit lowered, or – give me a break – one of those stupid smiley face signs which flashes up your speed and frowns if it’s over the limit. Far, far more effective would be speed bumps. The boneheaded, dangerous, selfish idiots who blast past horses at 50mph care not a jot for smiley faces. Speed bumps, they’d respect .Please don’t misunderstand here – I’m not anti – car. My licence is pep-pered with points. Acquired on empty roads at 3 am, natch. Anyway, enter man from Council. His name was... wait for it... Mr Haddock! AND HIS HEAD REALLY WAS POINTY! Mr Haddock [first name Gavin] was in the Fea-sibility Studies Dept, and he said he’d come to see if a feasibility study about speeds through our village was… er… fea-sible. He also had a large Adam’s apple. Get the picture ? What followed was the epitome of democracy not working. Our lane wasn’t a Priority. How does a lane/thoroughfare/common access way get priority ? Mr Haddock went blah blah blah for a while. A lane/thor-oughfare/common access way gets priority if a major incident has taken place on it. Like a UFO landing? Oh har har, went Mr Haddock, Adam’s apple oscillating like a little lumpy lift. Well, yes, har,har, but really, an accident would do, preferably a fatal one. What about the speed bumps au-tomatically installed on local council estates? Or new private housing es-tates? Or council car parks? Have there been fatal accidents thereon which went unreported in our ever vigilant local paper “Great Bog-worth Man Fed Up… Thomas Pump, 54, Great Bogworth resident for 23

years first felt fed up in August 1998. De-spite treatment at his local Medical Centre, Mr Pump remains, in his daughter Karen’s words, totally brassed off”.Oh har, har, Adam’s apple boink, boink, in-deed not, because, thanks to speed bumps, through traffic in those designated priority areas travels slowly. Please can we have speed bumps ? Er, well, no.Why not ?You’re not a priority.Mr Haddock, shame to say, was then man-handled to the [wonky] kerb edge of the village’s blind bend.The speeding car which hit him was thank-fully not driven by a resident. Har har. Pri-oritise that.

“I just get really depressed and iteases it somehow” “These celebrity cookbooks are getting ridiculous”

THE FOGHORN 12WWW.PROCARTOONISTS.ORG

Something to get your Claus intoChris Madden reveals the truth about Santa.

Do you remember when you first sus-pected that Santa didn’t exist? When it first began to dawn on you that your parents had been telling you fibs concerning the nature of the portly gent in the red outfit – when you first suspected that he was nothing more than a myth (al-though you didn’t know what a myth was at the time)? In some quarters there’s quite a heated debate going on as to whether or not it’s a good idea for responsible adults to deceive their credulous and innocent children into believing in Santa in the first place. Some people see the peddling of the myth as a betray-al of trust: something approaching psycho-logical child abuse. Just think of the damage that’s caused to children when they discover that the parents whom they worship are liars. Me, I encourage this duplicity. I see the lie as an important life lesson. The lesson is: never trust anyone ever again, even when those people think that they have your best interests at heart. I’ve never been disappointed since. It was the best gift that my parents ever gave me. The gift of realizing the existence of deception and trickery. Some people think that it’s wrong to tell children about Santa because it’s a crime against rationality. I’ve heard that Rich-ard Dawkins, in his very highly principled but possibly misguided way, actually sat his young daughter down one day and explained to her that there was no Santa. “How could he get round all of those chimneys in ONE night?” he asked her, appealing to her rationality. Okay, so Santa may be fictitious, but where’s the problem in that? After all, life’s more interesting when it’s embel-lished with a few larger than life fictional characters. (I’ve just spent half an hour on the phone discussing the dubious person-ality traits of a completely fictional tele-vision character with a friend, so I know that this is true.) Although Santa doesn’t exist, the facts behind the fictional character are

very interesting.Fact number one: Santa Claus is not the same person as Father Christmas! The exact origins of Father Christmas (as opposed to Santa) are lost in time: he was probably a pagan personification of midwinter, who put in an appearance at the solstice (December 23rd), and indeed may well have been one and the same per-sonification as the old bearded man with the scythe and hour-glass, Father Time, who turns up at New Year, a week or so after Christmas is over (once he’s slept off the sherry and mince pies).

Father Christmas was a central charac-ter in Britain’s seasonal festivities long before Santa Claus joined in the celebra-tions. Santa didn’t really participate in the fun until the nineteenth century. However, once Santa put in an appearance he soon pushed the original Father Christmas into the background. Why? Because Santa was an American.Or to be more precise, an American of Turkish ancestry. The original Santa Claus was Nicholas, a 4th century bishop of Myra in Turkey, who reputedly handed out gifts to chil-dren. (Very suspicious: if he were around nowadays there’d be a very heavy police file somewhere with his name on it. And possibly an electronic tag around his an-kle. Beware Turks bearing gifts.) The bishop remained relatively obscure, with only a cult following, for fifteen hun-dred years or more, until his star suddenly rose in the nineteenth century, when he was promoted from being a mere bishop

into a saint. Soon after his canonization St Nicho-las entered popular culture in the United States when the novelist Washington Ir-ving (who wrote Rip Van Winkle) penned a satire on the early Dutch culture of New York, referring to Saint Nicholas by his Dutch name of Santa Claus. A few years later, in 1822 a New York theology teach-er called Dr Clement Clarke Moore wrote the incredibly popular poem “Twas the night before Christmas.” (in which Santa first acquired his reindeer: before this he had to make do, somewhat bizarrely, with

an eight-legged horse). At this point the Santa industry went ballistic. With the poem as in-spiration, the illustrator Thomas Nast started to draw the first of what would eventually be more than two thousand illustrations for Harper’s Weekly depicting Santa as a rotund jovial gent rather than as the stern bishop of previous tra-dition. Nast also gave Santa his headquarters at the North Pole and his army of toiling elves. It was essentially Nast’s imagination that gave us

the Santa that we know today – except, that is, for his red coat with white trim.Santa reputedly wears a red and white outfit because they are the corporate co-lours of the Coca Cola Corporation, who enlisted Santa to promote their fizzy drink in the 1930s.So it is that Santa Claus doesn’t actually come from the North Pole but from New York city, and he doesn’t date from the birth of Christianity two thousand years past but from the early days of capitalism a little over a century ago. So much for tradition. The knowledge that Santa’s actually American and that how he’s depicted is as prone to cultural modification as any-thing else in society has given me an idea though.In a spirit of optimism for the forthcom-ing US presidency I intend to draw my Christmas cards this year with a Santa who’s black.Okay, okay - mixed race.

FEATURE CHRIS MADDEN

THE FOGHORN13 WWW.PROCARTOONISTS.ORG

THE LAST WORD

Breaking wind, as it happens!Foghorn’s resident critic Pete Dredge watches telly so you don’t have to.

The Critic

“Keep those emails coming in!” is the all too familiar cry from breakfast news pro-grammes these days. “We just love to hear your views on (insert topic of the day) so, email fillsagap@ it’syourlicencefeemate.co.uk.” Who gives a monkeys what Gordon from Bromsgrove thinks about a ‘mobile nasal hair removal service for ex-colliery pit ponies’. Apart from Gordon, that is, who else would be remotely interested in his “I think it’s a great idea” and how can the ex-newspaperman-turned tv news anchor express such convincing gratitude for Gordon taking the time to express his il-luminating and analytical thoughts for the benefit of the nation. It’s all patently bollocks and a total waste of time …and there’s the rub. It’s called ‘Rolling News’, an hourly revolving re-peat of headlines, weather, sport and stu-dio guests and… your emails, reams of the stuff, usually on yellow A4 held up to camera with the rider ‘keep them coming, we love to hear your comments, we have too many to read out now but Derek of

Nantwich is typical… “Keep up the good work” says Derek. “Thanks, Derek. It’s comments like those that make the 3am start to the day so worthwhile, and now Sport, good morning Steve!” These programmes are designed to be dipped in to rather than sat all the way through so the well rehearsed ad-lib links to the weathergirl should, in theory, only be heard the once. Too bad if your viewing routine doesn’t quite sync with their run-ning order and that ‘groundhog day’ sen-sation starts to kick in. How they must all be secretly hoping for a major disaster to break or an overnight royal bereavement to unexpectedly occur in order to get that adrenalin rush and put that tough, hard-bitten journalism training to good use. Time to ditch the running order and wing it for all it’s worth. This is LIVE TELE-VISION at it’s best bringing you the news when it happens, as it happens, so, sorry Derek of Nantwich, we don’t have time to read out your latest email on the forthcoming boundary changes. George Michael has been at it again in the Gents

toilets at Windsor Safari Park. Are you there, Steve?

FOGHORN (ONLINE) ISSN 1759-6440