Just Dandy

-What's that?

-What was that?

-CRACK!

-What's that?

-The Dandy Thunderbang!

-CRACK!

-The Dandy Thunderbang

is given free with The Dandy this week.

-CRACK!

-The Dandy!

Home to some of the most vibrant and surreal characters ever created.

-Korky the Cat.

-Miaow!

-Desperate Dan.

-Hey!

Keyhole Kate.

It's the world's longest-running weekly comic

and one of Scotland's proudest exports.

And that makes it...Just Dandy!

FAINT CHEERING

CLATTER!

75 years of publishing history ends

as the last-ever issue of The Dandy rolls off the press.

It seems that modern kids prefer the digital to The Dandy.

But in its heyday, it sold two-million copies,

and that was every week!

The Dandy is a publishing phenomenon with an amazing history.

And that history is not over yet. The Dandy is going digital.

This is the Edinburgh Book Festival.

There are some famous writers and a former prime minister here today,

but I'm really here for the biffs, the bangs and banana skins

and the launch of The Dandy's authorised biography.

Morris Heggie, The Dandy's editor for 20 years,

is too busy talking to fans and signing copies to speak to me now,

so let's see who, amongst the great and the good,

remembers the Thunderbang.

There you go. That's him officially in the club.

They didn't give that away with The Beano,

or The Times Literary Supplement.

-CRACK!

-It's not very loud, though.

-You need to try harder.

-No. I blame the manufacturer.

I'll give you a demo.

-CRACK!

-There you go.

Remember, Gordon Brown's here today, you'll have security on top of us.

-Right, Brian, do you remember that?

-Yeah.

-Have a go.

-OK.

-CRACK!

-Oh, bingo, first time!

-There you go.

-Fantastic!

-Do you remember that?

-I do remember. Does it still work?

-You'll have to find out.

-Oh, blimey!

-I remember you have to hold them slightly ajar.

-Yeah.

-CRACK! Oh!

-Oh!

-Hold it.

Just get me finger in there.

-CRACK!

-There you go.

-There you go!

-Perfect!

ALL: 75 years of The Dandy!

CRACK!

CHEERING

Here I am in Dundee city centre.

Now, normally in a city centre,

you'd find a statue of a long-dead prime minister

or, I don't know, Queen Victoria.

But here, they've got a real hard man, a real desperado!

HORSE WHINNIES

I hear tell there's a new guy in town who's tougher than me.

This, I gotta see!

Yikes! It's me!

Despite being a Texas cowboy from Cactusville

and The Dandy having always had an address in London's Fleet Street,

Desperate Dan is a true Dundonian

and is part of what makes Dundee famous for jute, jam and journalism.

David Coupar Thomson founded his newspaper business,

DC Thomson, in 1905.

The Courier was Dundee's paper,

but the Sunday Post was read throughout Scotland and beyond.

In the 1920s and '30s, the company releases

a hugely-successful series of adventure comics,

including The Hotspur, The Rover and The Wizard.

There was no television in these days, times were hard.

But the comic was cheap and fun

and the public couldn't get enough of them.

Then DC Thomson decide to release a new series.

This time, with the focus on humour and comedy rather than adventure.

The first of these was The Dandy! Oh-hoo-hoo!

I think anyone of my generation was a fan of The Dandy.

And of course, there was a whole host of other comics.

The Hotspur, The Wizard, The Beano, The Rover and all that,

but The Dandy, for me, was the prime one.

It was the colour, very vibrant colours and beautiful drawings,

but DC Thomson, the artists that DC Thomson had,

people don't appreciate how clever those guys were,

just as artists, you know. The standard of drawing was fantastic.

-Do you have a favourite character?

-Desperate Dan has to be the favourite character.

Especially for a wee boy, a big tough guy, you know,

a big sort of hard man, but a nice big guy, as well.

The Dandy's not as old as me.

It came out four years after,

or three years after I was born, in '34.

I started collecting The Dandy, and The Eagle.

I think I had nearly 100 Dandys

and one through about 50 Eagles under the bed,

and my mother threw them out.

-Oof!

-I couldn't believe it.

Doctor Chris Murray of Dundee University

has made a special study of comics.

I was given piles of comics at an early age by my uncle

who used to go drinking in a pub in Hilltown in Dundee.

And there was a guy there who used to get his comics delivered

because he didn't want his wife to know that he read comics.

So this guy would get his comics delivered to the pub, would sit and read them with a pint

and when he was done, he would leave them behind the pub for my uncle to pick up

because he knew he had a nephew who liked comics.

Now, the Dandy hits the stands in 1937.

What do you think the economics of the 1930s impact was

on the success of the comic?

Well, comics were a very cheap form of entertainment during the '30s,

a time of economic difficulty.

That's true in both Britain and America.

They were also a medium that had a certain shelf-life to it.

You go and see something at the cinema,

it lasts an hour or two, then you're out,

whereas if you've got comics, you can pass them around, swap them,

trade them in the schoolyard.

You know, they get pretty much destroyed

through passing all those grubby hands.

For more than seven decades, madcap characters

and bizarre plotlines tempted kids to part with their pocket money.

The Dandy was quite a massive part of my childhood, in fact.

I'd say I read it for about...

continually for about eight years or something like that,

getting it every week, along with The Beano, like most people.

So, who were your standout characters?

Well, I mean, obviously Desperate Dan, who I think everybody loved.

But there was...I really liked Big Head and Thick Head.

You didn't really like either of them.

One of them was the stupid kid

and the other one was the swatty four-eyed kid.

So I don't know how it quite worked.

I read Of Mice And Men years later and it's a very similar setup

in that the big oaf and the sort of smarter one.

You got The Dandy on a Tuesday and you got The Beano on a Thursday.

And I used to get The Beano and The Film Fun on a Thursday

and The Dandy and one other comic, I can't remember what it was, but that was my week.

That's what I had to look forward to.

The terrible truth is that in common with a lot of people, I was more of a Beano boy.

I was a Beano boy, but I got The Dandy, too.

I got them both. We were that well off.

Were you? Were you a bit of a swapper, though?

I would swap, of course, yeah.

No, I never swapped with anybody. I'm very mean that way.

You swapped, but you always got the bad end of the deal, I always found,

so I never swapped.

# The Fire exit door has never agreed with me... #

Kyle Falconer, he's the singer with Dundee band, The View.

I mean, I got that much, I had to start splattering them to my doors.

You started pasting them to doors so you could read them when you went to sleep.

I tried to get the whole house, but Mum would only let us do the doors in my room.

When you were reading The Dandy, did you know it was from Dundee?

Not really when I was dead young,

but once I'd, when I got to about 12,

I started to realise where DC Thomson's was and stuff

and you started going into the newspapers and you heard a lot about it

through going on school trips and that.

When we started going to London, that was the first thing they'd say, "Where's Dundee?"

and you'd go, "The Dandy, The Beano," and they'd go like "Ah, right."

So that was like our claim to fame.

Despite having always had a swanky Fleet Street address,

The Dandy has always been produced here in Dundee.

It was all done in Dundee and to be honest, I was surprised.

I can remember what I wrote when I was looking for a job, I wrote,

"Dear sir, I'm interested in a career in journalism."

A couple of months later, after several interviews, on my first day, they said,

"We're going to introduce you to this man, Mr Barnes.

"He's the editor of The Dandy."

I thought, "Is that journalism? Is that really done here?"

But it was all done in Dundee. And hardly anybody knew that.

I was not aware of that at all.

I mean, it really was such a shock to me when I found...

I mean, I didn't even know The Broons were from Dundee!

-THEY LAUGH

-Or the Sunday Post.

I mean, I think we east-coasters are, you know, certainly,

we were always, certainly, kind of...

I think we grew up with this inferiority complex

that we thought everything was,

if it was at all Scottish, it was Glasgow,

or the west of Scotland. It wasn't the east of Scotland at all.

But actually, of course, it was quite the reverse.

I did a gig in Dundee and I went along to DC Thomson.

I went into the Dandy office and if you looked down from the window,

you could see the school gates

where The Bash Street Kids was based and all that stuff.

When I went there, I thought it would be really disappointing.

It'll be businessmen and there'll be no sense of the comic at all.

But there was just piles of original comic art,

drawings of Korky the Cat and stuff all over the place.

Oh, man, it was a childhood dream come true.

It was amazing to be in there.

And I think they all had a sense that they were part of something special.

Here's the number one. This is what you got in 1937 for two old pennies.

28 pages. Korky the Cat on the front cover.

Korky the Cat when he was a proper cat, a little pussycat.

This is the first time that you used speech bubbles.

Aye. The Dandy used speech bubbles

more than any other comic had done before.

I'm sure the thing was that this was coming from...

It wasn't other comics they were competing with, it was the talkies.

It was the matinee cartoon strips. Steamboat Willie and...

-You never think of that.

-Yeah.

And it was very, you know, when you think back,

this was a really modern-looking comic.

And you were getting this through the door every week.

For kids, there wasn't much else, especially if you were in an area

you couldn't get to the Saturday matinee in the cinema.

The comics were the big thing. There was a real lot of reading.

This first Dandy, you'd take a long time to go through it.

You'd maybe go through it quickly, read all the cartoons,

then you'd come back and read these text stories.

It was a lot of entertainment.

For most of The Dandy's life, it was edited by one man, Albert Barnes.

Albert Barnes was The Dandy, essentially, for many years.

And it was very much his comic and everybody knew it.

He came on board in 1937

and started this very innovative comic

and was still going strong into the '80s.

So it was very much associated with his humour,

which I think was a bit tougher than The Beano.

And there was a little bit more slapstick,

a little bit more slap than stick, really.

It was very much a rambunctious kind of humour.

Even though as an individual, I'm told he was a very stern man,

he had a kind of militaristic bearing,

but he wasn't beyond a prank or two.

Of an evening, he would go down to his greenhouse

at the bottom of the garden and you wouldn't see him for hours.

And he would be thinking about storylines, characters,

serials, annuals.

And then he would come back in and he would have a pad of shiny paper

and he would scribble away on it with a red pen for hours on end.

And my mother would say to me, "Keep quiet, your father's working."

I could see fine he'd gone to sleep.

THEY LAUGH

The humour under Albert Barnes was moralistic in as much as bullies never prosper,

but the big laugh for Albert was somebody got a punch in the puss

and somebody paid for it. That was how it worked.

It was a rougher humour than The Beano used.

He liked elaborate pranks and Korky the Cat would set up a prank

that would be the punch line that would work. He was keen on that.

He read every script. Albert's humour was right through The Dandy.

But it was rough.

A lot of Dandy stories ended with a sharp, pointy stick in the rear.

That was a tough life in The Dandy.

Albert Barnes worked closely with legendary artist Dudley D Watkins,

creator of The Broons and Oor Wullie.

Together, they created Desperate Dan,

introduced on page two of the first ever Dandy.

Dan is a desperado, living in the Wild West town of Cactusville.

Albert Barnes was a very imposing figure

and he had a very imposing jaw.

And Dudley D Watkins incorporated that

into the design of Desperate Dan.

And even though Albert Barnes wasn't really a man to emote too much,

I think he was secretly chuffed

to have this character based on him in that way.

So I got Watty to draw pictures of a cowboy with a big chin.

And with a pencil, I squared off the chin and told Watty,

"I want a face with a chin like a chest of drawers."

I need to ask you, where exactly is Cactusville?

Cactusville's in Texas,

-but as you know when you look at the pictures...

-There's tenements.

There's tenements, there's London buses,

there's Glasgow taxis, there's pillar boxes.

There's parts of Cactusville in any working city.

Cactusville's a weird place.

It looks increasingly weird to us

because, of course, it's this amalgamation of a Western town

with a kind of Scottish town or village.

It doesn't really make any sense. No place like that has ever existed,

but it makes sense in Dan's world,

where he can juggle buses.

It one strip, he pulls the moon down,

he lassoes the moon and pulls it down with a rope.

There's no real narrative logic in Desperate Dan.

It's pretty much whatever Albert Barnes could come up with

and whatever Dudley D Watkins could conjure up on the page,

which is pretty much anything.

These completely bonkers cartoons

are the work of one of Albert Barnes's discoveries, artist Tom Paterson.

I had no idea that I would get into that, be a cartoonist,

until maybe the fifth or sixth year. I was going to go to art college.

And I ended up sending up some work away to DC Thomson.

It was a character I'd come up with. It looks terrible now. I've still got it.

It was a wee boy detective called Tiny Tech,

and it looks absolutely terrible.

But it was passed on to Albert Barnes.

And the next thing, I got a phone call and a letter

asking if he could come down and visit me.

So one day, down the great man comes,

a very imposing figure.

For Albert Barnes to get in the car to drive to Edinburgh

to meet this schoolboy protege,

that was the one and only time I would say he ever did that.

Paterson, fabulous artist, as he is today,

but as a 16 year old, was just a...

This was the George Best of the art world.

It was just fantastic. And Albert wanted, at that time...

I mean, Albert just never left his office, never mind left Dundee.

So that was very rare.

And that just shows you what he thought of him.

I remember him coming to my mum's house.

We lived in a wee council house, two up, two down.

My mum was in a panic trying to find cups that matched, nae cracks in the cups and stuff.

But he came down and he wanted me to do this script he had written.

I think he had written himself, called Dangerous Dumplings.

And that's how it started, basically,

and that led to two or three months back and forward,

me trying to get the characters how he wanted them.

And what's the characters up to?

They were like a dangerous family at the time. Disreputable.

They'd be called chavs now.

I wanted to ask you about the Dangerous Dumplings.

-They've all got the big chins, like you said, after the man Barnes.

-Yes.

The mother's got a big chin, as well as the father. What happened there?

That always slightly concerned me.

He was insisting the mother had the big chin, as well?

Albert seemed to have this fixation on the characters having the big lantern jaw.

And when we eventually got the dad and the two kids looking like that,

I had the mother looking a bit different,

but Albert decided that the whole family should look the same,

which always struck me as a wee bit strange.

Six months after The Dandy came out, The Beano was launched in July 1938.

The publisher had planned to bring out another four comic magazines

to make the total up to six,

but that was wrecked by that notorious killjoy, Adolf Hitler.

Now, due to the paper shortages during the war,

The Dandy could only be published then once a fortnight,

and that alternated with The Beano.

The number of copies printed was severely restricted,

so precious copies were sold, borrowed, swapped or pinched.

It was quite significant for me during the war years

because I'm old enough to have been evacuated during the war.

And we were evacuated to a place called Ardfern

in Loch Craignish in Argyll.

There was myself and my two wee brothers Norman and Iain.

There was only a year between us. We were very close in age.

It was a very isolated highland village,

but once a week, and it may have been once a fortnight,

a wee van came around and it stopped at all the farms, all the wee houses

and it used to stop outside Barbreck House.

And myself and Iain and Norman, the three wee boys,

used to rush out to the van.

You got your sweeties, you got wee toys

and you always got the comics.

And The Dandy was always the main comic.

And it was really, really exciting because it was a special event.

It wasn't like if you lived in town, you'd go to the shop and buy it.

You were fascinated by the brightness and the colour

and the sheer sort of joy of the thing, you know.

During the war, Dandy editor Albert Barnes became a naval officer.

And many more of DC Thomson's staff and freelancers joined up, too.

But for those that couldn't,

they wanted to do their bit to keep the morale up.

What did they do? I'll tell you what they did.

They sent Desperate Dan to fight the Nazis! Yes!

Gosh! I was about to be attacked by Nazis!

But I've blown them out of the sky! Ha-ha!

Ach! Dan has made der shipwreck of mine pootiful plane!

Thing is, Desperate Dan was an American from Cactusville.

That makes him the first American to get involved in WWII.

It's not everybody that knows that, you know.

In this front page from 1940,

Korky the Cat repels an invasion of Nazi mouse paratroopers.

Hitler and Hermann Goering, the head of the Luftwaffe,

came in for special attention, lampooned as Addie and Hermy,

bumbling idiots always trying to steal food.

Pretend we are der cripples and we'll soon get der free food, too.

Look! They are der frauds.

They are not der cripples, but they soon will be!

Dandy cartoonist Eric Robbie Roberts joined up to become a cartoonist.

He was in the RAF. He did a lot of the posters for the servicemen,

that gave instructions of what they should and shouldn't do.

And it was so unusual

because it was done in a comic way, with the characters.

And it meant that visually, people remembered them

and remembered the message that they portrayed.

In 1945, the war ended.

Demobbed servicemen, long parted from wives and sweethearts,

returned home and got to work creating a baby boom.

Among them was Albert Barnes.

He'd risen from naval rating to lieutenant commander.

But now returned to pilot The Dandy though its golden years.

These pages are the 1950 Dandy sales ledger.

And down this column, here's your British sale.

Starts in January. 1.92 million.

-A week?

-A week. Ends the year on 1.97 million.

And there are a few, quite a few weeks over two million.

The week the top-selling Dandy came out,

the market had become even more crowded,

with the issue of the first-ever Eagle.

The Eagle first published in 1950.

It had Christian values.

But The Dandy stuck to its subversive naughtiness.

The Eagle was educational, but The Dandy was funny.

Parents loved The Eagle, but kids? They loved The Dandy!

I used to get the Eagle second-hand.

I don't know if it was more expensive,

but there used to be a store on Cape Hill Market in Smethwick

and they used to sell comics second-hand.

So I'd go and buy, like, 20 Eagles

or 20 Look and Learns, or something like that.

But I think even at the time,

I didn't have a sense of working class, middle class,

but there was something slightly alienating about some of the stuff.

They had a thing in The Eagle

where you could convert your loft into a playroom

or something like that. Didn't happen in our house.

I don't think the council would have liked it very much, for a start off!

When I was at school in the '50s,

you had your Dandy and Beano confiscated

because it was riotous, rough humour.

I don't remember any of my friends getting their Eagle confiscated.

But for many people, The Dandy was an education.

When I first started reading The Dandy,

I hadn't started school, so I couldn't read.

So for the first, I would say, two years of my Dandy reading,

I just looked at the pictures and guessed.

And it was a very interesting process.

I can remember this feeling of learning to read

and the characters suddenly,

slowly at first, starting to speak.

I can still remember picking out the odd word

and eventually being fluent in comic speak.

We didn't have many books. We had a local library, but no bookshops.

Comics is what I grew up with. Comics is how I got into literature, how I got into writing.

I used to get wee bits of paper, fold them in half and make comics.

-Brilliant!

-And put free gifts on the front.

When I was younger, I was mainly into comics.

So it was The Beano, The Dandy, The Broons, Oor Wullie

and then it was the Marvel superhero comics,

a wee bit later on, which were just a bit darker and a bit edgier.

But I think comics are a good way for kids to get into books.

Because you're still consuming the words,

but if you're not a really confident reader,

it brings you in a bit more gently.

And then eventually, you progress onto novels.

The Dandy always kept an eye on what its rival, the cinema, was doing.

When MGM released the hugely popular Lassie Come Home in 1943,

DC Thomson saw not just a threat, but an opportunity.

Black Bob was first published in 1944,

which makes him nearly 500 years old in dog years.

So I'd get The Dandy, I'd read it through very feverishly,

except Black Bob.

And then I'd read it through again a bit more slowly, except Black Bob.

And then I was done with it, then, it was cast aside.

What was the problem with Black Bob?

Black Bob was a mysterious world to me.

And I don't think I've ever read a Black Bob.

If you consider how many Dandys I bought over a period of eight years,

that's something to say.

It didn't have any speech bubbles, which I found quite alienating.

The speech bubbles would have been, "Woof!"

Well, I suppose that's the problem.

If your main character is a dog, you don't need speech bubbles.

But then that was another thing with Black Bob, he didn't join in.

Korky the Cat was a cat, but he had a house.

Whereas Black Bob was a dog and he lived like a dog.

And that wasn't joining in with the whole comic thing.

The quality of the drawing was so different.

It was realism, it was movie, like a black-and-white movie. I loved it.

We used to go to a farm when I was a kid, out near Condoratt,

and they had a dog called Beth who was the embodiment of Black Bob.

So I'll never be sure where Beth ended and Black Bob began.

The two creatures were as one.

In one of DC Thomson's most surreal publications,

Black Bob actually teamed up with Dennis the Menace's dog,

Gnasher, from The Beano.

The Dandy of the '50s also featured adventure tales.

Artist Paddy Brennan was given space

for large and dramatic fight scenes

to illustrate text stories like Crackaway Jack and Turtle Boy.

But text was giving way to all-picture stories.

Tin Lizzie, the mechanical maid, was created as a text story in 1953,

but became a comic strip just two years later.

The times, they were a-changing.

Between the mid '50s and the mid '60s,

the number of homes with TV trebled.

Comics like The Dandy had an exciting new rival.

The Dandy fought back with new characters,

like rebellious schoolboy Winker Watson and Corporal Clott,

the Gary: Tank Commander of its day.

Corporal Clott, I really liked.

Corporal Clott, I think, was the only strip

where I was sort of aware of the artwork,

in that it seemed a lot starker than all the other strips in there.

There was almost no background.

It was like a Samuel Beckett play, Corporal Clott.

There's two main characters,

with usually terrible things happening to the authority figure.

Right, Rosemary. Who was your dad?

Huh! He was David Law.

He was an artist for DC Thomson's.

And what characters did he draw?

His most famous was Dennis the Menace.

It seemed to catch on very well.

And then Beryl the Peril.

Corporal Clott was his favourite, his personal favourite,

because I think he remembered things from the war.

So he got a bit of inspiration closer to home, didn't he?

Very much so, yes. Sometimes when we were playing with our cousins,

you would find Dad in the corner.

Somebody must have done an expression he'd want to remember

and transfer it into the characters that he was drawing.

You were always finding bits of paper about the house of yourself.

Of course, it horrified you that you thought,

"That's what I look like when I'm crying

"or throwing myself about on the floor

"because I'm not getting to wear tights or something like that."

You think Beryl did look a bit like you?

Facially, yes. But her hair, very dark, like Dennis,

and pigtails was, I think, based on my cousin Pamela.

She had very dark hair and pigtails.

What did you think about Beryl as a role model?

Well, at the time, I thought she was extremely naughty.

I thought, actually, she was Dennis' little sister, as a child,

but I think, looking back, that she was the first women's libber,

before Germaine Greer or anybody else like that.

She made girls look at themselves and think,

"Oh, we're as good as the boys, we can do that."

Bully Beef and Chips featured a violent,

but fortunately very thick bully

and his intended, but much smarter victim, Chips.

I feel like bashing someone!

Ah! There's that little shrimp, Chips! He'll do!

I'm going to give you a thumping, you little bookworm!

Oh! Bully Beef has got me!

Holidays became more affordable in the prosperous '60s

and The Dandy began publishing large-format summer specials.

In these days, it was still OK for Korky to be a smoker.

The '60s ended sadly for DC Thomson's.

Dudley D Watkins, creator of its greatest cartoon characters,

died at his drawing board in August of '69.

This is the last Desperate Dan he drew.

Shocked and saddened, Albert Barnes refused to let other artists draw Dan,

and for the next 14 years, only reprinted Watkins' classic creations.

Kids still bought The Dandy, or at least had a sneaky peek.

I did have to go down to the corner shop, which was owned by my parents.

-I was literally a kid in a sweet shop growing up.

-Fantastic!

We had, being Asian, it was part of the contract.

We had a newsagents for a bit.

So between the years of '78 and '82,

my formative comic years, between 8 and 12,

I was going down after school for two hours

and helping out my mum in the shop.

So this is a slight confession, but I used to rifle the comics

that were on order, that people used to come in for.

You're telling me you looked through these comics

and took that lovely painty, inky smell out of the comics

that was meant for the kids coming in with their 30p to buy it?

I maybe released about 10 percent of it. I mean, I was quite careful.

They were saying, "This joke should be funnier. Somebody read this."

Is that how it works? Taking pictures of jokes?

If there is anyone in the Battlefield area of Glasgow now,

ages with me, sort of early 40s,

if they felt that their Dandy had been fingered,

it would have been me, and I can't apologise enough.

If it's any consolation, it probably formed my comedy career

and, you know, I'm very popular.

So I think I've fed back, I think I've paid my dues to society.

No, we forgive you.

The Dandy captured the minds of children,

and some people believe it influenced them for life.

I would be surprised if there's anyone my age

who hasn't been influenced by The Dandy. The Dandy and The Beano.

It's very hard to measure the influence,

but I think it absolutely is pervasive.

Recognise these guys?

They're the creations of four-time Oscar winner, Nick Park.

What do you think influenced this?

I think the people here at Aardman, we're all of the same mind, really.

We were all...When I started at Aardman, we were,

we all just talked about The Dandy and The Beano

and it's that connection with childhood which is so important.

The things that influenced you.

And definitely, a good diet of The Beano and The Dandy

helped us all in some way.

I was actually more a fan of The Beano.

And, you know, in those days,

the comic you got every week was your identity as a kid.

And I really associated... I really identified with the Beano,

but my brother got The Dandy every week

and you'd trade comics, as well, after you'd read them.

So I always got to read The Dandy every week, as well.

So I loved that, as well.

I loved Korky the Cat.

And Desperate Dan, of course, is the obvious one.

-Did you start drawing then?

-Yeah.

I read The Dandy and The Beano all the time,

so my ambition as a kid was...

I discovered drawing was the only thing I was ever good at.

And because I used to live in The Beano,

I used to read it all the time,

my big ambition as a kid

was to draw for The Dandy or The Beano.

So you wanted to be an artist for that?

Yeah. That was what I wanted to be.

And it all went pear-shaped for you(!)

-Yeah!

-THEY LAUGH

My ambitions dashed.

Right, before we go, we want to ask you, do you remember that?

-Good grief, yeah.

-Do you remember how to work it?

I do, yeah.

CRACK!

Ooo! Not bad. Give it a bigger one.

-I do remember, because I never got mine.

-Did you not?

I remember the actual comic this came from, the actual week.

-Go on.

-CRACK!

We used to often get free gifts and the paperboy would nick them.

-Yeah.

-So I never got mine.

-Were you a Dandy fan when you were a kid?

-I was comic mad.

I didnae do the war ones, I didnae do Hotspur,

but definitely Dandy, Beano,

Oor Wullie, Broons,

Beezer, Topper.

You're from Govan originally, but you're a local man now.

I've been here for 20-odd years.

What's the feedback you get about your work?

I try to stay away from it. I mean, people love it.

The artistic community, no, they don't see it as art,

-but the people...it was made for people.

-Sure.

If you make a public sculpture, if the public part isnae there,

if they're not connecting with that, you're in trouble, I think.

It's continually surrounded by people.

What height do you reckon Desperate Dan is?

Looking at this, he's about 7ft 1. What do you think?

Yeah. That's fairly normal for Dundee.

Yes, it is, that's right.

Nigel Parkinson is working on The Dandy's last print issue.

When I was a kid, I read almost every comic I could get my hands on.

I was a bit obsessed with comics, to be honest. I read them all.

Beano, Dandy, Wham, everything.

-When did you start drawing?

-I was about three years old...

No, two years old, when I started drawing.

And I haven't stopped yet. So that's about 20 years now, isn't it?

Mm-hm.

I always wanted to be in comics.

Where do you end up, but with The Dandy?

So, are you quite honoured to be drawing Desperate Dan

in the last issue of The Dandy?

Yes. It's always an honour to be asked to draw something historic.

That'll be great. Yeah.

When I found out, I was amazed.

Desperate Dan, is that a worrying thing,

having to step into the shoes of Dudley D Watkins?

Well, Dudley was one of the great originators,

one of the real original artists of the comics world.

Having to draw like him is a little bit daunting

because you've got the weight of history on your shoulders,

going back to before the war. So it is hard,

but you just grit your teeth and get on with it, don't you?

In '82, 45 years after he'd first edited The Dandy,

Albert Barnes finally retired.

His successor, Dave Torrie, did the unthinkable.

He had Desperate Dan stage a palace revolution

that ousted Korky from the front page.

SCREECH!

That would have been a crime in Albert's eyes. Albert never...

Not only did he...he kept The Dandy, Korky on the cover,

Desperate Dan on the inside cover, he kept it for decades.

You could go right through his makeup

and it stayed the same year after year.

He wouldn't have done that at all, he wouldn't have done it.

Occasionally, The Dandy became controversial,

like the time it published a recipe for gunpowder

in a 1966 Guy Fawkes edition.

Brassneck was this robot.

A very intelligent guy, you see.

So the kids were thinking about making their own fireworks.

Remember, this is back in the early '60s.

So on this blackboard, Brassneck had written this recipe for gunpowder,

but it would have worked.

It was a recipe for gunpowder.

What, the formula for the actual stuff?

And The Dandy, Albert Barnes got this letter

from the Minister of Explosives.

They've got one of them, have they?

And it was a rap over the knuckles for printing this.

The '70s brought The Dandy a new hero.

Bananaman, a Superman send-up, began life in a new comic, Nutty,

which eventually merged with The Dandy.

Bananaman was the first DC Thomson character to get his own TV show.

But even the arrival of a banana-munching superhero at The Dandy

didn't alter the fact that the comic was now being outsold

two-to-one by its rival The Beano.

Enter, Morris Heggie.

Well, this is The Dandy office.

Come inside and I'll introduce you to my staff.

It's Morris in his heyday.

Before biffs, bangs and banana skins

turned his hair 50 shades of grey.

Hi. I'm Riona. I'm the Dandy balloonist.

I do all the balloon work and colour work for the magazine.

Hi, there. I'm Jim, comic genius.

I write Cuddles and Dimples and Jocks and Geordies.

What is it like to spend your adult working life trying to make eight year olds laugh?

Does it rub off, or were you bonkers to start with? How does that work?

I think you're born bonkers. That's how you do it.

You must have a favourite character from that period.

Yeah. Terror Tots, Cuddles and Dimples.

I was working on a comic called The Nutty,

where I did this character Cuddles.

So I teamed him up with a character in The Dandy called Dimples.

Eventually, they became twins that had the same parents.

Yeah, but there was something odd about that setup.

That naughty artist, Barry Appleby,

when we said we'll join the families,

he used the mum from one family with the dad from the other.

So there was a wife-swapping incident.

There was a scandal in The Dandy.

The Dandy had another close shave with Winker Watson.

In one series of Winker stories,

there was a millionaire kid came to the school.

And he ended up having a helicopter.

And just as a wee joke, Winker tied a bomb underneath it.

And we always had to do these rhyming lines above the stories.

So we submitted a few and the boss would pick the one he liked best.

The one I submitted, just for a laugh, said,

"Here's a wangle that's a topper,

"just look what's slung beneath Boodle's chopper."

And to my amazement, the boss passed it.

So we got it set up, got it put on the page and the page went away.

About three weeks later, somebody who was going to print the thing

got in touch and said, "You cannae do this!"

We had to change it at the last minute.

By the 1990s, Britain was undergoing

a revolution of political correctness.

Some of The Dandy's characters and storylines

-were now deemed to be too violent.

-CRACK!

The Jocks and the Geordies was the first casualty.

Dropped in '97 after 22 years of gang warfare and comic violence.

GRUNTING

Bullying was now recognised as a social evil.

So Bully Beef was first toned down,

and then dropped altogether.

I actually wish I'd been working 10, 15 years before,

the '60s and the '70s, because they got away with a lot more.

By the time I started working,

the PC rules and regulations started coming in.

Certain things happened with Desperate Dan.

He wasn't allowed to do a lot of the dangerous things that he did,

like shaving with a blowtorch and that.

You can imagine that would be one of the first things to go.

So it took away a lot of the anarchy and the fun out of it.

In 1979, the Viz launches, and it's outrageous.

It's smutty, surreal, satirical.

And it borrows characters

and its visual style from The Dandy.

We sort of celebrated that world, that strange world

in which the, especially the DC Thomson characters exist,

which is sort of...

I mean, Desperate Dan lives in this sort of cowboy world

-that has stone walls and pillar boxes.

-Cactusville.

But we sort of put into that

the world that we knew at the time, you know, which was this sort of...

We were in this northern English, um...

post-industrial sort of...hell-scape, really, you know.

So we just added the bleakness

and the violence and the social problems

that we knew from around us

into this sort of joyful world of innocence from The Dandy.

And that was really what Viz was.

We ran a few spoofs of Dandy characters,

well, Dandy and Beano. Generally, DC Thomson characters.

Crivens! The beastie's doing a wee jobbie in ma floowerbed!

We did Corky the Twat,

Desperately Unfunny Dan,

Arsehole Kate and Wanker Watson.

And when we published Wanker Watson,

we were issued with hat's known in the legal trade

as a cease-and-desist order,

which meant that if we were to parody any of DC Thomson's work again,

legal action would begin against us

without any further written notice.

So we felt a bit lost really, for a moment, thinking,

well, if we can't parody any of DC Thomson's work,

what are we able to do, you know?

So we decided to create a brand-new character

that didn't reflect any of DC Thomson's work.

And we called this character,

DC Thompson, The Humourless Scottish Git.

THEY LAUGH

His catchphrase was, "Och, readers, I think I've pissed ma kilt."

THEY LAUGH

Dennis! You are a menace!

You're breaking the law!

Dennis the Menace is copyright, you hear me?

Why, there's a misunderstanding. This is my son, Dennis.

-I was just saying what a menace he can be at times.

-Bah!

Come on, Dennis. I'll get you some little sour plum sweets.

The Viz had been running various parodies of us.

Desperately Unfunny Dan, Wanker Watson, things like that.

And we were doing a story Jocks and Geordies,

which, of course, is us,

where the Jocks were writing a comic

and the Geordies stole it.

This is the Geordies' real competition entry.

The Not-Very-Good Sharks?

The Boy with the Big Pants? None of this lot are funny.

-Rumbled!

-Rumbled!

-Take that!

-Take that, that, that!

-Take that!

-Take that!

-Take that!

The Jocks are the winners. That's a real comic punch line.

The Dandy was now in full colour.

And in July '99, issue number 3007

made it Britain's longest-running comic.

Desperate Dan almost didn't make that issue.

Two years earlier, The Dandy featured a story

in which he retired.

It was coming up to Dan's 60th birthday.

So we had Dan come into money.

Big yacht, ran off with the Spice Girls, thought it was a good laugh,

thought we could maybe make this run for a little while.

And my Dandy. Can't enjoy breakfast without my Dandy.

There is no Dandy, sir.

Seemingly The Dandy will be no more without Desperate Dan.

What? This can't be true!

I must see for myself! Ah!

Where's the editor and all my old pals?

It must be true. What have I done?

But of course, the real hardcore Dandy fans were appalled

that Desperate Dan was not in the comic.

Mistake.

Craig Graham has been editor here at The Dandy for five years.

In 75 years, there's only been four editors here.

Three times as many men have walked on the moon.

When I finished at university, I spotted an advert in the local paper

for a job as, I think, a magazine journalist here,

or a trainee magazine journalist at DC Thomson.

And I thought, "That will do me through the summer until I go to teacher-training college."

And that was 15 years ago now.

What reaction do you get when you tell people, "I'm the editor of The Dandy"?

Well, they never really believe you.

And once you've convinced them that, yeah, there is such a job

in reality and not just in the comic...

Is that one of the things people say, "That's not a real job?"

Yeah, yeah. They say, "That must be a laugh from 9-5 every day."

And I always say,

"It is, but it doesnae stop at 5:00."

You think about it all the time.

You wake up during the middle of the night and you've had a thought,

so you scribble it down and think that's really funny

and you go in at 9:00 in the morning and you think,

"That wasnae that funny, but there's something there."

Under Craig, The Dandy evolved.

In 2007, I think it was, we went fortnightly.

We started to bring in lots of films and games and things like that.

Things like Toy Story or like the sort of Madagascar films today.

And we felt that we could benefit from their popularity,

so we brought them into the comic.

And it kinda worked for a while.

After a while, Toy Story brought out its own magazines,

so everybody who wanted to read about Toy Story bought that.

So the benefits to us were fading fairly quickly,

so we knew we had to change things again.

So in 2010, we reverted to weekly

and went back to being a traditional British kids' humour comic.

But at the same time, we knew that 2010 wasn't 1937 all over again,

so we brought the celebrities in,

had a bit of fun with them, took the mickey

and we've just had loads of fun with the modern kids' lifestyle.

Five years after Desperate Dan saw the wrecking ball smash The Dandy,

life imitated art.

On the 4th December 2012,

the last edition of The Dandy really was printed.

On that very day, The Dandy was 75 years old.

The Dandy, I think, is part of Dundee's history.

But I'm sorry, it's history.

Very sad, actually. I don't know why they're finishing it.

It's part of Dundee's history.

Kids are not kids any more.

They're not into comics or things like that, sadly.

It was an institution when I was growing up.

With its circulation down to around 8,000,

a fraction of The Beano's,

The Dandy just isn't worth printing any more.

There'll be an earthquake in Burnhill, because that's where Albert Barnes is buried.

And he'd be turning in his grave

to know that his pet comic was going down, you know.

So, what's to become of Beryl?

Well, she will be, like myself,

well into her mature years now.

I would like to think that she was

somewhere in a little bit of all of us, of my generation.

But she definitely would be bolshy character.

Either that, or she's matured

into a sweet old lady, something like myself.

I'm very sad about it.

Because, it's you know, part of my, part of my growing up.

I was gutted, really.

Really gutted that it was coming to an end.

Surely Desperate Dan cannot vanish.

Lord Snooty's had a revival, thanks to the present Tory government.

That surely cannot be allowed to slip away.

Unlike the cartoon editor in the Desperate Dan retiring strip,

Craig's not joining the dole queue.

He's going over to the enemy and becoming editor of The Beano.

But there was still that matter of the final Dandy to produce.

Excellent! It really looks like Paul McCartney, doesn't it?

-Yeah, definitely.

-Tremendous!

Now, I've got a cover buff from our art department.

So we've got the classic logo up here, collector's edition text.

We'll refine that nearer the time.

But we do have another obvious question, which is,

do we do a classic cover, or do we do a modern cover?

Are you enjoying putting the final edition together?

Yeah. It's a huge job.

We're doing 75 characters from The Dandy's 75-year history.

That is a massive undertaking. It won't be all traditional.

There'll be bits in there for granddads and great-granddads.

I'm sure there'll also be stuff for the kids, as well.

It will be great fun.

And while it's a lot for work to put it together,

it's also been an absolute blast.

It doesnae sound the least big pressured.

HE LAUGHS

100 pages in a week. That's quite a lot of pressure.

Nigel Auchterlounie is drawing the final print edition, Korky the Cat.

It feels great, actually. Um...

because I can't be the first.

THEY LAUGH

Without a time shield.

Um...I just hope I don't mess it up.

He's supposed to be a cat that can talk and walk around.

That's the nice thing about Korky, is that there's no...

It's not like a secret agent undercover reporter this or that.

-He's just a cat and his adventures.

-Mm-hm.

Craig is about to click on "Send."

When he does, the final issue of The Dandy will go to the print works.

Three...two...one. Go!

The last-ever Dandy rolls off the press.

But The Dandy's not finished yet. No, no, no, no, no, no, no.

These are DC Thomson's Brain Duanes.

Geeks, to you and me.

They're creating a Digital Dandy.

An app where Desperate Dan and his Dandy friends

can live on for another 75 years.

What we're effectively doing is turning it into a motion comic.

We're adding sound and voices, we're adding games into it.

There'll be some video elements.

And that's going to be available online

as a sort of downloadable app

for mobile phones and tablets.

There's Desperate Dan, Korky the Cat, Beryl the Peril,

Keyhole Kate and Bananaman. So all the best-loved characters.

Kids will be able to download it.

There'll be scenes within some of the strips,

so there'll be mini-games within it.

You swipe through from cell to cell.

It's still a comic, it's still self-paste.

It's down to the user to click or swipe onto the next cell.

There's one scene where Dan's blowing up a gas cannon

and you've got to click as fast as you can for that to blow up.

There'll be some stand-alone games, as well,

and also some video content, competitions and puzzles.

So, yeah, it's fully interactive.

Not a flat comic any more, really bring it into the digital age.

What I think hasn't changed is that kids love to laugh.

And the things that make them laugh are still the same things

that made them laugh at any point in history.

It's a policeman slipping on a banana skin,

or it's teacher spelling the word wrong

and the kids can spot it before he does.

And that kind of humour will never change.

Well, I tell you something, I...

It's not necessarily bad news if it goes digital

because presumably, every comic will be digital soon.

It feels like the end, but it could be a sort of beginning for it.

And I would like to see...

I don't know how you could do things like Big Head and Thick Head.

You'd have to call them

Bright and Learning Difficulties and stuff like that.

THEY LAUGH

-It's not...

-Oh, dear!

-It's not going to help, is it?

Um...it's a pity they couldn't capture

some of that original spirit of it. I suppose...

I heard Desperate Dan was going to get

the big-money transfer to The Beano.

-It's what he'd do with the cash is the problem.

-I always...

Desperate Dan was always The Dandy's main man.

So the idea of him going to their rivals...

So, Harry Hill's been on the front of a few covers,

but not Funtime Frankie. What's happened there?

I don't know. I just never got the call.

I think I'm holding out for the digital version.

So far, I've met The Dandy writers, the artists and loads of fans.

I reckon it's time to talk to the man himself.

But how can I talk to a cartoon?

How can a cartoon talk to me?

I'll become a cartoon!

If something needs to be drawn, I'll draw it.

Just get your hair right.

Now, you know I'm only 35, right?

-Obviously, that's coming across.

-Yes, I can see that.

There you go. Wide-eyed look there. Looking pleased.

That's definitely me.

That's what Dan looks like in real life

and that's what you look like in real life. Sorry.

There's one person I need to interview

if I want to get the full scoop on what's going on with The Dandy.

Ah! There he is now.

I'll just mosey up to him and get the inside story.

-Excuse me? Mr Desperate...?

-Pesky flies! Shoo!

Aarrgghh!

Oh! That was sair!

Oh-ho!

-Argh!

-HE COUGHS

Maybe I need to try the direct approach.

Mr Dan, a few wee questions for you.

Waah!

That didnae work out as well as I thought.

Son, you don't want to be getting in Dan's way at lunchtime.

No, sirree! Only thing on the big galoot's mind is his grub! Yup!

Time to cook up a new plan. Hm.

Got it!

Ooo, that looks mighty tasty!

Shucks! Maybe the cow was a bit too fresh!

Hello, Dan! Could you give me and the viewers a few words about your future

and what's in store for The Dandy?

Well, I think I can safely say

Desperate Dan's got no intentions of giving up without a fight.

Now, could somebody just call him off?

Oh, Mammy! Daddy!

You lunch-rustling, pie-poaching sidewinder!

The inside of a pie's going to be where you belong

after I make mincemeat out of you! Come on!

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd