Every Dog...

In the issue of the Beano dated 13th March 1999, a new story debuted, Dog's Breakfast TV. Chronicling the goings-on at a breakfast TV show staffed by anthropomorphic dogs, it would prove to be one of the shortest-serving strips in the comic's history; just eleven editions appeared in total, over three months (there were three issues near the end of the run where it didn't appear).

I'm not sure why this strip stuck in my mind as strongly as it has. Maybe it sparked my interest in the nuts and bolts of television production. Maybe it's because it looked like nothing else in the comic -- it was the one and only D. C. Thomson commission for artist Stephen Baskerville. Maybe it's the sense that someone came up with the name first and worked backwards from there. Maybe it's because someone had the foresight to realise the joke wasn't going to last much longer and retired it so promptly. Maybe I just find anthropomorphic dogs really funny.

Whatever the reason, it's a strip I fondly remember despite its brief tenure (and, as we'll see, a couple of other reasons), and its short run means I can scan in and post every single edition of DBTV there ever was. For the most part, enjoy.

Before the next strip, I have to warn you we're about to encounter some racist material... which, to be honest, I've been incredibly fortunate to have avoided whilst writing about old British comics for this long.

DBTV is not the only offender amongst its contemporaries. I wouldn't necessarily blame Baskerville -- I don't know if he wrote the script for this particular strip, and the decision to give the chef a racist accent could have been made at the lettering stage. But it's still disheartening to find this in something published as recently as 1999.

Whilst this would be Baskerville's only work for a weekly humour comic, he went on to have a long career for Marvel and as a video game concept artist. (And, yes, Baskerville was his real name.)

Another thing I think I really liked about the story at the time was that Baskerville clearly did not feel his panels should be bound to any kind of template.

This one has a different logo to all the other strips apart from the first one -- I wonder if Baskerville planned to mix things up a bit more, but that was abandoned when the strip was curtailed.

Looking at Jamie Barkston in this one, I'm struck that the strip is fortunate not to have homaged anyone dodgy. Especially since a certain series about veterinary medicine was a frequent target for the comic around this time.

Clarkson's self-titled talk show was on the air at the time when the strip originally ran.

This strip ran in the 8th May 1999 issue; following this, there would be a three-week gap before the final two editions were printed in the 5th and 12th June issues. There are some unusual extra-long editions of other stories in these issues; I suspect the decision had already been made to axe DBTV at this point, and that made it an obvious choice to bump so these special strips could run.

I don't know if Baskerville knew when he was drawing this next strip that it would be the last one. But I really, really hope he did.

This is not quite the end, however, as one further strip appeared in the Beano Book 2001, published over a year later. Whilst the book would've been nearing completion around the time DBTV stopped appearing in the weekly comic, it is rather unusual for such a short-running story to appear in one of the Christmas annuals, and I can only presume that the story happened to hit a sweet spot where it was still live at just the right time to make it in.

Even further beyond this, Baskerville drew one final panel featuring the characters in 2008 for a feature marking the Beano's 70th anniversary, which you can see here.

The strip should probably be seen in the context that it came not long after a major revamp of the Beano to bring it up to date, and it wasn't afraid to experiment in this time. Around the same time, Dennis the Menace's baby sister Bea was born, Ivy the Terrible was expanded to two pages, the comic flirted with the reintroduction of text stories by serialising Dick King-Smith's latest book Mr. Ape, the Beano Club was introduced, and on occasion entire issues were given over to feature-length stories starring all the comic's regulars inspired by European comics such as Asterix. DBTV is undoubtedly a swing and a miss, but it's a totally unique swing which I think made it worth doing.