Diane Gabbott: List of her artwork

[Goof]

Ah, you have reminded me that at the time there were only two TV channels in my country and it was not until 1981 or so that our household a colour TV set for them. We did not even have a third channel until 1989.

I remember as a child when we only had the two channels in the UK, the BBC and one independent channel ITV. We weren’t allowed to watch ITV because my parents thought it was a bad influence. 1950’s Britain….

"Journey into Fear..." from Misty is another serial where a question mark is left hanging over the ultimate fate of charges against protagonists, in this case Jan Fraser and her brother Kevin. Jan was actually convicted of earlier charges, but being cleared will be even harder than it was for Shirley. Their defence is...it was the power of an evil car, which dragged them both into a Bonnie and Clyde-style run. What court in the world is going to believe that?

Yes, I know this story, a classic bit of Misty horror, but different in its effect from Shirley because it’s based on a fantasy – a demon car. Despite the apparently improbable central premise of the truth-telling oath, the great strength of Shirley is in its realism; yet this imposes no curb on the emotional impact of the story. The whole sequence of the trial and verdict is all the more powerful because it is so convincing. The journey to the court, the verdict and its aftermath concentrates everything that has gone wrong for Shirley into a huge emotional peak – the store’s insistence on prosecution, the taunts of the estate kids and Mrs Morris, the rubber-stamp verdict, the triumph of Evie Moore, the callousness of the other school girls (apart from Hannah), and above all the distress, humiliation and breakdown of her mother, which is “the last straw” that drives her to run away. The writer seems to go for broke by climaxing the story with an apparently irrevocable disaster for Shirley, yet leaves the door slightly ajar to a happy conclusion with the court’s decision to call for a social worker’s report before sentencing.

[Tammyfan]

The whole sequence of the trial and verdict is all the more powerful because it is so convincing. The journey to the court, the verdict and its aftermath concentrates everything that has gone wrong for Shirley into a huge emotional peak – the store’s insistence on prosecution, the taunts of the estate kids and Mrs Morris, the rubber-stamp verdict, the triumph of Evie Moore, the callousness of the other school girls (apart from Hannah), and above all the distress, humiliation and breakdown of her mother, which is “the last straw” that drives her to run away. The writer seems to go for broke by climaxing the story with an apparently irrevocable disaster for Shirley, yet leaves the door slightly ajar to a happy conclusion with the court’s decision to call for a social worker’s report before sentencing.

Not to mention the store just not listening to Shirley's side of things. As far as they are concerned, the stolen dress was found in her bag and that's that, an attitude echoed by Mrs Morris and from the sound of it, the court. If Shirley had returned to court the following week as scheduled, I imagine their sentencing would have reflected this instead of considering what the social worker uncovered with a more thorough investigation while Shirley was in hospital. And Shirley's parents were treating her so harshly, the worst being sending her back to school straight after the wrongful conviction, without a thought for her mental state. Yes, the writer was piling up the anguish to the max for Shirley, and it doesn't stop even while she's running away. More troubles ensue along the way, culminating in her nearly getting herself killed at Cactus Cove. Misery was frequently ladled on thick in girls' comics, but Shirley's case it comes across as realistic instead of going over the top and/or becoming protracted as happened in so many other serials.

Wrongful convictions are often resolved a little too glibly in girls' comics, with a convenient confession or something. Having Shirley's wrongful conviction end on a question mark was different. If someone had written to Tammy afterwards asking if Shirley was cleared of the charge, I wonder if the editor would have said she was or given a more ambiguous response?

[Tammyfan]

Shirley may have inspired another Tammy story featuring a comatose girl and guilt complex, "Come Back Bindi", which came out the following year. Jane is in a coma after a riding accident and they think the only thing that will wake her is her dog Bindi. But Bindi is missing. She ran away because she blames herself for the accident (got startled by the noise caused by an idiot blowing a hunting horn and ran under the hooves of Jane's mount). It didn't last long, only six episodes, and was written by Jenny McDade. Bindi was the only story credited to McDade during Tammy's credit run. McDade started off in Tammy with "Star-Struck Sister", and her greatest Tammy achievement was being Bella's first writer. She wrote the first and second Bella stories, but how much further she went with Bella is not known. During the credit run Malcolm Shaw wrote one Bella story and Primrose Cumming the rest, and I heard it mentioned somewhere that John Wagner wrote a Bella story at some point. It is not known what else McDade wrote for Tammy.

[Tammyfan]

I remember as a child when we only had the two channels in the UK, the BBC and one independent channel ITV. We weren’t allowed to watch ITV because my parents thought it was a bad influence. 1950’s Britain….

And so you watched ITV, eh?

Why the heck did they think it was a bad influence?

[Goof]

And so you watched ITV, eh?

I think we probably had the odd sneak peek...

Why the heck did they think it was a bad influence?

Partly I suppose because the generation who had lived through the War had Churchillian values. But mainly, I think it was a class judgement. Coronation Street was a particular offender. It was off-limits because, as one of my aunts used to say, it was “common”.

Sounds absurd now, but Britain in the late 1950s/early 1960s was a very different place. We weren't allowed to watch Doctor Who after the second episode, because my father thought it was too violent.

[Tammyfan]

Partly I suppose because the generation who had lived through the War had Churchillian values. But mainly, I think it was a class judgement. Coronation Street was a particular offender. It was off-limits because, as one of my aunts used to say, it was “common”.

Sounds absurd now, but Britain in the late 1950s/early 1960s was a very different place. We weren't allowed to watch Doctor Who after the second episode, because my father thought it was too violent.

Makes you think how ground-breaking Bunty must have been back in 1958 to have a working-class girl in The Four Marys.

I am getting more convinced that Jake Adams (if that is his real name) wrote Shirley Grey or the story had a major influence on him, because of the opening of E.T. Estate. I've already commented on the similarities in the lift scene where yobs block the protagonist(s) entering the lift, arousing the comment that this used to be a great estate before that lot moved in. Now I'm struck by a brief glimpse of differences between the two sisters that seem to echo Shirley and Trisha. One is scared to be out on the estate after dark and the other, clearly the more carefree one, tells her to stop worrying. The first sister does sound like Shirley, who is the worrier and in Trisha's view, scared of her own shadow, and the other is less bothered by danger, which sounds like Trisha. But unless Shirley Grey is selected for a reprint volume, I guess we'll never know for sure.

[Tammyfan]

The compulsive truth-telling story made regular appearances in girls’ comics, but mainly as comedies of farcical misunderstandings. It’s interesting though that even the most apparently light-hearted examples have a way of turning serious despite themselves because eventually the predicament of the heroine becomes too awful to be funny. “The Happy Days” has a striking instance, where Sue takes a bet to tell the truth and causes so much damage that even her father gets angry with her – something pretty much unique in the series. I think this shows that there was clear potential to adapt the genre to a powerful tragic drama for a writer who could make the truth-telling compulsion psychologically convincing - as I believe the “Shirley Grey” writer certainly does.

A variant of this was "To Tell the Truth..." from Mandy annual 1987. A girl is given a lie detector for her birthday by her scientist father (worn like a watch and buzzes when someone lies). The damn thing buzzes all the time and everyone seems to be lying to her, and it can't differentiate between white lies and black. For example, Mum says she likes a funky hairdo the girl is trying out, but a buzz from the lie detector catches her out in a white lie. The girl gets so fed up with it all she flings the lie detector right back at her father. It turns out people were lying a little to cover up her birthday surprise and Dad didn't think things through when he gave her the device. Everything is sorted out in the end, but she is through with lie detectors.

I remember one Wee Sue story had Miss Bigger order Sue to take a New Year resolution to tell the truth. It proceeds with comedic effect, but like the other resolutions Miss Bigger tells the girls to take, it becomes more trouble than it is worth.

I think there was a Bessie Bunter story where Bessie is told to tell the truth at all times. She finds the trouble it causes quite amusing. I can't remember how it ended, but she probably found it wasn't funny after a while.

Even The Dukes of Hazzard used the compulsive truth-telling concept in one episode, "Nothin' but the Truth". Resident villain Boss Hogg accidentally injects himself with truth serum, causing his lies to catch up with him as he confesses them all and can't stop telling the truth, which gets him, in the words of the narrator, into even worse trouble than he did by lying.

I wouldn't mind reading the Happy Days story about Sue's truth-telling bet. I wonder where I could get scans?

[Goof]

I wouldn't mind reading the Happy Days story about Sue's truth-telling bet. I wonder where I could get scans?

When I started hunting out a copy of this to scan, I realised that there are actually two Happy Days stories about truth-telling, with very similar storylines, and that I had slightly mixed up the two in remembering them. So I might as well send them both - on their way to you.

If anybody else reading this would be interested in seeing them, let me know and I'll post them here.

[Tammyfan]

Thank you for the scans, Goof. I can see Sue got herself into trouble with truth-telling for the same reason Shirley did - she couldn't tell the white lies needed to avoid offence or sneaking. Sue was lucky she had a time limit on her truth-telling, but Shirley just wouldn't stop. The reason it led to such trouble for her was that it caused her to upset two people who, in their respective ways, would be dangerous if she crossed them: the boss's wife and the school bully. At least some good came out of it in the end for Shirley and Sue, but they both learned that truth-telling vows are more trouble than they're worth.

I think you're right. The Shirley writer must have been inspired by the serious turn even lightweight truth-telling stories took in the end and wondered what they could do with a story where compulsive truth-telling took a serious turn from the word go.

I wonder if the writers from Tammy, Jinty and others trawled through old annuals and comics to get ideas for their own stories?

[Goof]

A variant of this was "To Tell the Truth..." from Mandy annual 1987. A girl is given a lie detector for her birthday by her scientist father (worn like a watch and buzzes when someone lies). The damn thing buzzes all the time and everyone seems to be lying to her, and it can't differentiate between white lies and black. For example, Mum says she likes a funky hairdo the girl is trying out, but a buzz from the lie detector catches her out in a white lie. The girl gets so fed up with it all she flings the lie detector right back at her father. It turns out people were lying a little to cover up her birthday surprise and Dad didn't think things through when he gave her the device. Everything is sorted out in the end, but she is through with lie detectors.

I remember this story, a curious and rather touching reworking of the basic idea that humans can’t take too much of the truth. The heroine starts off in light-hearted vein with what she thinks will be a fun gadget, until she finds that her family, boyfriend and friends are lying to her, and ends up totally desperate because she thinks they have all betrayed her. Another comedy about telling the truth turns sour, despite the happy ending.

I wonder if the writers from Tammy, Jinty and others trawled through old annuals and comics to get ideas for their own stories?

You bet they did! Comic writers recycled story ideas like turkey on Boxing Day. Small wonder perhaps, when each of these comics had to run around a dozen serials and other stories in each issue. But the Jinty and Tammy writers were expert at finding new ways to exploit familiar formulae.

[Tammyfan]

You bet they did! Comic writers recycled story ideas like turkey on Boxing Day. Small wonder perhaps, when each of these comics had to run around a dozen serials and other stories in each issue. But the Jinty and Tammy writers were expert at finding new ways to exploit familiar formulae.

The bit where Evie swipes money from a purse the teacher was so careless to leave unattended in class seems reminiscent of the 1966 Happy Days story where Willy Jeevons takes advantage of the teacher being out of the room to take a sneak peek at the answers to a test from her desk. And he does it right in front of the whole class, just as Evie does, and they both think nobody will snitch. And the bit where Sue upsets her sister with a too-blunt opinion about her homemade dress is similar to how Shirley upsets the boss's wife. Hmmm...perhaps this Happy Days story was inspiration for Shirley.

[Tammyfan]

I have found another Strange Story drawn by Gabbot(t): "Family Tree", Tammy 7 October 1978.

[Goof]

Thanks, Tammyfan, here's an updated copy of the list.

[Tammyfan]

You're welcome. If I find any others, I'll advise on the thread.

[Goof]

Following closure of the image host who provided the copies of the artwork list, I attach the latest list again as attachments.