LEE PAYNE

Tag: beano

  • I’m probably never going to be a writer – it might be time to do something else

    You will have to excuse the irony of this. I’m writing about how I’ve been wasting my time writing.

    For as long as I can remember, I have wanted to write for a living. Since I was a child. I think it stemmed from getting The Beano and The Dandy delivered to the house, as well as MATCH! magazine. I would also have a look at my dad’s copy of The Sun on a Saturday (forgive me, I was young). I was fascinated by the different styles of writing, and how the written word could make you feel depending on how it was presented on the page. When I was around 8 years old, I made hand-drawn comics called The Jumbo for my grandad, which the wonderful man paid me the cover price for. I think I ‘borrowed’ the character of Dennis The Menace for it, too, but thankfully I never received a copyright claim from the publisher of The Beano. A couple of years after that, I was mocking up newspaper front pages.

    Now, aged 30, it is clear to me that writing – communicating with the written/typed word – is probably what I’m best at. Despite being the grandson of a respected mechanic on one side and a talented carpenter on the other side, I am entirely useless at anything practical. Actually doing anything with my hands is beyond me. On one attempt to learn how to cook, I tried to crack an egg into a jug and ended up with the yolk all over the worktop and all of the shell in the jug. I also can’t communicate easily by other means. I’m debilitatingly awkward in face-to-face situations, and irritatingly inarticulate when speaking to someone. I have been asked to do a TV show and a podcast before, but tellingly never been asked to do them more than once.

    My TV debut, on the short-lived Mustard TV, in 2016. I haven’t been asked to do TV again in the six years since.

    I did work experience at Archant, who publish the Eastern Daily Press, Norwich Evening News and other local titles in East Anglia, in 2009. I didn’t actually have much work to do – I got a piece in the paper about a couple’s landmark wedding anniversary – but I was able to observe this huge office putting a newspaper together, as well as sit in on an editorial meeting. I really enjoyed it, and I was left feeling even more sure that I wanted to be a journalist. In 2015, the EDP advertised for contributors to a new Fan Zone page, all about Norwich City Football Club. I went for it, not expecting to get picked, but to my surprise I was chosen as one of four columnists and I’m still doing it now. In fact, I’m the only one of the original four still doing it.

    The closest I’ve ever been to getting paid for writing was when I had an interview at Archant in 2017. They were looking for a trainee reporter. Unfortunately, I failed to impress in the interview (face-to-face interactions letting me down again) and I didn’t get the job. Since then, I’ve never even applied for another job, carrying on with pretending to know what I’m doing in a supermarket.

    I have kept this blog going, as I like to write, but I have never pushed it to the extent that would get me noticed. As an introvert, it’s not in my nature to blow my own trumpet. In any case, when I do share what I’ve written, I don’t get many readers anyway.

    This is why I think that’s the case: TikTok. I’ve never been on TikTok myself because I can’t really see the point of it. My mum, however, is borderline addicted to it. She will spend ages scrolling through the app. I’ll often be shown videos from it. I can’t really get my head around it, though, because there is just so much crap on there. I can spend hours writing something, share it, and get maybe 50 readers if I am exceptionally lucky. Someone can record a 30 second clip of their dog farting, upload it to TikTok, and get millions of views. Short attention spans have ruined the art of writing.

    I’m not bitter though. That’s just how it is. After having this dream for twenty years, I have to start to wonder if my writing is really better than anyone else’s. Perhaps it is time to change tact. Do something else. I don’t know what that might be. But maybe the first step is to admit that writing is a dead end.

    Thanks for reading if you’ve made it this far.

  • Looking through my box of comics and feeling old

    In my younger days, I loved The Beano and The Dandy and my mum had both comics delivered to the house each week. I thought the smell of a fresh comic was one of the most intoxicating imaginable and was sold on their bright colours, gentle humour and simple charm.

    I have a large, very heavy box under my bed right now containing pretty much every comic that ever came through the letterbox of my childhood home. When I feel like adult life is getting on top of me, which happens more often than it really should, I open the box and spend a while indulging myself in the innocence of youth.

    It seems that my ‘golden’ period of receiving The Beano and The Dandy was between 1999 – the year I turned 7 – and 2003, when I was 11.

    My box of comics

    There’s a sort of running joke I have with a friend from when I was at university. We often talk about how we’re getting old and that our youth is well behind us. Well, we will both be 30 next birthday (him before me, I must add) which feels like something of a milestone but our chat about pipes, slippers and bowls of mashed up apple might be somewhat premature.

    Still, looking back through my old comics, it’s hard not to smile at how dated these dear old things are. Here are a few examples.

    This issue of The Beano, from December 2002, was giving away a free pack of stickers for your FA Premier League album. Collecting football stickers is still very much a thing, so nothing too bad so far, but look at the players used to advertise this brilliant giveaway! Dennis Bergkamp of Arsenal (retired in 2006), Paolo Di Canio of West Ham (now 53 years old) and Michael Owen of Liverpool (who left the Premier League to join Real Madrid two seasons later).

    A 9-year-old can’t just fill his football sticker album up on an empty stomach, though. He’s got to have breakfast first. How about some Mornflake Oats? You can still buy them, though heaven knows when I last saw an advert for them. The bit that caught my eye was the statement that they are available at Somerfield. That particular chain of supermarkets was taken over by the Co-Op in 2009, and by 2012 all Somerfield stores had been rebranded to that of their new owners.

    I’ve written before about how I’m not into films, but Disney’s Tarzan was one of the few that I have actually seen in the cinema. The film was released in October 1999, but by Christmas 2002 the character was back in an exciting new video game for… the GameBoy Advance. Released in the summer of 2001, the GameBoy Advance took games away from the bedroom and made them portable – for as long as the battery would last, that is. I never had one (I had the original GameBoy, which was in black and white).

    I may not have had a GameBoy Advance but I did have a PlayStation 2. Pretty much everyone I knew who was my age between 2002 and 2006 had one, actually. There was one boy at school who had a GameCube – we all thought he was weird. The PS2 is still the best selling games console of all time (more than 155 million of them have been sold worldwide) but anyone who wasn’t lucky enough to own one in December 2002 had the chance to win one in this competition. Note how you can’t enter online, you’ve got to send your entry in by post.

    Speaking of brilliant competitions, here’s another one. I don’t know if this still happens, but when I was a kid it seemed nearly everyone – boys especially – went through a stage where we’d spend that bit between getting home from school and going in for tea whizzing about on skateboards. I had one myself, but I was utterly useless at it and never did manage to pull off a single trick on it. Here the comic is giving away a skateboard. What could possibly make that prize better? By the skateboard having a photo of your favourite WWF wrestler on it, of course!

    Yes, nowadays it’s the WWE that does wrestling, but until 2002 it was called the World Wrestling Federation. They were forced to change the name when they lost a court battle with the World Wildlife Fund. I swear I’m not making this up.

    Those are just a few examples of how the last 20 years or so have changed the world, seen through the prism of British comics. Wow, does it make me wish I was 10 again. The comics still even have the little sticker on them that the newsagent would use to let the paper boy know where to deliver them. Simpler, happier times.

    If you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading.