STEVE BELL’S THE IF…. CHRONICLES Methuen Paperbacks 1983. ISBN 0-413-53970-9
Steve
Bell’s bitingly funny highly political satirical cartoons for the Guardian
Newspaper were never funnier than in the dark years of the Thatcher-Reagan era,
and this compilation of the 1983 season are Bell at his very best. Here, the
Falkland Penguins, delighted by their British citizenship following the British
war against the Argentinean Junta, flock to England in search of fish ad
dreams. Thatcher, depicted literally as an ‘Iron Lady’, made of battleship
steel, or as a wide-eyed deranged escaped lunatic, matches Reagan’s half senile
buffoonery. In America, Ronald Reagan gets himself a speech-writing hat and
literally negotiates with Francis the talking Mule. Norman Fowler becomes a
lame superhero called Fowlman, and Norman Tebbit is a Frankenstein monster
corpse of frightening proportions. Despite the passing years, the comedy is
often still laugh out loud funny. Thatcher gains the support of mindless
destructive robots from a car plant at which humans have been ousted by
automation. The police are seen as utterly corrupt, mostly through the eyes of
a monkey. A thread in this compilation shows them raiding under-paid pensioners
as if they were a gang of professional bank-raid gangsters. Bell’s comedy is
like a dark and daring cousin to Spitting Image, you read it, laugh and wonder
how Bell avoided getting sued or banned. Few other satirists take such a savage
uncompromising stance on the politicians of their day. Bell is still going
today in The Guardian, and with much still to commend him, but this collection
is from a true Golden age and there is little doubting the sincerity of the
point Bell makes about how monstrous our leading politicians can be. Rupert
Murdoch’s media empire gets lampooned savagely too, as does the lacklustre SDP
party, for its failure to take on Thatcher. Strangely, this collection makes
few digs at the Labour Party of Neil Kinnock, though Bell certainly made his
feelings on them known too in the newspapers.
© Copyright. Arthur Chappell
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