The Life and Times of Milly O'Naire

This is the very first edition of The Toffs and the Toughs, which appeared in IPC/Fleetway's Knockout across its 106 weekly issues from 1971 to 1973. It is one of many, many, many Fleetway strips based around class war, a few more of which we are soon to encounter.

I am not absolutely certain, but I think this very first instalment of TTatT is the only one in which the names of the individual toffs and toughs are ever given -- certainly I've read quite a lot of other strips and none of the characters are named in them. The artist was Reg Parlett, although some sources claim it was Joe McCaffrey; possibly McCaffrey ghosted some strips further down the line.

When Knockout finished in 1973 it merged with Whizzer and Chips. It appears The Toffs and the Toughs was carried forward to Whizzer and Chips incorporating Knockout (as it was known for a little over a year post-merger), but -- like several of the other strips that made the leap forward -- didn't last in its new home for more than a year or so. (Perhaps the most famous survivor of Knockout was Fuss Pot, who survived another merger later on and continued to appear in Fleetway's last comic standing, Buster, until it ended.)

However, the Knockout Christmas annual continued to be issued until 1984, and the toffs and the toughs continued to wage their wars against each other in that; additionally, later in the 70s the characters had a relaunch of sorts in a W&C strip called Smarty's Toffs and Tatty's Toughs (a sample of which can be seen here), which made the two groups supporting characters to the pre-established leads of Smarty Pants and Tatty Ed, although they seem to have disappeared from the pages of Whizzer and Chips for good by the late seventies.

Meanwhile, in 1979 Fleetway launched another new comic, Jackpot, which featured another class war-based strip in all 141 issues over a run of just under three years: Milly O'Naire and Penny Less (drawn by Sid Burgon), recycling the name of the female toff in The Toffs and the Toughs -- most likely unconsciously, although the two Millys do have some interesting similarities in their character designs.

And that is how Fleetway had two concurrent characters with the exact same name, without anybody noticing.

The Disappearing of Dimples

If you have enjoyed my recent writings on Cuddles and Dimples, and trying to pinpoint the exact moment at which the two tyrannical toddlers were retconned from being next-door neighbours to twin brothers, I am sure you will find this, by the excellent regular commentator Zoomy, of interest: a look at a Dandy Comic Library starring a solo Cuddles which was published after the retcon happened but had clearly been written before then, and has a bit of difficulty writing around the absence of Dimples (as well as clearly featuring the set of parents who were eliminated from the strip when the retcon happened).

A few months before that Comic Library was published, there had already been a joint outing for Cuddles and Dimples in the same range, no. 145 "The Holiday Horrors"; they appear to still be neighbours and not siblings in this one, as Cuddles' father (one of the set of vanished adults) is visible on the cover. The fact that the solo Cuddles story, seemingly written even before the two strips were combined, was released a few months after that is a real curiosity, almost as if it was sitting on the shelf for a while.

I did have a look through my Dandy annuals, and can report that by the 1990 book the boys are very clearly siblings (one story is a day at the beach and the other is set on Christmas Day; there can be no doubt these were produced after the retcon happened).

The 1988 annual still features a solo Dimples; when it was published, the neighbours-to-brothers changeover was happening, but the long lead times the annuals had meant that at the time it was being put together the Dandy and Hoot merger would not yet have happened. The Dandy Book 1989, which I don't currently have in my collection, may have featured stories where they were still neighbours, but that would probably be the only other publication at odds with what was happening in the weekly strip.

A New Contender for "Weirdest Thing Found in Charity Shop"

I mean, I'm assuming it's genuine, but if it isn't that would be if anything even odder.

The Twin Dilemma

Precisely eleven days ago, I took a look at one of the shortest-serving British comics on record, Hoot. Of particular interest was Hoot's cover star, the tyrannical toddler Cuddles; when Hoot was merged into the Dandy after just 53 issues, Cuddles was merged with a very similar strip about a tyrannical toddler called Dimples which was already running in the Dandy.

When the combined Cuddles and Dimples story began, the boys were presented as neighbours after Cuddles moved to Dandytown in the first strip. After some period of time, they were retconned into twin brothers and one set of parents vanished without trace.

The Dandy Summer Special 2022, as pictured above, is principally reprints of old material, profiling eleven different stories from across the comic's archive, with a little introduction to each set of repeats giving information about the character's history. The introduction to the section on Cuddles and Dimples states this:

Cuddles and Dimples are very odd brothers. Yes, we all know that they are super-wild and made of mischief, but they're even odder than you'd think, because they weren't brothers to begin with. Cuddles first appeared in The Nutty and Dimples arrived in The Dandy a little later. Cuddles moved to the short-lived comic, The Hoot, before joining The Dandy when the two comics merged. For two weeks the boys were neighbours and on the third week, they had become brothers and one set of parents had disappeared. The strangest thing is that not a single letter was ever received in the office about it. Nobody noticed.

Between publishing that earlier post on Hoot and now, though, I came into possession of a book I'd been after for some time: The Art and History of the Dandy, published to mark the title's 75th anniversary (and not long before it finished completely as a weekly title). And that publication has this to say:

When he left Hoot to join The Dandy, Morris [Heggie, editor of the Dandy from 1986-2006] took one of his favourite characters with him, a naughty tot called 'Cuddles'. The Dandy already had a mischievous toddler named 'Dimples', so Morris decided to have them join forces as next-door neighbours -- it was going to be double trouble.

In 1987 Morris decided the story would work better if Cuddles and Dimples were twins with the same parents. But he got a shock one Monday morning when Barrie Appleby sent in the first new strip with Cuddles' dad and Dimples' mum as the parents! He had no need to panic though, it was just Barrie playing a prank on Morris and it was quickly changed.

The combined Cuddles and Dimples debuted in the first Dandy branded as Dandy and Hoot: issue #2345, dated the 1st November, 1986. Both of these sources cannot be right. The change happened either almost straight away, or after a few months.

Extreme Deadlines

On 25 October 2001, Robot Wars Extreme: The Official Guide was published, tying in with the broadcast of, not unreasonably, Robot Wars Extreme (the first episode was broadcast on BBC Choice on the 8th, and received a terrestrial outing on BBC Two on the 26th).

Of the three Robot Wars publications aside from the Robot Wars Technical Manual, none are particularly great examples of TV tie-in books, but the one for Extreme is probably the strongest. Most notably, it learns from the similar book published for Series 4 by giving each robot two pages for its statistics, so it doesn't, for example, have to reduce a robot's previous battle history to 'Series 3: Overall winner'.

There is one particularly interesting thing about this book, and the series it accompanied. The bulk of filming for Robot Wars Extreme took place between 27 June and 1 July, 2001 at Earl's Court in London, as part of Tomorrow's World Live. However, filming fell very badly behind schedule, and a significant chunk of bouts had to be filmed alongside Series 5 from 26 August to 3 September at Elstree Studios. The book quite clearly had to be at the printers between these two filming blocks, as it is missing some key information about fights, or even whole events, which hadn't yet been filmed when it went to print. The introduction acknowledges this rather well:

All this incredible action guarantees the most extreme robot battles ever seen. Not all the competitors will live to fight another day. A robot that's scheduled to do battle might be annihilated by its archenemy in an earlier event. This makes for mega-exciting, adrenaline-fuelled viewing - but it also means that some of the listings in this book may differ from what you see on the screen.

Give a Hoot

Hoot was, to date, the final attempt by D. C. Thomson to launch a new weekly humour comic for children, and proved to be the shortest-lived of all their titles: it lasted for exactly one year and a total of 53 weekly issues (the first dated 26/10/85, and the last dated 25/10/86) before it was merged into the Dandy. So short was its run that the tagline "Britain's Bubbling New Comic!" was used for all its life. (A few titles by rival publisher Fleetway can claim an even shorter run; the record may be held by Nipper, which managed just 16 issues.)

Hoot is arguably the most obscure of all D. C.'s titles; not just because of its short run, but very few characters survived the merger and, as we'll see, its best-known star joined the Dandy in a rather unusual way. It was not featured in the publisher's reprint titles such as Classics From the Comics for a long time, although they eventually relented near the end of CFtC's run. (Plug was also excluded, but that at least had its wacky concept to make it memorable.)

Although a few new strips were added in the last few weeks (including one that only appeared in the final issue!), the comic's lineup was pretty static for its all-too-brief life, and you can get a pretty good sense of it just from one edition... so here we go. The issue I've scanned in is number 43, hailing from near the end (there would be just ten more instalments after this one).

Chicanery

In Part Eleven of the Doctor Who story The Trial of a Time Lord, original TX 15/11/1986, the evidence in the Doctor's trial is at odds with his own memory, as the footage has been twisted by the prosecutor, the Valeyard, to show him in a worse light than reality:

THE DOCTOR: I didn't do that!

THE INQUISITOR: Stop the Matrix!

THE VALEYARD: Are we to be subject to more chicanery, Sagacity?

In the fifth episode of the third season of Better Call Saul, "Chicanery", original TX 08/05/2017, Jimmy McGill has just provided the courtroom with proof his brother's electromagnetic hypersensitivity is all in his mind, hoping to provoke him into exactly the unhinged rant he ends up delivering:

CHUCK: No, no, no. No no, it's a trick, it has to --

ALLEY: Enough is enough. I submit that Mr. McGill's mental illness is a non-issue. If he were schizophrenic --

CHUCK: Schizo--!

ALLEY: -- it would not take away from the fact that the defendant --

CHUCK: I am not crazy! I am not crazy! I know he swapped those numbers, I knew it was 1216! One after Magna Carta, as if I could ever make such a mistake! Never! Never! I just -- I just couldn't prove it! He -- he covered his tracks, he got that idiot at the copy shop to lie for him --

ALLEY: Mr. McGill, please. You don't have to go into --

CHUCK: You think this is something? You think this is bad, this -- this chicanery? He's done worse! That billboard! Are you telling me that a man just happens to fall like that? No, he orchestrated it! Jimmy! He defecated through a sunroof, and I saved him! And I shouldn't have! I took him into my own firm! What was I thinking? He'll never change. He'll never change! Ever since he was nine, always the same! Couldn't keep his hands out of the cash drawer! "But not our Jimmy! Couldn't be precious Jimmy!" Stealing them blind! And he gets to be a lawyer?! What a sick joke! I should have stopped him when I had the chance! And you, you have to stop him! You --

And that is how Pip and Jane Baker foreshadowed one of the most iconic scenes in one of the most acclaimed dramas of the twenty-first century.

Fun and Games

So, there you have it, should anyone ever ask you then you can answer with confidence from this day on: Garfield's favourite game is this one I found in a charity shop today, which is remarkably similar to Ludo but with the added twist of having certain 'safe' squares which you can't be bumped back to the start from.

Curiously, Dennis the Menace's favourite game is this one I found in a charity shop a few weeks ago, from the same company, which is also remarkably similar to Ludo but with the different twist of an additional token representing Dennis' Dad, which patrols a section of the board and can also send pieces back to the start.

Funny how that works.