One Foot in the Beezer

The legendary One Foot in the Grave Christmas special, One Foot in the Algarve, original TX 26/12/93: Margaret opens up the suitcase she believes to contain the bed linen they've brought from home, only to discover that, thanks to Victor failing to empty the case he brought down from the attic, it actually contains "ten years' worth of access statements and a hundred copies of the Beezer."

There are many reasons why David Renwick might have chosen that particular comic book. The Beezer is an inherently funnier name than the Beano or the Dandy, especially when said in a Scottish accent, and it isn't as comparatively obscure as, say, the Nutty. For the first twenty-five years of its run, the Beezer was printed in A3 size, making it twice as big as most of its stablemates, which might well come in handy when you're using it as a prop in a sitcom. Strips in the Beezer such as Colonel Blink, The Badd Lads and Pop, Dick and Harry, which leaned heavily on slapstick and a general ethos of things going wrong, make it a particularly appropriate one to appear in One Foot -- quite possibly it was a childhood favourite of Renwick's.

The topmost issue in the suitcase is a distinctive one: a special Christmas issue, quite probably chosen deliberately. That should make it easy enough to narrow things down to the exact issue the production used, you'd think.

And thanks to Comic Vine, should you so care, it's issue #937, dated December 29th, 1973 (there's a better shot a few seconds later than the above screengrab where the top row of the Ginger strip is partially visible, providing absolute confirmation):

How likely is it, though, that Victor was still buying the Beezer in 1973? It's not unthinkable, certainly, but is the implication meant to be that these issues belonged to their son, Stuart?

There is one other thing that seems worth noting. The location filming for One Foot in the Algarve took place, as per Richard Webber's book, between 8 May and 26 June, 1993. Between filming and broadcast, the Beezer breathed its last: it had been merged with DC Thomson stablemate the Topper in 1990 to become Beezer and Topper (an unusual case of a Comics Merger where both titles retained equal billing), and that lasted three years before its final issue was the one dated 21st August, 1993 (although the quarterly reprint comic The Best of Beezer survived until 1996, and the summer specials and Christmas annuals until 2003), with the strips deemed strong enough to survive being divvied up between the Beano and the Dandy. That was a noticeable step towards the demise of the weekly humour anthology comic (or at least the scenario today, where the Beano is the last of its kind), as it left only those two plus -- if you count them -- Bunty and Twinkle standing from the DC Thomson stable.

I could say where it left the genre metaphorically, but it seems too obvious, doesn't it?