Tape is not an easy prop

I was somewhat surprised this morning to receive a parcel through Amazon, containing four rolls of black tape. The reasons for the mysterious delivery were eventually explained to me four hours or so later, but my only immediate thought at the time when I opened the package was "I seem to be having Baxter's Bad Day."

I left the tape on the sofa for my brother to find when he came in from work, and sure enough, as soon as I came downstairs at lunchtime, he immediately asked "Are you re-enacting Baxter's Bad Day?"

Does everybody else think of that when they unexpectedly see black gaffer tape? Or do you have to be of a very specific generation and background? I mean, this is actually the only time I've received unexpected black tape in the post, and it's been well over thirty years since I read or thought about the book in question, but it's obviously one of those things that sticks permanently in one's mind.

A Read-and-Play Storybook, published in 1983. American, and very conspicuously and strangely foreign to a young British reader in the 1980s, it was written by Jean Marzollo and drawn by Shelley Thornton. We must have acquired it through one of the primary school book clubs, or something like that. It was a great work! The important thing is that it came with push-out figures of the characters in it, and a series of clothes to dress them up in. There may even have been a stage you could assemble, with multiple backgrounds and slots to slide the characters into, so you could stage the entire story at home! As best I can recall, this is how the story went:

Baxter, the bear on the cover, is having a bad day. I forget exactly what series of things made it bad - from the cover, it's obvious that it was raining on his way to school, but there were other things that happened to him too. Maybe someone had thrown a heavy object at him and broken four of his ribs, or possibly I'm mixing it up with our father's copy of Dr Fegg's Encyclopaedia of ALL World Knowledge, which I also enjoyed reading at around the same time.

Anyway, after a great deal of badness one way or another (did one of the other things relate to his packed lunch being in some way deficient?) Baxter and his four classmates, who may also have been bears but might possibly have been other animals, are told that they are each to pull an item out of a bag and create some kind of costume and performance based on that random prop. The other classmates all pull good things like a magic wand out of the bag, but Baxter is left to last and ends up with a roll of black tape.

He continues to lament his bad luck overnight, but then has some kind of inspiration involving a bee, and creates himself a bee costume using the black tape and probably his yellow raincoat as seen on the cover. The following day, he gives a spectacular performance, and although it's one of those everyone-gets-a-prize competitions, Baxter doesn't have to be contented with 'funniest' or the ribbons his classmates get; his accolade is 'best of all'. He concludes that it turned out not to be such a bad day after all - so maybe the book's action didn't actually cover two days, and he created the costume during school hours; I don't know.

Anyway, the gaping plot hole that everybody who read the book always felt ruined the whole suspension of disbelief came near the end, when the teacher apologised for Baxter getting a roll of tape, saying it wasn't supposed to be in the bag, and must have fallen in there accidentally or something. And yet when Baxter pulled the tape out, it was explicitly said to be the only thing left in the bag! If the tape just accidentally fell into the bag, what happened to the fifth prop that should have been in there? This, along with the peculiar Americanness of the whole thing, led a whole generation of primary school children to conclude that the writer had no idea how to write a coherent story!

Despite this, it was a great book. And maybe I'll use any leftover black tape to create a bee costume of my own!

The Beano does what I tell it to do

 Whenever I complain about something on the internet, I always like to check a couple of days later to see whether the powers that be have fixed everything that's wrong with the world. Somewhat to my surprise, a mere four weeks after my cutting critical dissection of the Bash Street Kids, I looked in this week's Beano (number 4141, and let's stand back in awe at a weekly comic that's long since notched up its four thousandth issue and is now thundering towards the big 5K!) to find there have been more changes to the Kids' cast of characters!

Not only are there three new Kids in class 2B, two of whom are definitely female, Teacher is sporting an artist's beret that evokes memories of his classic mortar board! Obviously the sheer force and eloquence of my rhetoric (I seem to have used the word 'style' five times in one simple sentence) has convinced the Beano bosses to implement exactly the scheme I was talking about, of gradually adding more characters to equalise the demographic mix. So, good job, Beano people. Carry on. You have my approval.

In all fairness, Andy Fanton is actually a really great writer of comics, so I shouldn't sound so scathing about the whole thing. He not only writes this Bash Street Kids story, but on the page before it there are mini-strips devoted to the three new classmates (plus Pup Parade, which doesn't seem to have acquired five new dogs yet. Or for that matter a Cuthbert analogue - I don't think the Pups ever had one of him, did they?)

Harsha is long-established by now as appearing every week, along with her family, in Har Har's Joke Shop. There's also a Summer Special on the shelves, in which the new bugs appear in the Bash Street Kids story, but not in the title banner, so obviously they're here to stay (for a while, at least. I mean, we don't talk about Wayne, do we?)

I hope they really do continue to add characters at this kind of rate! It would take things back to the earliest days, seventy years ago, when the cast of When The Bell Rings were a vast, mostly unnamed, horde of Kids, rather than having a well-defined roll-call. They DID have more than one girl in the earliest days, even for a little while when all the characters had got names, you know. So really, we're just moving back to the classic era! I approve!

But again, that joke at the bottom of the page! One that the average Beano reader's great-grandparents might possibly find funny! A quick internet search reveals that there was a disastrously unsuccessful Lone Ranger movie in 2013; it passed me by completely, and I doubt that a nine-year-old movie has made much of an impact on the typically nine-year-old Beano reader. If you're going to tell a joke that needs the Lone Ranger to be common knowledge, you really need to beam it back through time to the 1950s. They might have laughed at it then. You could get Leo Baxendale to illustrate it!