Games
BERTRAM FIDDLE, GENTLEMAN EXPLORATOR Darcy Sullivan discovers the weird world of Seb Burnett and his most chappish video game character www.bertramfiddle.com
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“I’m from a town in Lincolnshire called Spalding, so I made a short film about a great Victorian explorer who ends up in this soggy little backwater called Slapding, where everything smells of fish and cabbages and people are descended from frogs and things like that”
long to be an adventurer, but I don’t like doing anything adventurous.”
A lot of us can relate to that. But cartoonist and accidental game designer Seb Burnett has turned his thwarted fantasies into comedy gold. Well, not actual gold. But it is very funny. That something is Bertram Fiddle, Victorian explorator, who has starred in the two most Chap-friendly video games you’ll ever point and click your way through. Bertram wears a massive moustache beneath his equally massive schnozzola, which resembles a jumbo shrimp. He inhabits a cartoon London rife with tea and skullduggery, where he and his Cyclopean sidekick Gavin slowly and ineptly track down nogoodniks like Geoff the Murderer. And there are puns. So many puns. Bertram Fiddle combines Sherlock Holmes with the nudge-nudge-wink-wink humour of the Carry On films and the kind of quirky folk you’d
encounter in an Edward Gorey book, all filtered through Burnett’s delightfully goofy art. It could not be more British, with bad guys like Lord
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