The Satirist: 2 – 'Spell my name properly when you speak to me!'

 

The 'Z-Dozer' goes into action in the very last 'Z-Car Toons'

1976 was the fortieth anniversary of BBC Television. That summer, a number of old programmes were dusted off and presented as a celebratory season, ‘Festival 40’. On Wednesday 4 August, a 1960s Z Cars episode, Police Work was broadcast. I wasn’t a fan of 1970s Z Cars, but I sat down to watch this special repeat with a feeling of nostalgia. The BBC used to repeat Z Cars on Sunday afternoons, which is where I first came to see it, aged maybe three or four. I had no idea what was going on, but I liked the constables’ peaked caps and their Ford Zephyr patrol car. In 1973, I’d got hold of a Z Cars Annual at a school bazaar, and a few years later chanced on a brace of vintage paperbacks that adapted scripts from the series into novel format. Unlike Supercar, I knew all the characters very well, and the books contained their fair share of comical asides, particularly involving Fancy Smith.

A couple of weeks after the repeated episode, on Wednesday 18 August, BBC1’s award-winning series The Explorers repeated a film about Roald Amundsen’s Antarctic journey. The snow-bound scenery suggested an idea to me: a comic strip about Z Victor One getting stuck in a snowdrift. Don’t ask me where these ideas come from. It couldn’t be serious, of course, and in recognition of the fact, I drew it – very badly – using a green felt-tipped pen. This became the first in a series of what I came to christen ‘Z Car-Toons’, comedic romps featuring the 1960s cast of Z Cars, getting into scrapes that usually culminated with Z Victor One reduced to a heap of unrecognisable scrap metal and Newtown HQ rendered into rubble. They were scribbled out quickly and with absolutely no finesse, in a series of Woolworths jotter pads. Green felt tip soon gave way to black biro, but the comedy/ absurdity content continued unabated. Barlow, who was an irascible character on screen, became a horror in the cartoons, with a sarcastic attitude that put his television persona in the shade. When he threatens to suspend Fancy and Jock from duty, Fancy queries his decision: ‘Suspended?’ ‘Yes, Smith’, replies Barlow. ‘It’s another word for hung.’

D.C. Thompson’s Sparky comic had been running its own comedy take on Z Cars for a few years. ‘L Cars’ featured the exploits of two Laurel and Hardyesque characters (fat and thin) in a patrol car, whose senior officer regularly sent them on their way with a kick up the arse. I decided this was the perfect trait for Barlow, who began applying the boot to the backsides of Fancy and the eternally misspelled ‘Jok’. Barlow’s name soon lost its terminal ‘W’, usually when he was being addressed by the Z Car crews. ‘Spell my name properly when you speak to me!’ he would bawl. At such moments, his face would be rendered as mostly a mouth, with some scratched-in lines to suggest a scowl.

The comic adventures mostly revolved around Z Victor One. Fancy and Jok’s eternal nemeses were either a bunch of Seaport tearaways known as the ‘Young Toughies’, or some criminal scrap-metal merchants, ‘The Old Ironers’ who weren’t beyond lobbing ‘old iron bombs’ at Z Victor One. The stories were stupid and violent. None was plotted in advance: I would simply start on page one of a new jotter and see where the story went. Wrecked Z Cars were a regular occurrence, and it wasn’t beyond the realms of possibility for an atom bomb to be dropped on Newtown HQ.

These nonsensical endeavours saw me through many a school holiday, and I went on drawing them into the early 80s. The very last one appeared as late as the 1990s, featuring a comic plot I was rather pleased with. In this story, Newtown had been struck by a violent gale, leaving a huge fallen tree blocking the access to Barlow’s house. Fancy and Jok arrive on the scene and can’t decide whether it’s an oak or an elm until Barlow throws a couple of house bricks at them. It’s ‘John Aloysius Watt’ who comes to the rescue at the wheel of the ‘Z-Dozer’, as can be seen in the panels above and below, which give a good idea of the extremely crude nature of my, ahem, 'artwork'. 

‘Z Car-Toons’ were hardly satire, but they were yet another example of my tendency to take nothing seriously in the worlds of film and television. Where had this come from? I had, of course, seen it done on TV by the likes of the Two Ronnies, who once memorably parodied Star Trek. So maybe it was just the logical thing to do. In the comic strip field, Mad magazine was pre-eminent at this kind of thing, and their parodies were always superbly drawn, but I'd never seen a copy when I began cranking out my own crude equivalents.

Over the years, I would knock off cartoon parodies of series including Danger UXB, The Professionals and Strange Report. None of them was drawn properly, and none took more than a few minutes to complete. Somehow, the thought of doing them seriously seemed to go against the whole idea. I saved ‘proper’ drawing for serious endeavours. Many of these comic creations were produced to entertain my friend Tim Beddows, who always knew the series in question and would understand whatever gags I included. Random lines of dialogue would be turned into catchphrases: in one (real) episode of Danger UXB, Brian Ash (Anthony Andrews), despairing after being injured in an explosion, implores his girlfriend Judy Geeson to ‘please go away!’ This became his stock signing-off phrase in the cartoons – which invariably ended in a huge explosion.

It’s never really left me, the urge to take comic swipes at pop culture’s sacred cows. In the 2000s, I dashed off a Dr. Who parody that saw the Cybermen trying to tempt the Doctor with their home-baked cakes. ‘You will be delighted’, they assured him. I was quite pleased with that, but it exists only as a piece of rudimentary scribble. It just didn’t seem to merit the effort required to work it up properly. Meanwhile, cartoonist Lew Stringer was doing it properly with his ‘Daft Dimensions’ series of humour strips. Maybe I've been missing a trick.

Well into the 21^st century I still find the urge to create parody hard to resist. Back in 2016, having watched the DVD release of the BBC’s Doomwatch, I decided that the characters – cardboard clichés for the most part – would lend themselves well to a cartoon treatment. This time I did it ‘properly’, drawing the panels neatly and even colouring them in Photoshop. The result (extract below) is to date my most recent attempt at cartoon satire. Whether it is the last remains to be seen...