Schools Just Wanna Have Fun

In October 1983, a new weekly humour comic for children was launched by IPC/Fleetway. Conceived by former schoolteacher turned comics writer Graham Exton, who had previously written scripts for strips such as Sid's Snake and Faceache, as its name suggests School Fun had the unifying concept that all of its stories were set in schools.

I can already sense eyebrows arching, and, yes, this concept does beg the obvious question: Would children really want to spend their precious time outside of school reading a comic full of stories set there, when there were about a dozen more escapist titles on the humour shelf alone? Most of them had at least one story primarily set in a school, from The Bash Street Kids to The Four Marys, but an entire comic?

You can put together some defence of School Fun as an attempt to create a comic with a cohesive theme. By this point Fleetway had seen a number of short-lived titles quickly sputter out due to a failure to establish a strong identity of their own -- not only their own titles, but several published by rivals such as D. C. Thomson. Nevertheless, the answer to the question in the above paragraph would seem to be a resounding "no": School Fun lasted for just 33 issues and seven months before it went the way of eight previous Fleetway titles (and three future ones) when it merged with Buster.

The very first issue included a fictionalised account of how the comic came to be on its first page, which is apparently not all that far from what really happened (although as per Graham Kibble-White in The Ultimate Book of British Comics, in real life a class in Cannock were asked by Exton what they'd like to see in a comic all about school). I think you can sense a little element of movement away from this over School Fun's short life -- the first issue's tagline "The Happiest Read of Your Life!" did not reappear, and later issues seem to promote things such as, well, children bringing a lion to school more on their front cover, such as the one under discussion today. It's issue #26, just two months from the end, which I've scanned in.

Dwarfing Through the Decades... Again

At the moment, BBC Two are repeating the fifth series of Red Dwarf. These repeats, which have been ongoing at the rate of one series a year since the first two were repeated in 2023, have given something of a second life to the Red Dwarf BBC Broadcasts Guide, one of the earliest and most genuinely useful things I ever wrote.

The continuity for these episodes have also had a lot of fun to them; "Holoship" opened the run with the same ident used for the original 1992 broadcast, and a continuity announcement based on the original, and something similar was done with "The Inquisitor" a week later, with the opening continuity riffing on a line from the original 1992 trail.

Something quite wonderful from 1997 also resurfaced the other day: a clip of some overrunning snooker coverage from 1997, with presenter David Vine confirming the scheduled episode of Red Dwarf will be broadcast following the conclusion of the match, after which the following immortal line is spoken by Dennis Taylor, in reference to Steve Davis: "From the Red Dwarf to the Ginger Magician..."

A quick check of BBC Genome dates this to 9 February 1997, and the Sunday repeat of "Duct Soup", which was already scheduled for 10.30pm, and (obviously) broadcast even later. Back in 2016 I went with the scheduled times in absence of any other information, but some of those narrative repeats were on the same day as live coverage of other events which makes it hard to be sure they went out exactly as scheduled. The continuity announcement for the repeat of "Blue" (erroneously described as being from the premiere) also describes it as airing 'a little later than planned' -- presumably due to, of all things, a live broadcast of the BBC Symphony Orchestra playing Stravinsky immediately beforehand.

Concluding the run, the 9 March repeat of "Nanarchy" was scheduled on the same day as coverage of the World Indoor Championships in Paris and Crufts, so it's quite possible that one was delayed too. But anyway, I've modified some of the footnotes to reflect this.

Adventures in Baby-Sitting

On 9 February 2001, BBC Two aired the Simpsons episode "My Sister, My Sitter" for the first time, where Lisa is inspired to start baby-sitting by The Baby-Sitter Twins books.

Precisely one week after that, on 16 February 2001, the one hundred and fifth Baby-Sitters Club book, Stacey the Maths Whiz,¹ was published in the UK... and would turn out to be the very last book in the series published over here, a relaunch to coincide with the publication of the 100th book the previous year (along with reissuing the older books as economy-price, 3-in-1 omnibuses) having failed to jump-start interest in the series. Whilst there are many examples of the show's free-to-air broadcaster airing stuff that was well out of date by the time they got the rights (elsewhere in this season, the BBC had to skip "Treehouse of Horror VII" from its initial showing because the "Citizen Kang" segment was so dated), them managing to get something in just before the deadline is perhaps more unusual. (As best I can tell, the Sweet Valley Twins books had stopped being published in the UK several years earlier, although curiously Sweet Valley High was still part of the Children's BBC schedule at this time.)

Anyway, that's a connection only I would think ever to make.

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1. Titled Stacey the Math Whiz in the US, naturally. ^↩

The Silliest Post About Adventure Gamebooks Imaginable

In the third GrailQuest gamebook, Gateway of Doom, one of the new spells Pip is given in their Second Spell Book is Pip's Amazing Legume Spell, which will give an automatic Friendly Reaction from any attacking vegetable. (Ordinarily, a Friendly Reaction requires you to roll three dice for yourself, and one die for your opponent; if the combined total of your three dice is lower than your enemy's single roll, they're friendly and you can proceed as if you'd won. All spells only require a roll of 7 or better on two dice to succeed.)

You may very well think that this is quite a specialised spell which doesn't come into play much.

You may even think that J. H. Brennan included it solely to set up the joke that if you accidentally rescue a Vampire Carrot (which takes quite a bit of effort on your part, incidentally) it turns out such an absurd spell is the only thing that can save your life.

The Sickest Character in Comics

In January 1988, the Beano strip chronicling the adventures of Dennis the Menace's pet pig, Rasher, was retired... and since its replacement was being drawn by the same artist, David Sutherland, there was a rather unusual handover, with The Germs and Ill Will appearing in the last strip before taking over the page completely the week after.

(Both strips shared not only an artist, but also a writer -- John Kemp, who also wrote Minnie the Minx, Ball Boy and Gnasher and Gnipper at the time. Kemp is a fascinating character who began writing for D. C. as an 18-year-old¹ in the 1980s and departed in the early 90s to become a mature student at Dundee University, during which time he was also elected to Dundee City Council and served as education convener.)

The first 'proper' strip, initially titled The Germs, was afforded two pages:

In the Bushes

This is something that has confused me for quite some time. In a speech given on 27 January 1992, George H. W. Bush gives a speech in which he says "we need a nation closer to the Waltons than the Simpsons".

The producers of The Simpsons rush out a response appended to a repeat of "Stark Raving Dad" a few days later, where the family watch the clip on their TV, to which Bart responds "hey, we're just like the Waltons. We're praying for an end to the depression, too".

However, an alternative version of the clip exists, which uses footage of Bush at the 1992 Republican National Convention later that year, where he repeated the line (as "...to make American families a lot more like the Waltons and a lot less like the Simpsons".) This is most notably seen in documentaries such as the "Bush vs. Simpsons" featurette on the Season 3 DVD, but I was not sure of its origin.

Last Roll of the Dice

The label on the jar has ripped and hangs half off. When she folds the torn piece back into its proper position, the blood drains from your cheeks. You are eating from a jar of Mutant Meatballs! 

Mutant Meatballs were concocted originally by an apothecary from Throben aligned to a rebellious Prince of Brice. On discovering their effects, they designed a plan of conquest. These potent little balls taste delicious, but are quite deadly. They wreak horrible mutations on whoever tastes them. The Prince of Brice planned to seize the throne, his troops manned by experimental mutants, bred for their bizarre powers. And you have just eaten a handful of the balls! Slowly, you will begin to mutate. What will happen to you? The effects are never predictable, usually harmful, sometimes fatal and sometimes useful.

If you are foolish enough to eat from the larder of the Mampang Fortress in the fourth book of Steve Jackson's Sorcery!, The Crown of Kings, then you should roll two dice and turn to the section given to determine what happens to you.

Cracked

Some scans in this article contain racist caricatures.

Shortly after the closure of Buzz, D. C. Thomson decided to have another go at launching a new weekly humour comic for children. It would do things a bit differently from its immediate predecessor: whereas Buzz had been in A3 size, the new comic would be A4, allowing it to boast 32 pages of comics and features. Although it didn't have a regular cover star, instead featuring a large splash panel promoting the characters within, it would feature a character that did not really have a strip of his own, but rather served as the comic's host, not dissimilar to some titles by rival publisher Fleetway of the time. It would prioritise gags, and lots of them, and include several points of reader interactivity.

The first issue of Cracker was on the shelves in January 1975, just two weeks after the conclusion of Buzz, but this title was destined to have an even shorter run: just 87 issues, across twenty months.

I have an issue from just after the halfway point here, number #51, and -- along with some examples of stories that had already been phased out by this point -- I'm going to well and truly scan it in.