I fucking LOVE the Mr Men. Iconic pop art done with felts from Woolies costing about 20p the whole pack. Unpretentious stereotypes that NAILED the human condition. Aesthetically engaging hand-sized books which predated the joy of CD inlay cards. And a spin-off TV series with the best theme tune ever (after The Sweeney) and the droll, avuncular and dulcet voice - like a melted Worther’s Original - of Arthur Lowe. Fucking love them.
But some of them were bastards.
Like Neil Young, Roger Hargreaves was at his best in the first half of the 1970s, releasing the first 13 masterpieces in ‘71-2: Tickle, Greedy, Happy, Nosey, Sneeze, Bump, Snow, Messy, Topsy-Turvey, Silly, Uppity, Small, and Daydream. He built on this success and in 1976 alone he doubled his body of work, adding the likes of Strong, Impossible, Dizzy, Muddle, Jelly and Funny. At this point, he and Neil Young got a bit stuck for ideas and put out more of the same, only not as good. And then came the 80s. As Neil Young experimented with a vocoder and released albums on which he sounded like Metal Mickey going down on Dolly Parton, Roger Hargreaves pissed on his own legacy by writing the Little Miss books.
That aside, you should be allowed to do a fucking DEGREE in the Mr Men. It’ll be well worth 9 grand a year. Your dissertation could be titled, “How far do the Mr Men embody the post-revolutionary social dystopia of the 1970’s through a combination of pathos and bastardness?”
You’d have to start with the worst bastard of the lot, Mr Uppity. Clearly a Eton-educated, Bullingdon Club, Far Right Tory aristocrat with unbridled disdain for anyone who hasn’t made his school fag let him snort cavier and cocaine out of his arse-crack with a hundred-guinea note. Hargreaves was too astute to state this explicitly in the story and I daresay that I may have become a little upset by it at such a young age, but it’s there all right , IN THE SUB-TEXT!
Mr Tickle was a prophetic premonition of that 1980’s thoughtless and galling desire to piss people off by playing practical jokes on unsuspecting members of the public. Clearly, Jeremy Beadle and Timmy Mallet had that Tickle gene. In real-life, that story would have ended with someone kicking the shit out of Mr Tickle.
He’s not the only one. Mr Nosey got his come-uppance by having his nose either painted or pinched with a clothes peg. This would not have resolved his anti-social behaviour. Instead, he would’ve become a police officer’s snout, a pathetic low-life criminal who grassed on the big fish and eventually found himself with a breeze-block tied to his schnozz at the bottom of a canal.
Mr Fussy was easily the most mealy-mouthed, self-righteous prick of the lot. Not wanting to nail his political colours to the mast, Hargreaves neglects to tell us that Mr Fussy was an avid Daily Mail reader, who masturbated over Mary Whitehouse’s letters and had such a bad case of OCD that he claimed to have CDO because he wanted to keep all of his conditions in the right alphabetical order.
Back in the 70s, though, no one had a “condition.” There were no learning difficulties or special needs. Mr Dizzy would never have been statemented at school – he’d just be called THICKO and stuck in the remedial class alongside the dyslexic Mr Topsy-Turvey and dyspraxic Mr Bump.
But for every obvious bastard, like some of these mentioned and Mr Mean and Mr Greedy (nasty cunts), Hargreaves was able to step back and let his audience judge for themselves sometimes. Mr Happy? What fucking drugs was he on? He needed a right old slap. Spending his time smoking shit with Mr Daydream and unpicking the pseudo-Victorian gothic horror-come-olde-English faery-tale nonsense of Genesis’s “Nursery Cryme” album. Wasters.
The Mr Men were my role models. I’m off now to eat 30 fried eggs and beat someone up.
No comments:
Post a Comment