A ten-pound-fifty pig

 Among the Christmas presents I got from my generous brother this year was the Dennis the Menace Book 1976!

We used to have this book, long ago, second-hand (it came out about a year before I was born; British annuals are always released the autumn before the year on the cover) and it always felt a bit strange to anyone used to Dennis as he looked in the 1980s. 

Even back in 1975, it must have seemed a bit off to new readers - at that time, Dennis had been the full-colour cover feature of the Beano since September 1974 (shunting Biffo the Bear to the back pages) and had probably attracted a new audience keen to see a book full of Dennis and Gnasher to supplement their weekly dose!

But inside the full-colour hardback book with the modern-looking Dennis on the cover, readers could only find Gnasher in the various text stories, pin-ups and other features. All the comic strip adventures were reprints from old Beanos of the days before Gnasher's 1968 introduction, when Dennis was in duotone red-black-and-white single-page strips, and drawn rather differently from the way he appeared in the seventies.

The dialogue had to be updated here and there whenever someone mentions money - decimalisation had happened in 1971, and the young readers being given this book for Christmas were the first generation to grow up without shillings, tanners, threepenny bits and the other stock currency-phrases of comics from the old days!

This particular strip, though, causes more problems than that...

Not only does Dennis say "We don't have a dog, Dad!", the whole punchline relies on pre-decimal currency!

The speech bubble has been dutifully corrected - "two shillings" becomes "ten pence", "eight shillings" becomes "forty pence", but they can't really change "ten guineas" and have to leave it as it is. Well, grown-ups even in 1975 would still probably have said that kind of thing if it was funny, and they could always explain it to the kids, so there's no harm done.

Except to Dennis's backside, of course - this was the era when every comic story had to end with the protagonist getting a ferocious whacking, and it's always nice to see an innovative implement being used instead of the slipper for a change! That's what people really read these things for, isn't it?