Tammyfan wrote:It used to have a regular photostory as well, but that was dropped...../.....Bunty could have used those pages more productively for a short serial or two, as Jinty did with her final issues. Or maybe use it to celebrate Bunty herself and look back over the last 43 years.
Yes, the photostory. I remember there being quite a lot of antagonism towards them at the time. It was partly because people don't necessarily react favourably to change, but I think a more fundamental reason was the way the presence of actual people disturbed the traditional relationship between the reader and the clearly-fictional figures on the page. Years earlier, those children brought up on text stories, their imaginations soaring, had problems adjusting to the picture strip equivalents, particularly when characters they had an acceptably clear picture of in their heads, from
The Rover for example, were drawn in a completely different way, one such being Alf Tupper. But introducing photos of real people into a strip was a different matter entirely. The result was a bit like a soap in a series of stills, with the same identity issues. Are we following the activities of Rita Tanner or those of Barbara Knox? Over the years, fortunately infrequently, some nutters certainly haven't been able to separate the fiction from the fact.
I was never as critical as others, probably because I had got used to them a lot earlier, reading the
Fotonovelas equivalents in Spanish from the sixties. I even used them for language lessons from time to time in the same way as I used comic strips like
Jaimito. There was one particular photostory in
Bunty that I liked a lot. It was called
Luv, Lisa. It was a kind of diary entry in two or three pages of pictures each week, mainly about Lisa, her family and friends in their day-to-day lives at school and home. So far, so ordinary, but unlike
Bunty's other serials, which ran for a few weeks and then concluded,
Luv, Lisa just went rolling along like the Mississippi, or the M6 on a bad day. But the really fascinating aspect of all this ordinariness was the fact that unlike
The Four Marys, who barely aged a day in over forty years at St. Elmo's, Lisa grew up before her readers' eyes at the same rate, obviously, as those readers. She would be about nine when the saga started, sixteen when it finished, with the family emigrating to Australia. Just imagine the empathy possible from this incredible opportunity that Lisa is offering to her readers. She is prepared to share her life, her loves, her disappointments, and sibling rivalry with them, and for a fair number, I suspect, it will have led to a blurring of the real and the illusory. But there is, of course, another layer that, in this story at least, readers might just not notice, that being that Lisa and all her family and friends are almost certainly just actors, getting paid for a photographer to take a series of snaps of them once a week. In this saga, that is well disguised.
In fairness, I must just point out that I am rehashing some of the above thoughts on
Luv, Lisa from the article
Bunty - Fifty Years On, that I wrote in 2008 to celebrate what would have been
Bunty's fiftieth birthday if she hadn't given up the ghost seven years earlier, and which was published in
FOLLY, a journal for enthusiasts of girls' fiction.
