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.