Oh, for a Beano Christmas

Joseph Connolly yearns for the Beano parties of his 1950s youth with top pals Dennis the Menace and Minnie the Minx I’m dreaming of a comic Christmas

Christmas, as portrayed in the Beano – oh, wonder of wonders!

During its heyday in the 1950s and 1960s, when it was selling way over a million copies a week, I gorged upon this fabulous comic.

The Beano and the Dandy – they came to form the twin pillars of this only child’s schoolboy existence. That might sound just a tad sad, but actually it was quite endlessly joyous.

These regular entrées into a world just crammed with so colourful an array of such attractive imps and chancers were a lifeline for me.

It’s rather amazing because the most memorable characters should have seemed merely alien and absurd to a prep-school boy in Hampstead: Dennis the Menace, Roger the Dodger, Minnie the Minx (the token girl – though what a girl!), the cowboy strongman Desperate Dan (fuelled by Aunt Aggie’s Cow Pie, replete with dangling tail, and whose pipe was fashioned from a drainpipe and a dustbin).

Yet I was sucked into the sheer exuberance of it all, poring over the wonderful drawings, and hanging on every bubble of dialogue.

Little Plum, ‘Your Red Indian Chum’, really was my chum. They all were. At Christmas, having lived the whole year with one another, we could all come together to celebrate! Or, at least, that’s how I yearned for it to be.

I wanted to live in Beanoland and Dandyland – they were just so much better than where I lived. Even the considerable perils failed to put me off – it could be a pretty dangerous place. Tough guys and bullies were everywhere – black eyes, bandaged heads and cauliflower ears being regular sights.

Even the solitary aristocrat, Lord

Snow business: the Beano in 1990 Right: Desperate Dan, Korky the Cat and his Dandy chums

Chortle, chortle! The Beano in 1954 and 1966

Snooty, and his merry band at Bunkerton Castle were not safe from the horrible Gasworks Gang – though Snooty’s gleaming, black silk topper always managed to remain in place. There was other violence – and all at the hands of adults: the swishing cane of Teacher in the Bash Street Kids (my favourite of all the strips) and the slippers wielded in the final frame by the furious fathers of Dennis, Roger – and even Minnie.

They all gave as good as they got – with their trusty catapults and peashooters (no bobby’s helmet was ever safe). The vehicle of choice, the cartie, was a weapon in itself – very useful for sending people flying head over heels.

It was fashioned from a wooden soapbox and old pram wheels, for which the local rubbish dump could always be relied upon. The mattress springs at the dump were ideal for attaching to your shoes, making you leap skywards and into the grumpy neighbour’s orchard to snaffle apples.

There were quite a lot of treats over the Beano and Dandy year – fish suppers at Toni’s, a mound of mashed potato with mandatory protruding sausages, a bag of sweets filched from Walter the Softy, and even the occasional slap-up meal at the Hôtel de Posh.

But all these were nothing compared with the promised delights of the December festive issue – the masthead draped in snow, bearing the warming tagline ‘A MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ALL OUR READERS’.

At home, we had very little in the way of decoration: paper chains which would come ungummed owing to insufficient application of saliva; balloons which would shrivel; and a small, artificial tree.

Each year, there were fewer glass baubles on the tree, because of breakage, despite each of them having been lavishly swaddled in copious sheets of Bronco.

Ah – but in my comics on Christmas Day was everything I desired. Beanoland and Dandyland would be covered in thick, virgin snow and, later, snowballs would whizz between grinning children in fringed check scarves (with another jauntily wrapped about the neck of a mighty snowman, with his pipe and trilby).

There were bulging stockings at dawn (sometimes you’d even get a glimpse of Santa delivering them!). At the foot of the huge, brilliantly bedecked tree, there were excitingly wrapped mounds of presents, each with an extravagant bow.

But it was the midday feast that was the true crowning delight in the comics: here was Yuletide heaven on earth.

Everyone sat around a vast dining table with a glistening roast turkey the size of an ostrich, flanked by crenellated jellies, a globular Christmas pudding and endless fizzy pop.

All my lifelong chums would be pulling crackers. These would snap at the centre with a jagged red and yellow star. And, oh, I so much wanted to be there.

A Merry Christmas to Beano readers who loved those golden days, too.