Britainology 57: The Beano
For this month's first Britainology, it's a slight reversal of the script: we have before us a British cultural institution that Nate knows more about than Milo does. It is in fact the children's weekly comics paper / mischief compendium 'The Beano,' which Nate read avidly in the early 1990s and Milo has only a passing familiarity with.
Comments (38)
£1 notes were discontinued in 1988. Also worth mentioning that £2 coins were only introduced in 1998
Carry On 9/11 is one of the funniest bits I’ve ever heard
“racism weekly”, not to be confused with “racisme weekly” which was an early iteration of Charlie Hebdo
Just wondering if this is recorded before or after part 3 of the lions tannenberg ep?
Anyway, good Pod.
The Daily Mail did do a parody 'Woke Beano' feature last year. It was pathetic.
Not wanting to misquote you Nate old boy, but from what I gather the more progressive changes made to the Beano very much came from within and willingly. Artist Lew Stringer in particular wrote a good piece about it.
http://lewstringercomics.blogspot.com/2022/01/woke-or-natural-progression.html?m=1
I've seen a few old (60s?) Beano strips in which Walter is still somewhat portrayed as a little rich boy shit; I think now the vibe is that the Softies would be the people that volunteered to sweep up after the London Riots.
Ding
Listening to this ep earlier today I caught myself thinking "come on guys, what the fuck, Desperate Dan is obviously from the Dandy"... so apparently this crap left an impression on me as well.
IIRC a few of the Beano mainstays also appeared in "The Funday Times", which I don't think has survived
I’m also going to supply my favourite Beano fact, which is that the current Dennis is the son of the original one, who has now grown up to be like a football hooligan version of his own dad, who is now being punished for his previous Menacing by having to raise the new one. So remember, if someone says Dennis the Menace has gone woke they’re a fake fan who doesn’t realise they’re two separate characters.
I remember for like the 60th or 70th anniversary Beano Club members could send away for a miniature but wholly accurate reprint of the first issue of the Beano, and oooooh boy did I learn a lot about The Past that day. I believe the literal first comic begins by exclaiming that while the protagonist may be “black as coke, he can tell a funny joke”. All of this was reprinted with absolutely no context supplied for the 1990s kids who ended up receiving it.
The Viz may have been worth a mention as it's a pretty good spoof of The Beano, Gilbert Ratchet, Johnny Fartpants and Terry Fuckwit, copy the same art style.
I had a load of Beano annuals from the 70s (inherited from parents), Karate Sid was definitely a white kid wearing the rice paddy hat and all. When I was reading it as a kid in the noughties he was changed to actually be Asian I think. Little plum was still very much there around 2005
"It wasn't bullying per se" covers 95% of British youth culture
also the political system
Do Viz next, probably the only truly worthy satirical publication in Britain, largely because it does not forget to include farting and senseless violence
Possibly? I'm not exactly a fan of its schtick, but I'd vote for Private Eye if another publication was going to be covered though, if only due to its impact.
Like the anti-gas pill?
Karl May is the author that underpins the Indian of the German imagination. It does mean that Whitehorse gets a direct flight to Germany in the summer months. Totem poles are very much a west coast / PNW thing.
Obligatory comment.
RE: Germans getting weird about Native Americans. The "father of American anthropology" was a German immigrant Franz Boas
Milo’s voice is so ruff get better king
Anyway the local obnoxiously British fish and chin shop in Brooklyn wall papered their bathroom with Beano pages
At least when I was reading in the late 90s, Walter was both gay and posh coded, an age old association in British comedy. Gnasher was a wire-haired Abyssian tripehound
Yep 100% that’s it, I knew it was wire haired something but it has been…over 30 years…
billy whizz also a colloquialism for the drug speed
This is the Britainology I've been looking forward to more than any
Does the shift in premise make this the first ever episode of ygoloniatirB?
Between blue Peter and this, I get the sense that Milo’s childhood was very sheltered from cursed UK culture
I'm doing my best not to giggle through this as "Beano" is a brand of anti-gas medication in my part of the States
"Rasher sandwich" is absolutely current in Ireland.
After his experience with the Dog Balthasar, I bet Nate's parents were thrilled that he'd be reading something explicitly for children and not German when he inherited all this Beano.
I think they were happy that I was interested in reading anything, honestly. because let's be real, at age 6 I wasn't the strongest reader in English and I didn't understand a word of German
Guernsey also still has £1 notes funnily enough, far from the most outdated thing going on down here
Regarding Walter being gay coded, i read pretty solidly from the early 90's and my little sister picked it up in the aughts, so i actually got to see that pivot in real time and it was wild, real "editing the pictures to remove people convicted of treason" stuff I even had the cheap VCR cartoons they put out before it got cheap enough to make a “real” one and you bet your ass they gave Walter a high pitched nasal voice and a lisp The dog was a tripe-hound, which i only remember because that's how i learned what tripe is when i asked what a wire haired tripe hound looked like. Shoutout to the best onomatopoeia "niff" meaning "these stink lines means someone is exuding a bad smell"