Coping With Nostalgia

I am sure that many readers of the blog around the same age as me will remember these. The Coping With... books, by Peter Corey, did for self-help books what Horrible Histories did for history books -- a terrible analogy, since they actually predated those books by several years, but never mind -- and lasted for twelve titles between 1989 and 2000 (plus a diary for the year 1999), each tackling a different subject, including Parents, Exams and Tests and the 21st Century. Each book follows a broadly similar formula: an introduction to the author and his entirely fictional team of researchers, a history of this book's subject, an A-Z guide to the subject, and then an afterword and appendices. Whilst the books had their tongues firmly in their cheeks, they did offer some sincere advice on the matter to hand. But the humour was what I wanted to cover here, since the books had a habit of getting crap past the radar which stuck in my mind beyond any of the sincere advice. Or, in some cases, just not bothering with any pretence of a radar at all. To cover the extent of said filth, I have decided to find, to my mind, the most risqué/risky joke in each entry of the series.

Coping With Parents (1989): On the subject of impending fatherhood, the series gets off to a good start with no attempt at plausible deniability whatsoever:

Coping With Teachers (1991): On a conversation with an old school friend: "I haven't seen you since we got that first-year's head stuck down the toilet! Cor! Did we laugh! We thought he was going to die!" "Yes! And we were right!" How embarrassing. I really should have remembered it.

Coping With Girls/Boys (1992): Henry VIII's courtiers' reaction to the birth of the future Elizabeth I: "It's a girl." "I'll get my axe."

Coping With School (1993): I think it suffices to say the section "Bike sheds, behind the" could qualify here in its entirety.

Coping With the Family (1994): On the subject of Mike "Mad Flasher" Jenkins: "As the name suggests, Mike is a photographer."

Coping With Pets (1995): The page on dead pets is morbidly humorous, I suppose, but otherwise there's not very much straying over the line here at all.

Coping With Friends (1996): "As you grow older, you begin to realize that not everybody is your mummy and daddy's friend. That man with the bright red face and steam coming out of his ears didn't seem very friendly when he yelled at your daddy for 'cutting him up' (whatever that means). Nor did that tall man with the pointy blue head who came round looking for your big brother - he didn't even smile at you."

Coping With Love (1997): On orgies (partial): "It involves everyone taking all their clothes off, and 'doing things' in a big tangled heap. It might also involve yoghurt."

Coping With Exams and Tests (1998): For some reason this book has a running joke about alcohol, of which my favourite is: "We take anti-depressants. Several pints later it doesn't look so bad."

Coping With 1999 (1998): The "emergency contacts" page includes space for your hitman, master forger, and alibi provider.

Coping With the 21st Century (1999): Again, this one doesn't stray particularly close to the line at any point.

Coping With Christmas (1999): There's a retelling of the run-up to Christmas from the POV of a turkey that doesn't end particularly happily.

Coping With Cash (2000): Apart from possibly the joke about cutting open a dog to retrieve some money it's swallowed, this one reads as positively sanitised even in comparison to the more innocuous of the earlier entries.

Rounding up the moments in this series where it clearly and unambiguously steps over the line of what is acceptable was a little disappointing, as it does so far less frequently than I recall; I suppose that's because the moments that did push the boundaries of what you can get away with in a book aimed at 11-to-16-year-olds stick in your mind and end up creating false memories of the series being risqué more frequently than it actually was. That said, the earlier books are definitely better for this sort of thing than the later ones, and it does feel like there was some attempt to tone things down as the series came to an end. And perhaps just because of the subject matter, Coping With Love is definitely what I recall the series being like (and thus a considerable outlier in terms of what it actually was like); I chose to stick to my rule of only reproducing one joke for it, but there is plenty more where that came from, and of all the now out-of-print books from the 80s and 90s I have reviewed for this blog, it is the one I most strongly recommend you track down to see for yourself.

(Endnote: In 2000, four books in the series were reproduced in a cut-down, pocket-sized format, branded The Concise Coping With...; namely the first three titles in the series, plus Coping With Christmas. I didn't cover these here because I presumed they had no new content, but if you happen to know otherwise please let me know and I'll try and track copies down. The books also spawned a BAFTA-winning TV series on Channel 4 - a one-off special in 1994 on Coping With Grown-ups; another special in 1995, Coping With Christmas, which predated the book on the same subject by four years; and a six-part series in 1997 with each episode covering a different subject. I might have looked at these if they were still available to watch anywhere, which as far as I can ascertain they aren't; again, any corrections are welcome.)