For this prep school boy, hell was Tuesday afternoons shivering on the football pitch hoping the ball would not require his attention, his only sustenance the thought that the next morning his favourite comic would arrive tucked inside his parents’ Daily Express. I think I knew even at the time that TV21, connected so intimately to television, would not be considered by the future controllers of nostalgia a classic comic in the sense that the Beano or the Dandy were. Although its artists, particularly Frank Bellamy, are sometimes celebrated, I was proved right. Comics Britannia (BBC Four) last night placed the golden age of comicry in the 1950s not 1960s, and declared its crown jewels D. C. Thomson’s famous duo.

But even if Comics Britannia makes no mention at all of TV21 in its next two parts, I shall bear it no grudge, for last night’s documentary brilliantly recreated how it is to be enthralled by comics as a child and how totally comic strips may supplant the reality of classroom and playing field. To make the point, the programme’s contributors – avid readers such as the animator Nick Park, experts led by my old school pal and fellow sports hater Paul Gravett, draughtsmen, including the great Leo Baxendale – were placed within comic-strip frames, their armchairs and sitting room windows replaced by line drawings. Like the original artwork, Merryn Threadgould’s programme was a labour of love and detail.

Archive film from post-war Britain showed us urchins playing in monochromatic dirt outside privies scrawled with admonishments to pull the chain. The colour in these childhoods, and in those privies, was supplied by comics, even if most of their pages ran only to black, white and red. In these years of austerity there was no greater comic fantasy than a slap-up meal, hence the Christmas-pudding-a-head feasts at Lord Snooty’s and Desperate Dan’s gigantic cow pie. Corporal punishment as administered by humourless fathers and sadistic schoolmasters was the norm both in the strips and in reality, and it was against this grim penal code that the periodicals’ feral terrors spectacularly rebelled. Dennis the Menace would receive a nominal beating in the final frame of strips but Minnie the Minx got away with her misdemeanours because her creator, Baxendale, was the greater anarchist.

But what a strange, unsentimental, violent, anarchic, archaic, class-conscious, xenophobic, sexless, jumbled world those short-trousered readers escaped into – a world in which British pillar boxes stood in cowboy towns, schoolmasters were married to moustachioed women who looked like their sisters, Native Americans always replace the definite article with “um”, and the finest boats of the victorious British fleet were sunk, weekly, by a chump called Jonah! This world – a microcosm of nothing – was the products of minds pushed to the edge by the demands of rapacious publishers. Ken Reid, Rodger the Dodger’s inventor, woke up one day unable to draw. In recovery, he drew a cartoon of himself, pencil in hand, at the foot of an endless roll of blank paper.

The novelist Jacqueline Wilson speculated that later feminists might have been inspired by Minnie the Minx’s vim. The theory seemed farfetched but perhaps all the antiestablishment sentiment of the late 1950s and 1960s had its roots in these bloody-minded comics blithely disseminated for commercial return from Dundee. Perhaps Private Eye was not a continuation of Punch by other means but the Beano? As to Viz’s antecedents, in any case, this programme left us in no doubt.

So that was BBC Four’s contribution to last night. BBC Three’s was How Dirty Can I Get? in which one Nicky Taylor gave up washing for six weeks. The result of this experiment was that Taylor got very dirty but not very, very dirty. A stern woman from the Hospital for Tropical Diseases scolded her, however, that if everyone was as slovenly as she Britain would soon be welcoming back typhoid and diphtheria. A measure of the show’s IQ was that when Taylor chirped the cliché “a cocktail of chemicals” we were helpfully shown a cocktail glass and when she joked that she was becoming a walking Petri dish, some computer whiz replaced her head with, yes, a Petri dish. Her show stank, too.

Out of the box

–– Sunday AM, BBC One’s politics seminar, returned with a new title: The Andrew Marr Show. Guest Nigella Lawson joshed that it was another example of the rise of the culture of celebrity, but the progamme’s editor, Barney Jones, tells me it was simply what the programme had become known as by default. “We thought we were being clever using Andrew’s initals but it was too subtle,” he says, reassuring licence-fee payers that he’ll be using up the old letterheads before ordering new ones.

–– After three years it’s farewell to ABC1, home to Home Improvement and Hope & Faith double bills. Disney, who owned it, blames the channel’s inability to get a slot on Freeview in the evenings. But hello tomorrow evening on Freeview to Nuts TV proud transmitter of Britain’s Fittest Barmaid, Gender Bender and Rude News. Ah, the crazy whirligig of digital television!

andrew.billen@thetimes.co.uk

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