I researched this column by reading the Beano in a fairly hard north London pub. I would dare any one of those people who believe that our class system is dead to go into this particular boozer and read The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen. But with the Beano, I was OK, as the sight of a 39-year-old man frowning over Minnie the Minx (50 years old this year) probably boosted no end the punters' confidence in their own intellectual attainments.
I wanted to run my class-conscious eye over the Beano, not having paid close attention to it for 30 years, because my sons are now subscribers. I myself was always a Beano kid, spurning the war comics like Victor, which struck me as just jingoism, and stale jingoism at that. I mean, we'd beaten the Germans - or "the Jerries", as Victor called them - so where was the narrative tension?
The big news, class-wise, about today's Beano is that Lord Snooty has been deemed irrelevant to the modern child and banished, which I think is slightly unfair. The ironic thing about Lord Snooty is that he was not really snooty at all; he was an amiable youngster who got into much the same sort of scrapes as other Beano folk, but had an unfortunate tendency to dress like Lord Salisbury and live in a castle.
Other than the removal of Snooty, the Beano is as it was in my day, with most of the same characters and the same class-conscious message: epater les bourgeois. In fact, the space given to the arch exemplar of this philosophy, Dennis the Menace, has been increased, and there's now a strip devoted to Bea, "Dennis's Little Sister". (I suppose the Beano, like all publications today, is going for the "young female reader".)
But my eight-year-old son has his own class-based "issue" with the comic, and it's quite unrelated to the detail of the editorial content: he knows the Beano's not Shakespeare, and worries whether he ought to be seen reading it. At this rate, he'll be like all those north Londoners who buy only those books that a quorum of intellectuals has approved. You know the kind: the last book they bought was The Corrections by Franzen.
