Play Not Dull

Last week, there was a moment when BBC TV rivalled the internet for wilfully propagating anarchy.

During Mock The Week, Dara O’Briain suggested extracting the radio-control chip from a London Underground Oyster card and fitting it into a magic wand. Then you wave it at the gate each time you go on the tube. Many people might say, “Why would you want to do that?” To which the only sane answer is “Why would you not?” Come on, it looks cool, it makes onlookers laugh and it might seriously annoy a bureaucrat somewhere. And it demonstrates the sort of youthful, playful outlook on life which makes you irresistible to the opposite sex. Or not.

Talking of annoying bureaucrats, how many of you have come across the splendid book by Patrick Moore on this subject? Bureaucrats and How To Annoy Them is a guide to doing exactly that. It offers helpful advice like always putting a stamp in the exact middle of an envelope, how to slightly overpay your income tax by an amount just significantly too much for them to ignore and generally how to drive officials round the bend. The philosophy is that you can never beat bureaucracy but you can waste its time by engaging it in pointless correspondence. It’s an engaging, hilarious book and I recommend you buy it and put its philosophy into practice immediately.

Back to the interweb. Another bit of wayward brilliance recently came to my attention via YouTube. In Me Shed is a raucous, back garden pop-video performed by suburban Welsh rockers Punks Not Dad.

For those of you too desperately unhip to know, Punks Not Dad are a bunch of middle-aged blokes who are living the dream of punk rebellion exactly 32 years too late. Their lead singer is called Sid Life Crisis. Other band members include Johnny Cardigan, Joe Strimmer and Adrian Viles.

PND’s motto is Allen Key in the UK, although it might just as well be live slow, die old and concentrate on developing an impressive beer gut between gigs.

Like Where The Hell is Matt?, In Me Shed one of those attitude-defining things. You either get it or not. Explanations are redundant and there is no middle ground.

Which is as it should be. What one person categorises as joyous and life-affirming, another will find mind-numbingly tedious.

And speaking of dull, there is one reason why you might not want to do Dara O’Briain’s magic wand thing: Transport for London will fine you for damaging an Oyster Card.

There are far too many reasons for being grown up and boring. Fight back. Buy Punk Not Dad’s CD.

Singular regularity

I like to keep regular.

Like most people, I suppose, I prefer a daily rhythm which is predictable and ordered. Especially important when one works freelance as a jet-setting, international cartoonist, freed from the shackles of the weekday nine to five. So it came as a shock when my usual Thursday job switched to Wednesday.

This is no trivial matter. The Westmorland Gazette has been appearing on the same day of the week for hundreds of years. Thursday has been my newspaper cartoon day for a quarter of a century. True, the time of day has varied as different printing presses and production deadlines have come into play but Thursday itself has remained an immovable object. Holidays have been built around it. Appointments in far flung corners of the globe have been organised to allow me to fax or email cartoons back to the high-tech, super-streamlined newspaper office in a remote corner of England.

Furthermore those around me have undergone 25 years of training to make sure they know that Thursdays, for two or three hours, I cannot be reached by phone, person, email or carrier pigeon for any reason except in the direst of emergencies. (My publishing business partner has now just about got it … I am not sure I will live long enough for him to become programmed to the change of routine.)

The new day has been running two weeks so will take a while to bed in. It does have benefits. Wednesday is market day in Kendal and the town is therefore very exciting, being positively a-throb with life and activity. (I don’t get out much when I am not internationally jet-setting.)

On the subject of which, when I am jet-setting - or at least, train-setting - I can do it on a Thursday, avoiding the transport companies’ predilection to screw their customers at Friday ticket rates. (Note to overseas readers - highway robbery did not die out in the UK, it became a subsidiary of the national rail network.)

On press day itself the cartoon routine remains the same. Read stories, produce a batch of sketches, sulk when the editor choses the wrong one, draw final artwork and scan into computer in three hours prior to press deadline. This has a rhythm all of its own, finely tuned to the hot-house environment of a regional newspaper office, a vibrant news-gathering organism turning a penetrating, incisive scrutiny on the community around it.

Unless it is someone’s birthday. In which case it’s cakes all round.

Being a Cartoonist

I have just completed one of the most difficult projects I have undertaken. A book on cartooning. Odd that it should have been so hard given that I am a cartoonist and have been drawing professionally for over 25 years. But it became one of those very personal endeavours that you agonise over getting right, fuss with endlessly and generally drive everyone around mad with. (I like ending sentences with prepositions.)

One of the things I have been keen to emphasise in the book is that cartoons are not just for kids. Some of the best cartoons are done for kids (Quentin Blake, for example) but it is not some noddy deviant relative of real art, to be dismissed by grown ups the world over.

Cartoonists have brought down governments, undermined politicians, attacked dictators, annoyed major world religions, taunted tyrants and taken men to the moon. (I may have got carried away with the last one.) The point is, it is a valid art form with a strong tradition. If you don’t believe me, go visit the British Cartoon Museum in London. Cartoonists, children’s illustrators and comic book artists are, in my opinion, hugely undervalued in this country. Some produce work of far greater artistry than any of the contemporary Brit Art clowns.

Someone once asked me what I did for a living and retorted, “Cartoonist? That must be a nice little life.” I decided to ignore the patronising tone and asked what he did instead. It turned out he was a manager in a city company and therefore astonishingly boring. Loads of money, no time, no life. I therefore saw it as my duty to regaled him with some of the jobs I had done, the exciting and exotic clients I had worked for and the endless freedom and creativity my nice little life afforded me. I have no idea if he saw the point but it felt good to me.

Cartooning is a brilliant way to earn a living. You get paid to make people laugh and you’re legitimately allowed to spend all day playing with ideas. Sometimes you get to annoy politicians. (Although if you do, the chances are they will ask for the original artwork, which takes the edge off the sense of satisfaction you may feel.)

I wouldn’t swap jobs for the world. It has brought me untold wealth, fast cars, glamorous women and a jet-setting lifestyle. (Some or all of the last sentence may be untrue.) Laughing keeps you healthy and helps you live longer: I recently interviewed American cartoonist Arnold Roth - 80 years old and determined to keep cartooning until nature intervenes (his words, not mine).

So my message at the end of the book, to any aspiring cartoonists: Go out there, do your best work, draw what makes you laugh and hope it will also amuse your clients. With luck you’ll never have to return to the day job.

Fly Me To The Moon

So, where were you when Neil Armstrong stepped out onto the moon?

As far as I recall - and yes, I was alive at the time, hard to believe in one so fresh faced and lovely - I was in bed. I remember scrambling out for the re-runs at 6.00 a.m. and spending the rest of the day at school trying to keep my eyes open.

I also spent the next few days buying up all the newspapers, in training to be a geek before the word was invented. I then filed them all away in an old suitcase (in a bid to be an early nerd as well). And during all the Apollo frenzy last week, a trip into the loft revealed … taraa, they’re all still there! So the last week has been a complete lunar nostalgia fest. And as I re-read all those old papers, I experienced again that old feeling of guilt about not doing my homework.

Whilst it’s possible to recapture some of the excitement of the period (readers under 48 need not apply), it is, of course, impossible to get a feeling of what it would really be like to stand upon the surface of the moon. Probably the nearest most of us will get is to look at the cleaned up, archived photographs in the book, Full Moon. Or go and look at the paintings by Alan Bean. That’s right, one of the moon walkers. He was the 4th person to walk on the moon, in November 1969. When he came back home, realised how lucky we were to live on Earth and was inspired to take up painting.

No cartoonists have yet made it to the moon (I am open to offers). It’s probably just as well. You may be aware there are people out there who doubt the moon landings were real and think it’s all an elaborate conspiracy. Designed, I presume, to give them a vapid and tawdry career spouting cobblers on TV. A cartoonist couldn’t resist messing with their heads by scratching out in the lunar dust: “IT’S ALL FAKE!”

Incidentally, drawing cartoons on the moon is now entirely feasible. NASA’s new LRO has already sent back pictures of the Apollo landing sites, showing the Lunar Module and the path made by Aldrin and Armstrong. Let me repeat, there is one cartoonist not a quarter of a million miles from where I sit who would go in a heartbeat. (Although a spaceship would be more useful.)

Was Apollo worth it? The lunar landing programme cost $150 billion in today’s money. That seems an awful lot until you discover that bailing out the American banking system has just cost the American tax payer $700 billion. Which of those two achievements is the most uplifting and inspirational?

On the other hand, spending $700,000,000,000 to send the world’s bankers to the moon seems a fantastically reasonable deal. We could even save some money: Don’t bother to give them space suits.

Going Digital, Part 2

Having decided that the BBC licence tax is going to get me whether or not I have a television, I’ve succumbed to a digibox. And now the second stage of the demented switch over process is complete, and analogue has been switched off, I have:

(A) About a million new channels

(B) A television with a pile of redundant analogue electronics inside it. Yes, I know I am supposed to ditch it and get a flat screen thing but I like my old Sony, so there. The economy can recover from recession without my input.

Acquiring all the digital radio stations, including the wonderful Radio 7 and BBC-BBC World Service, is a considerable bonus. I am not so sure the same can be said for some of the TV channels. For those of you who haven’t switched yet, here’s what you have in store:

BBC1 to 4 - not quite sure why the BBC needs so many or why 3 and 4 require a little logo in the top left to tell you what you’ve tuned into. Are goldfish the BBC's new core demographic?

BBC News - 24 hour news with presenters who aren’t handsome or pretty enough to be on BBC1.

CBeebies - training channel for future news and current affairs presenters.

BBC Parliament - feeble attempt to suck up to the politicians ready for the next licence fee review

ITV1 - occasionally contains programmes without real people.

ITV2 - contains older programmes.

ITV3 - repeats of programmes you last saw when you were three years old.

ITV4 - quiz channel, e.g. what is ITV4?

Channel 4 - so named because you have a one-in-four chance of getting Big Brother whatever time of day you tune in.

E4 - Channel 4 translated into Yorkshire.

4 + 1 - Channel Five for accountants.

Teacher’s Channel - only on for a few hours a day and then disappears for the summer.

Directgov - dodgy insurance channel.

Community Channel - stuff you would otherwise know about if you didn’t spend all day indoors watching TV.

Gay Rabbit - alarmingly enlightened children’s channel.

305 - nothing broadcast, which makes it the one place you’re safe from those irritating Michael Winner adverts.

Strangely enough, the likelihood of finding something you want to watch seems to be in inverse proportion to the number of channels on offer. Other channels may, of course, be available but after going through that lot, it’s easy to find yourself being drawn to the bookcase …

Fortunately, the electronic programme guide is quite exciting. I could watch that for hours.

Radio with Pictures?

Following on from last week’s newspaper blog, here’s another question often asked of cartoonists:

Which comes first, the caption or the drawing?

Answer: It doesn’t matter, as long as they both arrive at the reader at the same time.

The caption rarely stands up on its own. “I keep thinking it’s Tuesday,” isn’t even mildly amusing until you realise the speaker is a hippo wallowing in a pool. Paul Crum’s Punch cartoon may defy logical analysis but without the drawing, it’s nothing. So what is the point of doing cartoons on the radio?

Weirdness. A desire to be different. Refusal to do what everyone else says you must do. These are all good reasons for becoming a cartoonist. Once you accept that, being told cartoons on the radio won’t work are all the reasons you need.

The radio cartoons appear on CityTalk 105.9’s Sunday breakfast show Rob McLoughlin Live. It all came about because of the sheep connection.

I’ve drawn a number of sheep on postcards over the years. They raid picnics, dance on caravan roofs or drive tanks - all the usual things sheep get up to when there’s no one watching. So when ace radio journalist Caz Graham produced a BBC feature on the little woolly monsters, she asked me to draw one on-air. “Use your loudest pencil,” she suggested, helpfully.

The pencil was recorded and the cartoon went onto the BBC website. Another first ticked off, I thought.

Then along came Mr McLoughlin. Rob used to be a regular presenter on Granada Reports and now hosts ITV Granada’s political discussion show, Party People. His latest venture is a Sunday morning on-air broadsheet and, as we all know, all the best newspapers have a cartoon.

The show goes out between 7.00 and 10.00 a.m (BST). If you think you have an excuse to stay in bed because you aren’t in Liverpool, think again; it is streamed live over the interweb.

During the show Rob and I chat about the news and what ideas I’m producing (if any). Initial sketches go onto radiocartoonist.co.uk and Rob and his studio guests vote on their favourite. The winning cartoon is coloured and online by the end of the show. A deadline which is a tad more stimulating than a Sunday morning fry up.

The next show is 19th July. You can never have enough opportunities to make an idiot of yourself, so this time I’ll be Twittering about it during the course of the show.

The insights offered may not be deep or meaningful but they’re guaranteed to be less than 140 characters long. And I’ll even supply the pictures.