First thing to note : Isn't Roger's artwork superb when it's free of the crude colouring that the Mirror used in those days? I always used to think Roger's unadorned artwork was excellent, but it got ruined when it was published in colour. These were the early days of colour newspapers in Britain - Eddie Shah's Today newspaper had only launched four years earlier and all the other newspapers were playing catch-up. Not even Rupert Murdoch's Sun had colour at that time - the Mirror Group were able to get in early as it had had at least ten year's previous experience with its Scottish papers, the Daily Record and the Sunday Mail. Photoshop was but a dream in those days - Roger had to send his art boards in to the Mirror by courier and they were then effectively photocopied and coloured in with felt pens before they were split mechanically into the four process colours ready for printing. It was another world.
The backstory to this was the National Curriculum, which had just been introduced by the Tories. An efficient method of precscribing a set amount of knowledge that everyone should have before leaving school, or a cyncical attempt to wrest control of what should be taught away from teachers and put it in the hands of politicians? You decide.
Note there are two different stories going on at the same time here. There's an 'A' story - the one in the speech balloons, and there's the 'B' story: the three girls join the queue for school dinners, have gruel deposited in their plates, ignore Richard's attempt to get them to sit with him and scrape the food into the pig bin without ever actually sitting down and eating it. I know of what I write here - school dinners at Skinners were frequently inedible and I ended up bringing in a packed lunch after my first term there. Look at the kids sat at the table in frame five.
Miss Thrimmage and Mr Twenk. I think I was having a Dickensian name attack at that point.
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