Millie Week 10 Pt 1; Mon 5th - Weds 7th Nov

Click to enlarge

Twenty years ago I was living in Tunbridge Wells. Its main shopping street, Calverley Road had just been pedestrianised and a new shopping Mall had been built adjacent to it. This provided a perfect breeding ground for people with clipboards - a narrow area full of people and very few means of escape. In those days you would just get accosted by people doing surveys. Nowadays, the precinct is awash with Chuggers (short for Charity Muggers - those people who stop you in the street and try to get you to sign up to a charity for a commission), so much so that the local paper had a headline on its front page this summer warning about 'The Chugger Menace'.

That's where the first strip came from. As for the questions: At the time Whiskas cat food had the slogan '8 out of 10 cats prefer Whiskas', a phrase so famous there is now a comedy panel show about statistics (sounds unlikely, I know) called '8 out of 10 cats'. Then, sometime in the 90s, someone realised that no-one had ever consulted the cats. The slogan is now the less snappy '8 out of 10 owner say their cats prefer it'. The mintiest lager is, for the record, Special Brew. And Sky TV was just starting up - a satellite dish outside your home was at that time a pretty good signifier of being one of the lower orders. I don't know why but TV technology is subject to some rather strange inverted snobbery - my Dad was proud that our family still only had a black and white TV in 1977!

...and now we return you to our main story...