No longer a menace

When I was little one of my favourite TV shows was Dennis the Menace and Gnasher, the adventures of a naughty schoolboy and his dog. This Dennis should not be confused with the American version – he’s not nearly as cutesy! No, the British Dennis is much naughtier, much more of a delinquent – or, rather, he was.

Dennis, with his spiky, unkempt hair and red and black striped sweater, first appeared in March 1951 in a children’s comic called The Beano. He has remained a steady feature ever since, growing in popularity, even as he moved down the generations. He was loved precisely because he was a bad boy, because he got into all sort of naughty scrapes. In so many ways he was the perfect outlet for the childish imagination, crossing all sorts of boundaries. Sadly Dennis is no longer such a menace – no, he has been sanitised, giving way to the onward march of political correctness.

I was amused by William Langley’s article in Sunday Telegraph (Why he’s no longer such a naughty boy) describing how Dennis’ standards – my God! -are improving! A timely piece now that the Menace is sixty years old, mature and increasingly rather tame. The whole thing is really quite risible and ultimately condescending, a possible intimation of an encroaching death. Children know when they are being got at – a clean and didactic Menace is the last thing they want!

There is so much irony here, things that unconsciously reveal adult concerns about children. As Langley says, an airbrushed and bubble-wrapped childhood is increasingly being demanded by TV and much of the publishing industry. So Dennis is no longer allowed to carry his catapult and peashooter; Gnasher is no longer allowed to bite people and Walter the Softie, the Menace’s pansy-like alter ego, the object of his repeated persecutions, has been given a girlfriend, Matilda, to counter any accusations that he might be gay! Remember, this is for a target audience whose average age must hover around eight years old.

In the early comics the strip apparently ended up with him being whacked by the parental slipper for his misdeeds. This was long gone, of course, by the time the TV series premièred in the mid-1980s. Langley says that the punishments sent two clear messages to the millions of children who followed the comic strip: that misbehaviour carried consequences and that corporal punishment was futile. Dennis simply became more ingenious in the pursuit of naughtiness!

It’s all gone, punishment, delinquency, all the endearing naughtiness has gone, all of the trademark things that made Dennis Dennis. Oh, no, we can’t have children being shown a bad example. And this for me is where the condescension comes in, the assumption that children are another species, that they can’t distinguish between right and wrong, that if shown a negative example they will simply follow on mindlessly; that they cannot see Dennis simply as an object of harmless entertainment.

The irony is that as Dennis and Walter merge into an anodyne oneness, safe, washed-out, harmless, real delinquency, real harm in the real world, has become increasingly malign. It’s a complete inversion of reality: speak no evil, see no evil, hear no evil, and evil will go away. It does not work like that. The menace, sad to say, is no longer Dennis.

Carry on Sex

I take pleasure in new discoveries, of books, of movies, of places, of ideas and of people. Thanks to a fellow blogger called Glen, who, amongst other things, writes about individuals and events associated with Kent, his home county (Kent Today & Yesterday), I became aware of Hattie, a biopic about the late Hattie Jacques, a British comedy actress, broadcast earlier this month by the BBC.

I confess the name meant nothing to me, though in fact I recognised her from watching occasional appearances in episodes of Hancock’s Half Hour, a classic comedy show which I bought on DVD last summer with the intention of reviewing. In contrast I remembered John Le Mesurier, her husband and fellow actor, quite clearly from television repeats of an old sitcom called Dad’s Army, focusing on the comic antics of a Home Guard unit during the Second World War. In this he played Sergeant Wilson, a rather louche, languid sort of chap, obviously public school, a sharp and amusing counter-point to Captain Mainwaring, the pompous and pretentious lower-middle class commander, so obviously discomforted by his subordinate’s effortless social superiority.

I finally managed to see Hattie on BBC iPlayer, followed by a brief spot of research on Jacques herself. A fat, matronly sort of figure, she clearly played up to this, making her name in a long run of British comedy films with the title of Carry On this, that or the other. I mean no disrespect when I say that these movies are prime examples of British working class humour, lots of double entendres and sexual references of a sort of naughty seaside postcard variety, the kind of thing that does not, I imagine, travel all that well.


Hattie, which I take to be a true account of part of the actress’ life, focused principally on a love affair she had with one John Schofield, such a contrast in every way with Le Mesurier, lower class and roughly spoken, not at all the gentleman.

Now, I should say that I’m not easily discomforted when it comes to matters concerning sexual relationships. I’m tolerant of others and I’m adventurous myself. Having said that, I found the relationship between the three people depicted in the drama risible and oddly bizarre. If I say that Schofield, by his own demand, moved in to the master bedroom with Hattie in her own home, while Le Mesurier was shuffled off to the attic, all while their two young sons were living under the same roof, you may have some idea why I felt like this.

She wanted John to stay; he did not want to go; he did not want to damage her career by the scandal of a divorce. But, my goodness, surely the persona of the unflustered gentleman can be pushed too far? What kind of man, I have to ask, would tolerate such a situation in his own home; what kind of woman would find such an arrangement tolerable? Am I being naïve; are there people like this; is there some kind of vicarious sexual pleasure in humiliation? I felt both sorry for Le Mesurier, for his discomfiture, and angry, for his lack of assertiveness, at one and the same time.

In the end, for all the sexual novelty, the whole silly ménage a trios was just so chintz curtains, furry lavatory seats and mock-Tudor suburbia, all so vulgar and petty-bourgeois, a farcical and comic slice of real life that might very well have served as a script for a Carry On movie.

The heart of a heartless world

I meant to write something earlier in brief tribute to Norman Wisdom, the British comedian and actor who died earlier this month aged ninety-five. An all round performer in the tradition of vaudeville, he is probably best known for a series of films he made in 1950s and 1960s, in which he starred as the hapless Norman Pitkin.

His comedy is that of a different age, a simpler and more naïve age. In a sense Wisdom and Pitkin were one and the same, the little man, a modern Chaplin, continually struggling against the pompous and the inflated, fighting against impossible odds with infectious optimism, defeated at one moment, triumphant at the next, always irrepressible. In The Art of Donald McGill, an essay on bawdy seaside postcards, George Orwell makes the following observation;

I never read the proclamations of generals before battle, the speeches of flihrers and prime ministers, the solidarity songs of public schools and left-wing political parties, national anthems, Temperance tracts, papal encyclicals and sermons against gambling and contraception, without seeming to hear in the background a chorus of raspberries from all the millions of common men to whom these high sentiments make no appeal.

This, for me, is Pitkin, the universal common man, always heroically unheroic. I would have said that his comedy was uniquely British, a manner and a style that did not travel well. But it did travel and to some of the most unusual places. There was perhaps no place more unusual in Europe than Albania under the communist dictatorship of Enver Hoxha. Almost every ‘decadent’ western influence was banned, anything that made life pleasurable.

Pitkin made it across this cultural cordon sanitaire. Given what Orwell says, I would have assumed that his style of comedy, a hymn to individualism and non-conformity, would have been completely taboo in any kind Stalinist utopia, but apparently the humourless and literal-minded Hoxha saw it as a parable on the ‘class struggle.’ It doesn’t really matter, though, for in their sterile lives the Albanian people found a new hero in such movies as A Stitch in Time and Trouble in Store. Pitkin became a huge hit, giving Wisdom an enduring cult following. On his death the present Albanian prime minister sent condolences on behalf of his nation to the actor’s family.

Wisdom, once asked to explain his popularity in Albania, said that he thought it was because his films, amongst other things, were free of sex and violence. I don’t think that’s the explanation at all; I imagine the Albanians would have delighted in a spot of sex and violence if they had been allowed to see such things. No, his appeal went deeper. What was it? In April I wrote a blog called The Dictator and the Clown in which I made the following points about Albania, Hoxha and Wisdom;

Almost any kind of foreign literature or media was banned, with the odd exception of old British comedies starring Norman Wisdom. It’s impossible to fathom the minds of dictators, but one would have thought that Wisdom, who often played the little man at odds with authority, would be as unacceptable as Sancho Panza. But, for whatever reason, he made it across the cultural barrier, becoming the much beloved ‘Mr Pitkin’, the character he played in his earliest movies. Wisdom became, if you like, the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. His comedy was the opium of the Albanian people.


The heart of a heartless world; I can think of no better epitaph.

The Dictator and the Clown

This coming Sunday will mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the death of Enver Hoxha, head of the Marxist dictatorship in Albania for some forty years. He was also a fervent admirer of Stalin, so much so that after the Khrushchev Secret Speech, revealing some of the excesses of Stalinist rule, Hoxha broke with the Soviet Union, realigning Albania with Mao’s China, the only Communist ruler to do so.

No country can entirely escape the past, and just as Stalin was a product of Russian history, so, too, was Hoxha a product of the history of the Balkans. He was born into a Muslim family when Albania was still a backward and obscure province of the Ottoman Empire. He ruled Albania in much the same oppressive fashion as a Turkish Bey, with absolute and unrestricted power. All organised religion was banned. Sorry, that’s not quite true. Existing religions were replaced with the most abject forms of state worship with the attendant personality cult.

There was little of the lip-service paid to liberty paid in other communist countries. The 1976 constitution effectively defined political liberty as contrary to established order. The Sigurimi, Albania’s secret police, were allowed the widest discretion in monitoring the population for any expressions of dissent. Thousands were imprisoned in labour camps.

Almost any kind of foreign literature or media was banned, with the odd exception of old British comedies starring Norman Wisdom. It’s impossible to fathom the minds of dictators, but one would have thought that Wisdom, who often played the little man at odds with authority, would be as unacceptable as Sancho Panza. But, for whatever reason, he made it across the cultural barrier, becoming the much beloved ‘Mr Pitkin’, the character he played in his earliest movies. Wisdom became, if you like, the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. His comedy was the opium of the Albanian people.