Does Andy live in the past or in the present?-————-Since Smythe’s death in 1998, the strip has built jokes around karaoke machines, mobile phones, e-mail addresses and even computer games consoles. But the current team all agree that such elements must be used sparingly. - “It is quite a timeless cartoon, but you don’t want to be too remote,” Garnett says. “I think you have to have reference to today’s world without having Andy himself taking part in it.”- Goldsmith adds: “Andy’s world is kind of a precious thing, really. It’s easy to break it if you start messing around with it too much.”- It’s a tricky balance to strike. Mahoney will often draw houses in Andy’s street with a TV aerial on their roof, for example, but never a satellite dish. “Andy’s world is so complete it doesn’t need any drastic changes,” he says. - The team who made Andy’s 1988 TV sitcom took a similar line. “There is nothing overtly modern,” Waterhouse tells Lilly. “If we showed a car, it would be a Morris Minor.”- Smythe faced a similar dilemma himself, as Hartlepool was already changing very fast even when he began Andy’s strip in 1957. “They were already knocking down the terraces and so on then,” Waterhouse points out. “But the best characters don’t belong in a period. They just ‘are’.”- Smythe mentions computers in the strip as early as 1968, showing one that’s the size of a small car four years later. There’s one 1985 strip which mentions a home computer, a video recorder and a microwave in the same panel.- For the most part though, as Hiley points out, Andy’s Hartlepool has remained in the era Smythe remembered there from his own youth.- “It would be difficult to think of any other popular cultural medium that stays as unchanging as, say, Andy Capp in the Mirror, or Fred Bassett’s suburban world in the Mail,” he says. “I think strip cartoonists create worlds that people get attached to, and they don’t want them to change.- “I don’t want to see Andy driving a car out to some multiplex in the suburbs of Hartlepool or going to some huge Weatherspoons pub. He deserves to drink in a proper back-street pub.”- Doing my research for this piece, I’d noticed that neither Smythe nor his successors have ever shown a black face in the strip. I could believe the town really had been that monocultural in Smythe’s day, but asked the current team if they were ever tempted to bring in a black character today.- “You’ve got to be a bit wary of bringing in ethnic characters just for the sake of it,” Garnett says. “I’m in the North quite a bit, and I think the demographic is still the same. It hasn’t changed that much.”- The most recent source available for Hartlepool’s demographics – the 2001 census – lists its population as 98.8% white. “We’ve got the cast of characters and we need to stick with that really,’ says Goldsmith.-————————(From: www.planetslade.com/andy-capp-reg-smythe14.html)
Does Andy live in the past or in the present?-————-Since Smythe’s death in 1998, the strip has built jokes around karaoke machines, mobile phones, e-mail addresses and even computer games consoles. But the current team all agree that such elements must be used sparingly. - “It is quite a timeless cartoon, but you don’t want to be too remote,” Garnett says. “I think you have to have reference to today’s world without having Andy himself taking part in it.”- Goldsmith adds: “Andy’s world is kind of a precious thing, really. It’s easy to break it if you start messing around with it too much.”- It’s a tricky balance to strike. Mahoney will often draw houses in Andy’s street with a TV aerial on their roof, for example, but never a satellite dish. “Andy’s world is so complete it doesn’t need any drastic changes,” he says. - The team who made Andy’s 1988 TV sitcom took a similar line. “There is nothing overtly modern,” Waterhouse tells Lilly. “If we showed a car, it would be a Morris Minor.”- Smythe faced a similar dilemma himself, as Hartlepool was already changing very fast even when he began Andy’s strip in 1957. “They were already knocking down the terraces and so on then,” Waterhouse points out. “But the best characters don’t belong in a period. They just ‘are’.”- Smythe mentions computers in the strip as early as 1968, showing one that’s the size of a small car four years later. There’s one 1985 strip which mentions a home computer, a video recorder and a microwave in the same panel.- For the most part though, as Hiley points out, Andy’s Hartlepool has remained in the era Smythe remembered there from his own youth.- “It would be difficult to think of any other popular cultural medium that stays as unchanging as, say, Andy Capp in the Mirror, or Fred Bassett’s suburban world in the Mail,” he says. “I think strip cartoonists create worlds that people get attached to, and they don’t want them to change.- “I don’t want to see Andy driving a car out to some multiplex in the suburbs of Hartlepool or going to some huge Weatherspoons pub. He deserves to drink in a proper back-street pub.”- Doing my research for this piece, I’d noticed that neither Smythe nor his successors have ever shown a black face in the strip. I could believe the town really had been that monocultural in Smythe’s day, but asked the current team if they were ever tempted to bring in a black character today.- “You’ve got to be a bit wary of bringing in ethnic characters just for the sake of it,” Garnett says. “I’m in the North quite a bit, and I think the demographic is still the same. It hasn’t changed that much.”- The most recent source available for Hartlepool’s demographics – the 2001 census – lists its population as 98.8% white. “We’ve got the cast of characters and we need to stick with that really,’ says Goldsmith.-————————(From: www.planetslade.com/andy-capp-reg-smythe14.html)