Hallo Cheeky - Jan 19 1976

From the recently discovered, long-thought-lost early diaries hidden in a suitcase at my Mum's house for forty years, here's a spread from this week in 1976. Nothing much happens in my actual life, which is very much a theme in these things, but boy did I love my telly.

On the Monday I complain about a dentist visit, not because of any pain or discomfort, but because it makes me miss all "ALL" of the kids telly. And I seem rather obsessed by the fact that Tuesday's TV contains no first episodes of new series. An odd child indeed.

The 6 Million Dollar Man illustration shows you the level my drawing had reached by the age of 14. I was a dab hand with the felt tip pens, but had yet to master the realistic portrait. Hopefully I've got that together over the intervening years.

My Records For The Day go from most famous to most obscure quite nicely. I doubt there's anyone who's unfamiliar with Sgt Pepper, but who remembered Jump In My Car by Chris Spedding?

Shoved under the shower - Jan 17 1975

By January of 1975, my Picture Diary has almost given up on trying to tell my life story in comic strip form, but a few examples were still sneaking in. Here we see the dramatic incident of me being forced under a shower at Scouts - I was ever the unfortunate victim of lighthearted bullying it seems - leavened by the fun of me drawing my face in the back of a spoon.

On the right hand page we see Doctor Who among the TV shows that night. And coincidentally, as I type this, it's Tom Baker's 85th birthday. And on Friday night we see Ed Stewpot Stewart presenting Crackerjack. And what photo have I also just found among the piles of stuff at Mum & Dad's house..?

Mum and Dad with Ed Stewpot Stewart, at some event or other, sometime in the 70s.

By Jan 1975 I'd introduced the feature to my diary known as Record For The Day, this pair's treats being The Bay City Rollers' Saturday Night and Stevie Wonder's Boogie On Reggae Woman. I knew good music when I heard it.

Entry No 2: June 25 1974

From the newly discovered treasure trove that is my long-lost teenage diaries (discovered while clearing out Mum's house in January 2019, until now I thought only 3 volumes survived), here are the second and third entries, from June 1974.

The idea was, when I began my diary age 12, that I would turn my life into a comic strip. It wouldn't be long until I discovered my daily routine offered little in the way of visuals, and my diary morphed into a heavily decorated scrapbook of TV shows, music and comic reviews, with a little bit of diary squeezed in.

What a violent time I was having at Kibworth High School. Punched in the face and chucking someone down some steps yesterday, and now having my dinner ticket ripped. The horror.

Kev F Sutherland, as well as writing and drawing for The Beano, Marvel, Doctor Who et al, runs Comic Art Masterclasses in schools, libraries & art centres. email for details. Facebook, Twitter. Promo video here. 

Found - All my long lost diaries. Entry No 1: June 24 1974

Clearing out the cupboards and hidden corners of Mum's house I found something that I thought had been lost forever - my missing diaries.

I have had, and been posting pages on this blog, just three volumes of my teenage Picture Diary, volumes 9, 10 and 11 (mid 1976 to late 1977). For years I've assumed they were the only ones to survive the various clear-outs and tidy-ups that have happened in the 40-odd years since I drew them. Now I know better and I couldn't be more pleased.

From the very first skimpy folded-paper diaries, through the hardcover art books, I now have them all. I began on June 24th 1974 and entries dry up in 1978 as I start taking my O levels seriously. A written diary continues into the 1980s, but the full colour fully decorated version lasted a little over four years. As you can see from this first entry, the plan was to do a comic strip of my life. I don't think it took long before I realised there was nothing in my life worth illustrating. Though I must say, Day One proved quite action packed.

Further pages to follow when time allows.

Kev F Sutherland, as well as writing and drawing for The Beano, Marvel, Doctor Who et al, runs Comic Art Masterclasses in schools, libraries & art centres. email for details. Facebook, Twitter. Promo video here. 

Christmas Eve 1976

I commemorated Christmas Eve 1976 by decorating my diary page with a Paul Sample illustration from the Sunday Times, an unusual treat given that I was more used to eviscerating my Look-Ins for these pictures. Paul was a regular in the Sunday Times and also produced the covers of the Tom Sharpe novels like Wilt and Porterhouse Blue, which I would devour a few years later.

As always it's the telly and pop music that seems to make up the whole of my life. The only thing I physically do in these two days of Christmas cheer, apart from watch TV and listen to Radio 1, is collect 70p in tips on my paper round. I was living my best life at age fifteen and no mistake.

TV highlights include the Rutland Weekend Television Christmas Special, which I've watched recently on Youtube, for the first time in over 40 years, and can't say it's aged well. George Harrison's in it, have a look, tell me if I'm wrong.

And look at the enthusiasm for Christmas summed up by those "countdown to Christmas" flashes at the corner of every page. I can't imagine being that excited about anything. On which depressing thought, what awful music have I chosen as my Record For The Day.

There are a few Christmas standards in there, including Lonely This Christmas which was only 2 years old at the time and had already entrenched itself. But for my Youtube finds, here a couple of the more obscure suggestions. Here's To Love by John Christie (not, one assumes, the one from 10 Rillington Place) and Bionic Santa by Chris Hill? No, me neither.



Here's To Love, I find on its first listening in four decades, is virtually an anagram of Gilbert O'Sullivan's Alone Again Naturally with Auld Lang Syne shoehorned in for no obvious reason. Oh yeah, you want to listen to it now.



Oh dear, I remember Chris Hill now. A DJ who fancied himself as a comedian and edited bits of records together to hilarious effect. Well I clearly thought this was funny at the time, god help me.

Arnold, Dull & PC Bharsted - Leicester March 1986

Before The Monkhouse Comedy Club came to be, Alan and I had started our stand up comedy careers at its predecessor, The Magazine Jokespace. Here we shared the bill with Arnold Bolt and the mysterious Comedy Counts in a one-off gig in March 1986.

If memory serves, The Comedy Counts were a very young Anthony King, now a stalwart of the comedy scene, still based in Leicester, and a double-act colleague about whom I'm sure he'll tell us more.

Arnold Bolt was a legend of the Leicester Folk Scene at the start of the 80s, and made a successful crossover into the comedy clubs that usurped the folk clubs' place (and, as we can see, shared their venues). Sadly Arnold, or rather his civilian alter-ego Martin Brown, died last year dreadfully young. For as long as our Leicester comedy clubs were around, he was always a headliner, never anything less. Memorable comedy songs such as Henry The Hedgehog and Dumped In Mary Lou's Barn were the staples of his set, and will live on in Leicester folk comedy history.



John Dull was Alan's alter ego, as character comedy was very much the order of the day for both of us. Given that Alan's surname is Seaman, you wouldn't have thought he needed any extra enhancement, but his character of a boring accountant worked very well at the time and lasted for a while.

My character, as you might be able to make out from the photo, was PC Bharsted, a caricature policeman. It was the 1980s, and doing a feeble impersonation of Griff Rhys Jones's policeman character from Not The 9 O'Clock News, with songs, seemed as good a way to start doing comedy as any. My songs, as PC B, included I Had To Nick My Girlfriend, a cover of The Goodies' Rock With A Policeman, and Driving In A Winter Wonderland. Tragically no recordings survive of this musical comedy act which, given the standard of both my singing and my guitar playing, deserves inverted commas round both of those words.

Betty Spital - The Monkhouse

Betty Spital is easily found on Amazon, courtesy of The Thoughts of Betty Spital: Pensioner, Activist and Radical Granny, but that's written by a Christopher Meade. I'm pretty sure the Radical Pensioner who played our club at the start of 1989 was a middle aged woman.

To be honest I'm drawing a blank, both in the memory banks and on Google. Maybe Betty Spital was Christopher Meade. I'm sure someone will tell me.



The illustration on the poster is, of course, Mrs Brady Old Lady from Viz, but you knew that. Viz, you will recall, was very big in 1989, being only 10 years into people telling it that it wasn't as funny as it used to be. In December 1989 it became the 2nd best selling magazine in the country, second only to Radio Times, selling over a million copies. Did I mention my strip, Tarquin Hoyley He Has To Go To The Toilet, was in it a couple of times? You'll find them in the Big Pink Stiff One book. I don't get royalties.

As for googling Post Glasnost, forget it. The best I get is a comedy series from 1991 called Sleepers, a "post-glasnost comedy" starring Warren Clarke and Nigel Havers. Probably brilliant, but most likely not the comedy act that graced our above-the-pub smokey Leicester club in the frozen wastes of January 1989.