Still hazy after all these years
There seems to be no shortage of things that make me feel old nowadays, but it's hard to believe that Comic Relief has been chugging along in its biennial fashion for almost twenty years now.
When I was 17, it was a very good year the second Red Nose Day ever, and some of my schoolfriends and I had the wheeze of drawing our own charidee comic book and selling photocopies of it at break time. As far as I recall, we only made about ten copies altogether, and sold them at 50p a throw, so we can't have raised much, but we did it anyway, probably because almost anything's more interesting than A-Levels.
Obscure cultural historians may be interested to note that these scribblings from before the age of the Undo button still survive, and since today is Red Nose Day yet again, I thought I'd take this topical opportunity to scan them in and demonstrate that my taste for lazily drawn cartoons and overly obvious and soon-outdated jokes is not, as you may have believed, a recent thing.
So, fresh from 1989, here's fruit-centric fun with The Lone Pineapple, and punctuation-based potterings with The Adventures of Dot. The pineapple was never seen again, but the devastatingly easy-to-draw Dot became the star of a long-running series, mainly scribbled on bits of scrap paper in the back row of my German classes. Time may not have been kind to my teenage concept of cutting-edge humour, but in retrospect, I was merely waiting for the internet to be invented (weren't we all?) so I could show off to more than just the three people sitting next to me. And that, readers, is how I got where I am today. Sad, innit?
Meanwhile, back in 2007, the actual TV offerings for Comic Relief have been pretty poor this year, apart from the chance to see the lovely wriggly Mr Tennant talking to Donna Catherine Tate in his real accent (watch it here). Oh, and the Top Gear posse's charmingly incompetent attempts at embracing the spirit of rock and roll (watch it here) were also entertaining. Passers-by are, however, encouraged to donate some cash before they start hitting YouTube...
When I was 17, it was a very good year the second Red Nose Day ever, and some of my schoolfriends and I had the wheeze of drawing our own charidee comic book and selling photocopies of it at break time. As far as I recall, we only made about ten copies altogether, and sold them at 50p a throw, so we can't have raised much, but we did it anyway, probably because almost anything's more interesting than A-Levels.
Obscure cultural historians may be interested to note that these scribblings from before the age of the Undo button still survive, and since today is Red Nose Day yet again, I thought I'd take this topical opportunity to scan them in and demonstrate that my taste for lazily drawn cartoons and overly obvious and soon-outdated jokes is not, as you may have believed, a recent thing.
So, fresh from 1989, here's fruit-centric fun with The Lone Pineapple, and punctuation-based potterings with The Adventures of Dot. The pineapple was never seen again, but the devastatingly easy-to-draw Dot became the star of a long-running series, mainly scribbled on bits of scrap paper in the back row of my German classes. Time may not have been kind to my teenage concept of cutting-edge humour, but in retrospect, I was merely waiting for the internet to be invented (weren't we all?) so I could show off to more than just the three people sitting next to me. And that, readers, is how I got where I am today. Sad, innit?
Meanwhile, back in 2007, the actual TV offerings for Comic Relief have been pretty poor this year, apart from the chance to see the lovely wriggly Mr Tennant talking to Donna Catherine Tate in his real accent (watch it here). Oh, and the Top Gear posse's charmingly incompetent attempts at embracing the spirit of rock and roll (watch it here) were also entertaining. Passers-by are, however, encouraged to donate some cash before they start hitting YouTube...