Flights of fantasy inspired by author's drug memoriesBy Jack Malvern
He has been an icon to generations of children who watched his surreal adventures on the BBC, but Mr Benn has a secret drug-influenced past, The Times has learnt.
David McKee, who drew the Mr Benn stories in the late 1960s, said that he had indulged in the occasional cannabis cookie and that Mr Benn was very much a product of the decade.
Although McKee was a responsible father of three when Mr Benn was first broadcast in 1971, he admitted to having previously cultivated and consumed the drug. “I remember some very nice cookies of the period,” he said. “I remember we did grow some stuff at home.”
Mr Benn was a bowler-hatted businessman who, in each episode, tried on a costume in a fancy-dress shop. He would step out of the changing room into another world — such as the Wild West, dressed as a cowboy — and have adventures. These included being a knight in a red suit of armour and a prisoner encouraging other inmates to paint their cells in psychedelic colours.
It will come as no surprise to some fans that his bizarre experiences were inspired by drugs. One enthusiast, writing on one of many websites that pay homage to Mr Benn, said that the character was a cult icon among clubbers in the Ecstasy-fuelled dance scene of the early 1990s. He wrote: “The shopkeeper (was) an icon for the new generation of drug dealers who imagined that they were enabling a new generation of office workers to holiday as a different person in a different place through drugs like acid and Ecstasy.”
Other websites speculate that the fancy-dress shop was a front for drug dealing. One argues: “He meets with a strange man wearing a fez (suggesting some sort of Moroccan connection). They exchange words and the ‘shopkeeper’ then takes Mr Benn off to show him the ‘merchandise’.”
Mr McKee, who is re-releasing all 13 episodes of Mr Benn on DVD, said that the shop was based on a bric-a-brac shop in Plymouth, where he was an art student.
“There was an antique shop that I passed every day on my way into college,” he said. “There was a guy in there who . . . was never very keen to sell anything.” We used to say to ourselves, ‘What is it a front for?’ ”
Mr Benn’s house at 52 Festive Road was based on one next door to Mr McKee’s home in Festing Road in Putney, southwest London.
Mr McKee says that he didn’t actually draw Mr Benn under the influence of drugs. The character was based on René Magritte’s faceless, bowler-hatted man and Buster Keaton’s cartoonish performances. The bright colours were influenced more by Fauvist painters than 1960s psychedelia, but he was amused by the theories.
He once overheard a parent at a book signing for one of his other creations, Not Now Bernard, remarking that Bernard’s visitation by a monster was obviously a metaphor for a nuclear holocaust. “You can tell because he drew the tree on the back to look like a mushroom cloud,” she said.
Despite the success of Mr Benn, which the BBC broadcast until 2001, Mr McKee made no money from the character. He subsisted on fees for his cartoons for the Times Educational Supplement and Punch and from other series, including King Rollo and Maisy Mouse.
Two episodes of Mr Benn were never filmed. One was the prison-cell painting episode which was deemed “inappropriate” by the BBC. The other involved Mr Benn dressing as Father Christmas, which the BBC vetoed because it would be able to broadcast it only at certain times of year.
Mr Benn, which is still shown on Nickelodeon, will be released on DVD on October 10.
HIGH FLYERS# Hunter S Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was inspired by “two bags of grass, 75 pellets of mescaline, a salt shaker half-full of cocaine and a galaxy of uppers, downers, screamers (and) laughers”.
# Philip K Dick wrote 11 novels in 1963 and 1964 under the influence of amphetamines
# W. H. Auden used benzedrine to wake him up — and barbiturates to help him to sleep
# William Burroughs used his experience as a heroin addict to write Junkie and The Naked Lunch
From
The Times today.
Blimey, who'd have thunk it?
