SMILE, WE’RE ON TELLY!

Robert Ross remembers T.V. Fun, a sister title to the established Film Fun and Radio Fun featuring strips based on various TV shows and celebrities...

As the golden oldie joke goes, television is called a medium because it is neither rare nor well-done. Still, T.V. Fun, that most colourful and jolly of late-flowering comedy personality-led comics, is both extremely rare and extremely well-done. Well-done because, as we will see, in its first couple of years, there was much joy to glean from its fun-packed pages; and rare because of the fact that so few issues were released. Until recent years, T.V. Fun has been perceived as one of the less collectable of publications.

Indeed, at first glance T.V. Fun can be seen to be the weak link in the mighty triumvirate of celebrity comics from the Amalgamated Press. When T.V. Fun was launched on 19th September 1953, the mighty Film Fun was fast approaching middle-age, having started in 1920. Its sister paper, Radio Fun, had first appeared in 1938. 1953 was, of course, a pivotal year in the history of television. The Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in the early June of that year boosted the sales of sets across Britain. The two months prior to the Coronation saw the largest number of sales yet, with an estimated eighteen million people - including non-resident family and friends - crowding ‘round the two and a half million televisions in circulation. The time was certainly ripe for a comic based ‘round the small screen. Even so, the Amalgamated Press had been rather slow on the uptake.

In 1950 just 400,000 television licences had been issued. By the following year that had jumped to 700,000, and the News of the World group had capitalised on the interest by launching the very first television-based children’s paper, T.V. Comic.

T.V. Fun, correctly guessing that its Film and Radio family loyalty would attract instant readership, proudly announced its “smashing new weekly”, and went all futuristic with its eye-catching logo-design: a small screen shooting out beams of light. This was a brave new world!

However, the front cover pole position was put in the safe pair of hands of an old favourite: Big-Hearted Arthur Askey. With the strap-line: “It’s me, Playmates!” Askey’s long-standing popularity was captured in fun frolics drawn by Reg Parlett, a firm favourite at the Amalgamated Press.

Right: Big-Hearted Arthur often made the cover of T.V. Fun Annual and was also featured on the cover of their 1958 - seen opposite

Askey’s antics were typical: the silly little man getting embroiled in domestic embarrassments but winning the day in the final panel. As a character in the comics, he had been doing the same kind of thing in Radio Fun since the late thirties, and even enjoyed his very own Annual as war broke out, but Askey’s television cache was at fever-pitch in 1953. The previous April his BBC sketch show Before Your Very Eyes had not only helped pioneer fast-paced, shortform comedy on the box, but also given the diminutive comedian another lasting catchphrase.