Patty may have gone on to outlive her original writer and co-creator by many years but I think Philip Douglas deserves a lot of credit for the sense of sheer everyday realism with which his scripts imbued her world. Without their timely pairing on this strip I can't help but wonder if Purita might have been forced to draw an endless succession of generic romance stories which repeated the same, hackneyed formula of love, heartbreak and marriage over and over again.On the surface 'Patty's World' seemed to echo the diary format of the popular 'Happy Days' stories by Jenny Butterworth and Andrew Wilson, but whereas Sue Day's comfortable middle-class world had its roots in the early 1960s (if not the 1950s! ) this new strip was much closer to the 1970s reality that most of Princess Tina's readers were familiar with. For anyone who's never seen the series here is an early episode from 15th January 1972 which should give some idea of the dramatic way in which Douglas and Campos rewrote the usual conventions of British girls' comics:
To my mind the domestic scenes which precede this sudden accident make the ending all the more shocking (and the tension was only increased the following week when her friend Sharon stood in as narrator while Patty lay near to death in a hospital bed! ).
Of course I'm sure this episode is already quite familiar to Ruth. There is, however, one other aspect to this issue of Princess Tina that she might not be aware of: namely the fact that Patty also starred on the cover in what may well have been Purita's first major colour illustration of the character:
(The odd thing is I didn't even realize it was Patty until I noticed those familiar ribbons in her hair and the distinctive school uniform. Princess Tina covers which featured interior characters were virtually unknown at the time, and they never appeared without some kind of identifying caption. It was almost as though Purita had deliberately slipped the image past IPC to coincide with the unusually affecting nature of that week's installment)
- Phil Rushton
