He spoke for Dennis, Gnasher, Minnie and comical friends
JIM GILCHRIST 21 Sept 2007
Dennis the Menace, the Bash Street Kids, Desperate Dan, Little Plum... pimply, anarchic and wildly surreal, many of the comic characters with whom we grew up in the 1950s and 1960s are - against all the odds - still with us. Last week, however - just as BBC Four's Comics Britannia series celebrating the evolution of the classic British comic got underway, one of the genre's unsung heroes, Ian Gray, died unexpectedly.
Gray, who died of a heart attack at the age of 69, was a long-time scriptwriter with DC Thomson's Dundee-based comic publishing empire, a larger than life character himself, who worked with the artists who shaped the Beano and the Dandy during their golden age. He is credited with co-inventing, with artist Davey Law, Dennis the Menace's dog, Gnasher, in 1968. The Menace himself had first leered his way on to the Beano's pages back in 1951, four years before Gray joined the team.
Comics Britannia featured the ebullient scriptwriter, who took early retirement in 1992, in its opening programme, along with such legendary DC Thomson comic artists as Leo Baxendale. The episode was titled "The Fun Factory", acknowledging the extraordinary paradox that such a famously strict and sober publisher as Dundee's DC Thomson could harbour such a spectacularly anarchic creative hothouse as the editorial offices of the Beano, Dandy and their eccentric comic stablemates. Gray regaled the programme's presenter, Armando Iannucci, with tales from this comic crypt - what he described as "like a big squad of mischievous schoolboys, frolicking around day-to-day but, at the same time, churning out some of the funniest comic material that that's ever been written."
Typically, Gray arrived at the studio sporting a deerstalker which remained determinedly clamped to his head during his on-camera interviews. "I remember he sat down in the chair wearing this thing," laughs the series producer, Alastair Lawrence, "and we sort of looked at each other and were umm-ing and aah-ing, should he wear it or shouldn't he? But of course he should."
Describing the genesis of Gnasher, Gray recalled his collaboration with Davey Law, one of Thomson's great comic artists, who was having difficulty coping with the concept of a Dennis-like dog: "So I said, 'Davy, you can draw Dennis's hairstyle can't you?' 'No problem,' said Davy. So I says, 'Right, scribble in Dennis's hairstyle down in the corner here,' so Davy scribbled in, and I says, 'Right, put a leg on each corner put two eyeballs at that end.' And that was it - the founding of Gnasher and he produced this strange blotty character that I thought was outrageously funny, totally by accident."
In the same Albert Square sanctum - just a short walk from the comic capital's statue of Desperate Dan - David Donaldson, managing editor with DC Thomson, recalls Gray as "a real character who was probably as well known locally for being Ian Gray as for anything else. He was also well known in sheepdog trial circles - not with any great success, but he looked the part."
Gray, who was nicknamed "Smokie" after the famous produce of his hometown of Arbroath, was also well known on the local folk and bothy-ballad scene, and, says Donaldson, had a fairly well-honed extra-curricular line in blue comedy. "He used to write his own material; there was a classic one called The Ballad of Flechie Eck. I worked with Ian for quite a long time and there were times when you had to pull the reins back on him, otherwise the Beano would have been X-certificate."
During his TV appearance, Gray fulminated about today's emphasis on political correctness restricting some of the more spectacularly, if improbably, dangerous, sadistic or health-threatening antics of their characters. Long gone are the days in The Broons, to mention yet another famous DC Thomson creation, when characters could enjoy a sly fag behind the fence, or miscreant young Beano characters could be thrashed with a hefty carpet slipper. However, Donaldson - who has his own vigorous views on political correctness - doesn't think the climate is as constricting to comic creators as one might think.
"There's often ways of getting round it," he says. "Although personally I think we should just ignore such things. What certainly has stopped is things like the carpet slipper and kids getting a real good leathering. When you look back at it now you wince, but at the time, that was an age when kids got thrashed with the Lochgelly tawse, as we called it, at school.
I think we all take ourselves far too seriously now."
While today, Beano or Dandy characters might occasionally be seen sporting a leather bondage outfit (in a spoof horror strip) or propelling themselves across the page in a blast of flatulence, some of the crazier don't-try-this-at-home pranks have definitely been curtailed, as Paul Gravett, consultant for the TV series and author of Great British Comics, laments. "It seems sad that the sheer absurdity and fantasy has to be kept in check because a child might decide he wants to pull a ship out of the sea or throw an elephant off a cliff. Kids do know they don't have to shave with a blowtorch or use a shotgun to part their hair, but these are wonderful images."
Scriptwriters like Gray, says Gravett, are the unsung heroes of comics: "The writers were less well known than the artists, but there's no doubt that, particularly during the great Beano years, when Ian was at his prime and he was working with the likes of Ken Reid and Leo Baxendale and Davey Law, it was an amazing partnership. It's relatively unusual that today, as a writer, Ian is credited officially as co-creator of Gnasher."
And he reiterates the irony of this hotbed of comic genius fermenting within these stern Dundonian precincts: "All the practical jokes that Ian and others played... you realise that they were basically naughty boys who loved pranks, in real life as much as writing them in the comics. There was definitely a spirit of anarchy reigning there - the paradox of the 'fun factory' again."
In fairness, Gray portrayed the working environment as fairly congenial: "There was no sort of set rigid pattern at work. Everybody worked in their own way and if you were producing the goods at the end of the day, R D Lowe [Thomson's legendary managing director and creative spark] turned a blind eye to extra curricular behaviour, of which there was quite a lot.
"It was a peculiar place but the basic overall philosophy of the Thompson's is the ancient Scottish attributes of thrift and hard work. Which didna go down too well in the fun factory, but RD Lowe acted as the buffer between the two."
Gray came from a journalistic background, his father having been reporter and later a sub-editor for DC Thomson, so he came to comics already instilled with the inexorable ethos of the deadline. "But also, having a journalistic outlook meant you were able to get ideas from all sorts of places. Ian always read the papers, looking for something that might spark off an idea, something that might be turned upside down, as they produced work on a daily, weekly and monthly basis."
For the demand was unremitting, as Comics Britannia highlighted, citing one artist who eventually had a breakdown under the strain of having to come up with fresh material to the same standard for "52 Beano weeks in the year". So far as the pressures of creating comic strips are concerned, says Donaldson, who currently manages to script The Broons and Oor Wullie, along with his executive duties, "I think if you took yourself too seriously you wouldn't last very long."
His predecessor producing the Oor Wullie and Broons storylines gave up, finding that as soon as he finished one, he was thinking about the next. "I wouldnae say I breenge through it," says Donaldson, "but if you thought about it too much, it would drive you to drink."
Gray died of a heart attack while feeding his pigeons - another of his consuming interests - at his home near Forfar. As yet another inspired speech bubble from the golden age of British comics vanishes from the page, does that zany style of comic strip have a future? Gravett thinks so, though not necessarily in its traditional form. "They'll still be around, but my guess is we'll see people getting their comics on their iPods or mobile phones."
But will there be a future for cow pie - horns, tail and all? Gravett chuckles: "That's debatable."
The final episode of
Comics Britannia is on BBC4 on Monday at 10:30pm.
WHERE
ARE THEY NOW?
Some of the illustrious - or less so - Beano characters now wreaking
havoc in a retirement home somewhere are... Big Eggo
The first Beano cover character was an ostrich, drawn by Erg Carter, who was replaced in January 1948 by Biffo the Bear.
Biffo the Bear
This amiable bear remained the cover star until September 1974, when he was elbowed out by Dennis the Menace and retired in the early 1980s.
Lord Snooty
One of Dudley D Watkins's inspired creations, the young toff and his proletarian gang made their debut in the first Beano on 30 July 1938 and ran until 1990. Theirs was the comic's longest running strip, a title now held by Dennis the Menace, who's been mis-behaving himself since 1951.
Alf Wit, the Ancient Brit
Surely the Beano's shortest lived character, an eccentric caveman who appeared during April 1947 and had vanished into obscurity by the end of that month.
Pansy Potter, the Strongman's Daughter
The formidable Pansy first stomped on to the pages of the Beano early in the comic's life, returning for a spell in the early 1990s.
Little Plum
Plum's pseudo-native American patois would get him into um heap big trouble these days. He and his pals in the Smellyfeet tribe first whooped their way into the Beano in 1953, drawn by the great Leo Baxendale. They disappeared in 1986, but have made re-appearances since.
Hard-Nut the Nigger
An early Beano character but a definite non-starter today. He was a crude racist stereotype, and as such is perhaps best consigned to the wastebin of comic history.
See also
Comic conference
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