Millie Week 100: Mon 3 - Sat 8 August 1992

I love Scotland, and I realise I'm giving a completely unfair impression of the friendliness of the natives here. They're very friendly really. And I'm not just saying that because my boss is Glaswegian.

If there's a corner of Scotland I could call my own, it would be the village of Lochranza on the very northern tip of the Isle of Arran. A sea loch, a castle, a distillery, a post office, and more sheep than people, nestled into a glen surrounded by mountains on three sides and the Firth of Clyde on the other - what more could you want? Lochgazza is based on that village.

One of those plot points that you can't get away with any more - the idea that you have to search for somewhere that has a telephone. Cellphones are evil - they destroy fiction.

Millie Week 99: Mon 27 July - Sat 1 August 1992

Memories of holidays in Scotland when I was a kid, being copped up in car forever because we lived at the bottom right of Britain and we were camping in the very top left corner. And to make matters worse, our car couldn't go over 50MPH because we were towing a trailer, so the journey took forever.

Motorway service station food is fabled for its inedibility and high prices. The only place in the world that serves worse food is any steak house in the centre of London with a name beginning with 'A'. If you ever come to visit, remember that tip - you'll thank me for it.

Flight 714 actually goes from Djakarta to Sydney, as any TinTin fan will tell you..

Millie Week 98: Mon 20 July - Sat 25 July 1992

Velcro can be fun. And this possibly the only catching game I can manage. I've since got one of those baseball catching mitts, which is also a great help.

Millie Week 97: Mon 13 July - Sat 18 July 1992

At my old school the school sports day (something for which I was very happy to be a spectator every year) always led up to its grand finale, the inter-house tug of war match.

I know - school houses, how very Harry Potter. My school had four houses, and despite us being assigned to them at random on our first day it still seemed that our character was determined by the house we were put in. Knott was the sporty house, Atwell was the artistic one, Hunt was where the thugs tended to go, and Sebastian was the leftover Hufflepuff sort of house. I was assigned to Atwell.

Richard's tug of war storyline never got its payoff - I think he had to miss out on sports day due to tree-related whiplash.

Millie Week 96: Mon 6 July - Sat 10 July 1992

What I'm most happy about in this week's bunch of strips is the way one subject organically becomes another completely different one.

And yes, this was the first outing for the idea that eventually became this gag...

In the twenty years between the Millie strip and this one I've learned that anticipation of an event can be funnier than the event itself. And it's even better if you don't have to use any words, either.

Millie Week 95: Mon 29 Jun - Sat 4 July 1992

This romantic comedy material was not the normal kind of stuff I'd produce at the time, bitter twisted singleton as I was then. But it's good to let the soppier side of your nature go every now and again, and it provided a nice sort of contrast to Richard's anguish of a few weeks previously.

Millie Week 94: Mon 22 - Sat 29 Jun 1992

Suddenly, these two boys who played a bit part at the party that played out over the past few weeks take centre stage. It's time for Millie to play romantic lead against a gentle well meaning oaf. I like Moose - he's very much how I imagine Chumley to be, big gentle and slightly dim.

Millie Week 93: Mon 15 - Sat 20 Jun 1992

The story's not over yet... this party will have repercussions. And they're not all bad...

Millie Week 92: Mon 8 - Sat 13 Jun 1992

I'm reliving my 18th Birthday party to a certain extent here. Halfway through that I left to see if anyone would notice - no-one did! Still, at least I had enough self awareness to know that it was potential comedy gold and the situation reemerged here, years later.

I especially like 'Blancmange... Pah!'. That's my book title for the collected Millie right there.

Incidentally, I'm contemplating putting together ebook collections of Smith ready for this Christmas - one for each of the first three years of the strip, probably being sold at the £1.99 price point. Anyone got any ideas for titles?

Millie Week 91: Mon 1 - Sat 6 Jun 1992

Oh dear. It's all starting to get horribly autobiographical here.

Millie Week 90; Mon 25 - Sat 30 May 1992

The two boys who gatecrash in strip No 5 become important later on...

Millie Week 89; Mon 18 - Sat 23 May 1992

In Britain, 18 is the magic age at which it is legal to buy drink in licensed premises. Of course, no teenager takes any notice of that. I've never understood the need to prevent children from drinking alcohol anyway - it strikes me as one of those self defeating prohibitions. I think the best way to keep kids away from alcohol is to do what my parents did to me - invite me to take a sip of warm British bitter at the age of seven. Words cannot describe how revolting the taste of Watneys Red Barrel is to a palate more accustomed to R Whites Lemonade or Orange Quosh. Bleeeee! That sip was enough to inoculate me from even considering drinking until I was about 20.

Millie Week 87: Mon 11 - Sat 16 May 1992

 

Millie's about to enter its imperial phase here, where for the next six months it can do no wrong. A storyline begins here that flows effortlessly for the next three months until it is interrupted in late July by the summer holidays.

Millie Week 87: Mon 4 - Sat 9 May 1992

More memories of school. I very rarely got put in detention - if I ever did it would have been for boring stuff like handing in homework late. The nuclear option for the worst miscreants was the Saturday detention which involved coming to school for three hours on Saturday mornings. Not too onerous, but for one thing - you had to go to school in full uniform - and everyone in town knew that wearing uniform on a Saturday could only mean one thing...

The book punishment was one I remembered from primary school. An encycopedia would be put on each outstretched hand, and you had to keep them there without dropping the books for two minutes. Try it on your five year old tonight, a fun time is guaranteed for all.

I've talked about chalk throwing in the past. We had a French teacher who was the best at it - the chalk embedded back wall of his hut was an effective deterrent to any misbehaviour in class. Teachers with less finesse threw board rubbers - luckily they tended not to have any aim at all.

Millie Week 86: Mon 27 April - Sat 2 May 1992

King Lear was one of my set texts for 'A' Level at school, and I loved it. There doesn't seem to havebeen a Hollywood version of it made to date - I can find listings on IMDB for an austere 1971 English/Danish version, and the BBC's worthy 1980s TV production seemingly filmed in one room in the BBC TV Centre, but nothing really Hollywood. An Al Pacino version has been in development hell for a while - let's hope it ends up starring Fluffy the Wonder Hamster.

The comedy bit isn't actually from Lear. As the original script says: Because of a freak dubbing accident at the video manufacturers a small segment of 'The Comedy of Errors' has appeared on the soundtrack. This takes the place of one of those totally unfunny 'humorous' episodes between Lear and the Fool, as is, happily, just as incomprehensible and unfunny. OK, I've lent my copy of Lear to a Drama Students and now it's lost in limbo, so the Comedy of Errors is understudying for tonight.

Millie Week 85: Mon 20 March - Sat 25 April 1992

Four people stuck in a car during a traffic jam. Not so much a cartoon strip as an episode of Seinfeld.

Millie Week 84: Mon 13 March - Sat 18 April 1992

The week leading up to Easter brought forth this. Now the parents were in place I could now channel my memories of long bank holidays spent stuck in the back of a Ford Cortina in the 1970s.

The something beginning with J is of course 'Jam'.

Friday's strip is missing. Which is a pity, as Roger would have drawn it so well, and it's so much a vignette drawn straight from my own childhood...


FRIDAY 17th April.

1. OK, it's one of those Vistavison jobs*. Grouting terrace, early morning. The sun has barely managed to struggle over the horizon. We see a line of acrs parked outsode their respective houses. Each one has a their owner either stuffing hampers into the hatchback, attaching trailers laden with camping equipment, fixing canoes to roofracks or or strapping bikes to those precarious clampy things on the backs of estate cars. In short, the road is a hive of activity. Dads fiddle around with their cars while Mums wait patiently inside them, trying to stop the kids from starting all out war on the back seat. Millie's parents are much the same. Dad is trying to control whatever is hidden under a lumpy tarpaulin on the roof rack hile Mum fills the hatch back with Tupperware. Millie stands in the foreground in the far right corner of the frame, looking on.
MILLIE: BEHOLD THE EASTER RITUAL OF GETTING UP EARLY TO AVOID THE RUSH ON THE M25!

* In other words, this is a single panel strip.

Millie Week 83: Mon 6 March - Sat 12 April 1992

This must have been the Spring 2002 General Election - the last one that the Conservatives won outright. I say 'won' - to be fair, they didn't so much win it as have it handed to them on a plate by Labour leader Neil Kinnock a few days before the election. By the final week of canvassing it seemed inevitable that Labour would win the election - the Tories were tired and rudderless, Margaret Thatcher had imploded and the remnants of the Conservative party were being fought over by two different factions, John Major's well meaning but clueless moderates, and a venal bunch of Thatcherite robots. Labour celebrated by holding a massive political rally in Sheffield just before polling day. This was a mistake - we Brits tend not to trust big political rallies, especially not ones that take victory for granted before a ballot has even been cast, and you can double that for rallies in which the prime-minister-in-waiting roars out 'ALRIGHT!' to a baying mob for what seems like hours. A nation recoiled and the Tories waltzed into office for a fourth consecutive term. A few days later the currency collapsed and the Conservatives grimly held onto power for another five years of scandal and squabbling. It was the last general election they would ever win on their own (to date).

The Daily Mirror is a working class left-leaning paper. There aren't very many of them, in fact I'd say it's almost unique - the Guardian and Independent fight for the left wing intellectual professional market, and no-one really reads the Communist Party's Morning Star. At the time the 'i' (a concise remix of the Independent's content for the mid market commuter) didn't exist. All other British papers can be defined as conservative (except the Sun which just backs whoever Richard Murdoch has in his pocket at the time). Despite the Mirror's in-built bias I was determined to be even handed in the bile I handed out. Thus the first canvasser is a Labour party man, the second is from the Tories, and the councillor in the final strip is probably supposed to be a Liberal Democrat, though the colours seem more suited to the Mararishi's short lived Natural Law Party.

The strips were of course written six weeks before polling took place.

And yes, you have seen the Thursday strip before. I repurposed it for Smith for the 2010 election (the one without a result that led to the current inept coalition). This was written before I worked out the formula of letting the real world intrude on Smith and Jones via the TV set.

The awful thing is that the current parliament is rapidly proving there actually isn't anyone left worth voting for. When Ed Milliband seems like the most credible choice, you know things have gone very very wrong.

Millie Week 82: Mon 30 March - Sat 4 April 1992

 

Having just had two weeks of the parping daffodil in Smith, meet his progenitor in Millie, Des the weed. He was introduced in the previous year when Richard first built his window box, and he was to return every spring afterwards.

The real reason Des got invented was because I wasn't allowed to have a cat in the strip - and after a few months of solid real-world storylines I occasionally needed to let rip with the bit of hard core whimsy of the kind that only animal characters will let you get away with. 

It's interesting to see what comics editors will let you get away with. In the fifth strip, the phrase 'Oh go pollinate yourself' was passed without a murmur. However, I did get a phone call from the comics editor asking whether 'vacuole' was a rude word.

Millie Week 81: Mon 23 - Sat 28 March 1992

I know nothing about computer games - it's an area of popular culture that has completely passed me by. A few months after writing this series of strips I thought I'd try a Sega megadrive console, in an attempt to see what the fuss was about. Dare I say it, most computer games are deadly dull - I can't see the attraction at all.

The long string of figures Millie reads out of the paper were TV+ codes. The idea was that you programmed the codes into your VCR and it would record the programme you wanted, if by some miracle you had managed to input the long string of 16 figures correctly. It was an attempt at user friendliness which was anything but.