From 1977 to 1987 Posy Simmonds drew a regular cartoon strip in the Guardian newspaper gently mocking the middle-class lifestyles and liberal concerns of a regular cast of a dozen or so fictional characters, centred on:

• Wendy Weber, a former nurse married to verbose polytechnic sociology lecturer George Weber, and mother of a brood of six children, ranging from little Benji to teenage glamour-puss Belinda
• Jo Heep, married to tedious, drunk whisky salesman Edmund Heep, and mum to two rebellious teenagers who’ve adopted the punk look
• Trish Wright, married to philandering advertising executive Stanhope Wright, mother of a young baby

Throughout the period the cartoons were periodically gathered together into books, namely:

• Mrs Weber’s Diary (1979)
• True Love (1981)
• Pick of Posy (1982)
• Very Posy (1985)
• Pure Posy (1987)

And these books were themselves gathered together into a huge compendium volume, Mrs Weber’s Omnibus which was published in 2012 and now appears to be the only way to get hold of the cartoons.

Pick of Posy is the second in the series of collections, given that True Love was a one-off ‘graphic novel’, loosely based on the schoolgirl crush of one of the characters, Janice Brady, for a regular cast member, tall, suave philandering advertising executive Stanhope Wright. The most obvious aspects of the book are:

– it is twice the length of Mrs Weber’s Diary, at getting on for 90 pages

– the diary format which dominated the first book has been dropped, allowing the strips to stand on their own

– the drawing has changed and improved; the earliest cartoons from the previous book were sometimes drawn with a very heavy, thick outline; in Pick of Posy the lines are thinner, more subtle

– and accompanying this there is a noticable increase in the amount of background detail in the frames. Some cartoonists leave the frames almost empty except for the human characters. Simmonds’s frames are stuffed with detail of an almost photographic realism.

Compare and contrast the almost children-book simplicity of a very early cartoon, most of the frames having a simple white background:

With the style of only a few years later, which is stuffed with minutely catalogued and realistic details, designed to reinforce the mood and meaning of the text.

Class distinctions

Surfing the net around Simmonds I came across an American blogger who said that for a long time he didn’t understand Posy Simmonds cartoons at all. He didn’t get what they were about, they just seemed so British, with no real humour in them. Then one particular strip gave him a Eureka moment and made him realise that Simmonds’s cartoons are predominantly about class, about the thousand tiny subtle markers of class and class distinctions which the British obsess about and which are so opaque or invisible to outsiders. That was the key, and from that point onwards he was able to understand and appreciate them.

I think this is a massive insight. It explains why the strips are almost all talk or thought bubbles, rather than actions or events. Because it is via thoughts and dialogue and words and concepts that the subtle distinctions of class which are Simmonds’s meat and drink are expressed.

But I think you can extend the insight. Her cartoons are not only about class. Age and gender are also dominant themes:

• Gender in the form of the familiar sex war in which countless women feel they are the hard-done-by, downtrodden, stay-at-home-mums, or harassed working mums, or young women wolf-whistled in the street, or leered over at work by lecherous middle-aged men.
• Age in the obvious way that the concerned liberal Weber couple have a teenage daughter, Belinda, who has become a punk, goes out with leather-clad bikers, and generally rebels against everything her parents held sacred, as do the two punk sons of alcoholic whiskey salesman Edmund Heep. The presence of these two types of teenage rebellion (one female, the other male) allows Simmonds to make countless jokey observations about the gap between the idealistic 60s generation and the nihilistic 70s generation.

This line of thinking helps explain why the strips are not about broad humour, or puns or boom-boom punchlines, but are concerned with a thousand subtle, acute observations on the differences of class and age and gender which permeate British society and, in particular, which divide the so-called middle classes into scores of sub-tribes or groups.

Mundane subject matter

It explains why so much of the subject matter – what is happening in the strips – is extremely mundane and everyday: it is not the events which are interesting, it is the way they spark divergent responses in this or that middle class tribe, divides men’s responses from women’s, the overly-concerned liberal parents from their spotty stroppy kids.

The wry smile of recognition

It explains why even her strongest fans tend to use words like ‘wry’ and ‘dry’ about her humour, which are code for something which is obviously not serious but also is not trying to prompt laughter. Instead I think the central aim or effect of her cartoons is to trigger recognition: her readers read a strip and nod their heads and think – ‘Yes, I know that sort of angry mum, or leery businessman, or stroppy teenager’. They give you a wry smile of recognition.

It’s the same kind of wry smile that is prompted by her clever-clever references to famous paintings, or use of pastiche elements like suddenly accompanying the strip with the worlds of an Elizabethan song, or slipping into the style of 1950s True Romance magazines.

All the elements – recognition of social types, recognition of their precise class position, recognition of clever cultural references – are designed to make you nod and think, ‘Yes, I get it; very clever’.

Humour

Where there is humour in the strips, beyond the wry smile of recognition, it is most often expressed in ironic reversals – when an exasperated mother, or concerned parents, or adulterous man, set out with one intention and then find themselves ironically frustrated, or (very often) outsmarted by their children or rivals or would-be targets.

A good example is Peaceful twilight years where George’s Aunt Weber comes to stay and is sitting comfortably in front of the television when she starts saying ’89’, repeatedly. George and Wendy look at each other and then have a sotto voce conversation about how the old lady’s going gaga, and Wendy very patronisingly asks if that’s her age. To which Winny shocks her and the reader by replying that, No, 89 is the number of violent TV deaths she’s seen so far this month. ‘They say today’s children see over 10,000 TV murders by the time they’re 15… I’ve seen over 120,000.’ Now that is quite funny.

Or Happy families where Paul and Emma Standish have come round to George and Wendy’s for Sunday lunch and afterwards one of their little kids starts drawing on Wendy’s wall and then on the sofa so Wendy gives her a light smack which leads to an enormous argument and debate about the rights and wrongs of smacking – the comic punchline comes as the strip cuts away to the other kids playing quietly on the floor, one of whom says: ‘It always ends in tears.’

Themes

I tried to do a one-sentence summary of some of the strips just to record what they’re actually about:

• Spotlight on beauty Wendy buys new wall lights, fits them herself but is then horrified when they spotlight the mess, damp and chaos in her kitchen
• Happy ever after George and Wendy take the mickey out of all the merchandising surrounding the Royal Wedding, which prompts their teenage daughter Belinda to complain that they’re always belittling things and mocking romance, at which point George and Wendy say they’re just as much in love as ever, which prompts Belinda and the other kids to go ‘Eurgh, GROSS!‘
• Sunday TV Wendy, her mum and the little kids are watching a TV documentary about lions in Africa which includes scenes of them mating, which prompts her mum to whisper, in French so the kids don’t understand, that they ought to turn it off – so they turn it off and draw the kids’ attention to their two pet rabbits in their cage, but when the adults have left, the kids notice that the rabbits are also mating and -m in an ironic payoff – one of the older kids parodies their grandma by saying ‘Ooh la la, Keith! Pas devant les enfants!’ because, of course, being good middle-class children they do of course understand French.
• Mea culpa Wendy is in the basement kitchen of the Weber household when she sees a man walking a dog which is doing a poo right outside. She rushes up and out the door to berate him, but he tells her a long shaggy dog story about how the dog was foisted on him by his ailing mother-in-law and he thinks its behaviour is awful, but what can you do? On and on, until it is Wendy who feels abashed and ashamed of herself.
• Hawks and doves Dominic’s parents are giving a dinner party but the little so-and-so, in his pyajamas, runs around the dinner table shouting and making a fuss and tugging his mums’ skirt: in their minds the guests divide neatly into hawks, who would give him a good smack, and doves, who thinks he is just over-tired and needs attention. The strip ends with his father picking him up at which point he becomes calm and docile, and his long-suffering mother looking daggers at her husband who seems able to mollify their son so effortlessly.

• Piggy bank George joins everyone else staring at a man who is walking through the street effing and blinding, George goes in to see his bank manager who gives him a hard time about bank security and needing to verify his identity, until George emerges onto the street doing exactly the same kind of effing and blinding as the man the strip started with.
• Higher education In the Polytechnic canteen on the first day of the new academic year, we see all the staff moaning and worrying.
• Exchange of views The Dean of the Polytechnic where George works needs to shed some staff and so is shown soft-soaping George and several other old-timers, telling them now is the time to take early retirement, write that book they’ve always wanted to, pick up work as a consultant and so on…

Exchange of views by Posy Simmonds (1980)

• Identity parade A visiting lecturer at the Poly is introduced to George who recognises him and takes a moment to review where they’ve met – was it at the Uni of Essex in the 60s, at hippy rallies in Hyde Park, at fashionable beatnik cafés, or attending R.D. Laing’s fashionable lectures on psychiatry. Then the penny drops. God, no, it was when they were both in the army doing their national service at Oswestry and the visitor was corporal to George’s private.
• Clouds of glory A split-screen strip in which George visits the GP because of something up with his poo – on one side the doctor tells him he only weeks to live, all his relatives tearfully come and see him and after his death his magnum opus is published and given a rave review in the Time Literary Supplement; on the other side exactly the same sequence of events leads up to the doctor telling George that, from the state of a sample of faeces he’s given him, George has been eating too much beetroot!
• Urbs and rus Stanhope and wife Trisha are at their second home in the country and Stanhope pontificates about how his knowledge of country matters and nature is infinitely superior to their neighbour, farmer Pearcey, who is not a real farmer and just makes a mint renting his and to a caravan park. All of which Mr Pearce unfortunately overhears, putting Stanhope in his place with the witty riposte: ‘As the man said, we must all cultivay notre jardin, eh?’
• THE DENTIST A couple of surreal strips in which Trish Stanhope visits an Australian Marxist dentist who, in effect, hears her embarrassed confession about  how she’s not as left-wing and right-on as she ought to be, what with the second home and the cleaner and the private school for the little ones…
• Rustic blues Stanhope takes a country neighbour of his, another Londoner who bought up a disused railway station and has renovated it and moans about how he can’t ingratiate himself with the locals to the local pub where – they discover it is packed to the rafters with Londoners down for the weekend and treating the locals to fancy tipples and fags.
• Home is where the heart is Stanhope drives the family down to his lovely country cottage, singing the praises of the countryside all the way – until he opens a letter waiting for him to discover it is a summons to jury service, at which point he explodes that he’s going to be stuck in this ‘one-eyed dump’ for weeks! (The insult ‘one-eyed’ applied to a remote village will recur in the graphic novels Gemma Bovery and Tamara Drewe.)
• Angles and Saxons Stanhope and Trisha Wright are enjoying a picnic in the country with their step-daughter Jocasta, who has brought along her middle-aged boyfriend, an expert in graphs. When a motorbike roaring by sputters to a halt, the boyfriend shows Jocasta a series of graphs based on the likelihood of Stanhope giving the rider a bollocking. But to everyone’s surprise Stanhope is intimidated by the biker, and ends up wishing him well. Much to the chagrin of Stefan the graph-expert. And Jocasta’s punchline to the strip is: ‘Stefan has always believed that British middle class behaviour goes out of its way to defy rational explanation.’ Not that funny.

• Always welcome Typically English middle-class, envenomed restraint, when Trish and Stanhope welcome Jocasta home to say, and then find themselves lumbered with putting up middle-aged Stefan – going out of their way to make a nice diner for im, and making up the sofa bed with pillows and a duvet – and then retiring to their own bedroom to fret and criticise and disapprove.
• A room of one’s own Jocasta in her freezing, scruffy student flat at Christmas.
• Christmas Christmas is a recurrent theme in all the books. Simmonds hates Christmas, all the fol-de-rol and pretending. So the Christmas strip in this book kicks off with Wendy and Trish traipsing through the West End past gaudily decorated shops lamenting which pack of ghoulish relatives are coming to stay this year – but then both notice little Benji cooing over the shop window decorations and Wendy ends up thinking: ‘It’s all a terrible expense… but still… it is Christmas… & one has to do it for the children, after all…’
• Wish you were here The Christmas Day cartoon is one big picture of Jocasta in bed in her filthy flat, smoking and reading a book surrounded by dirty dishes and fag packets and food wrappers, imagining the polite family Christmas Stanhope and Trish are having with some in-laws who they politely loathe and how everyone is getting on each other’s nerves in that repressed, English way.
• Lonely heart The thoughts of an Action Man doll who is horrified when his owner’s big sister starts dressing her Barbie doll in the Action Man clothes and putting her in his tank etc.
• Wendy’s mum comes to stay and insists on doing all the washing up and chores and dusting and cleaning the loo and Wendy is hugely relieved when she finally leaves!
• Consumers In post-Christmas mode George and Wendy watch ads on TV and George way over-analyse them in terms of ‘reification’ and ‘heuristics’.
• Perpetuum immobile One big clever cartoon showing alcoholic Edmund Heep propping up the bar at his local and buying drinks for everyone, with his tiresomely cheerful banter.
• All systems go showing the brand new regional office of International Brewhouse Inc empty, as the designers designed it, and then full of boozy male middle-managers after work, with harassed secretaries having to cover for them. Men, eh!
• The silent 3 introducing Edmund Heep’s two sons who are safety-pinned, spiky-haired punks, and their mate arguing and swearing at each other all the time.

• The silent 3: Gather ye rosebuds shows the three punks hanging out, threatening passersby and ogling passing birds, only to reveal at the end that young Jules, occasionally, in the privacy of his own home… can be quite sweet to his old parents, buying his mum a gardening book and his dad a tie.
• Settlers Quite a funny strip in which George and Wendy are round the house of a friend who’s done up a house in a remote and derelict area, all the language leading you to believe they’re talking about the remote countryside until… they step outside and you realise the house is in n area of abandoned urban wasteland.
• Happy families Paul and Emma Standish have come round to George and Wendy’s for Sunday lunch and afterwards one of their little kids starts drawing on Wendy’s wall and then on the sofa so Wendy gives her a light smack which leads to an enormous argument and debate about the rights and wrongs of smacking – the comic punchline comes as the strip cuts away to the other kids playing quietly on the floor, one of whom says: ‘It always ends in tears.’
• An unnamed strip which ironically takes tropes to do with spring, and singing birds and buds breaking through to…. show that these daffodils are blooming in the foetid flat of Jocasta Wright where they start coughing and choking.
• True confessions Stanhope and his wife Trish are weekending at their cottage, but when Stanhope beings tentatively to tell his wife about his latest fling (they have an open marriage) she gets cross and shouts that she’s not his Mother Confessor. She decides to invite ‘the Dixons’ over although this requires a complex set of instructions as they’re two hours from London. In counterpoint to Trish’s directions Stanhope draws an imaginary maze which would lead Trish to discovering him, Stanhope, in bed with his latest floozy.
• Angles of incidence Stanhope is in the lift with his mother when he starts making eyes at a pretty young thing who makes eyes back at him. Stanhope’s mother spots it and treads in his feet interrupting the flow of sexual enticement, saying as she helps him limp from the lift: ‘I thought we’d had quite enough of ETERNAL TRIANGLES, Stanhope.’
• The conversation piece Jocasta and her dad, Stanhope, are hanging out in the airport departure lounge because the plane to take them on their skiing holiday is delayed. Stanhope, as is his wont, starts chatting up another middle-aged woman, which Jocasta listens to for a bit and then suddenly stands up and announces to the entire lounge that she is his mistress which leads to a massive picture showing all the passengers in the lounge commenting on this revelation in a rich mix of European languages.
• Bitter sweets Trish is shopping at the supermarket when little Willy spots sweets at the checkout counter and starts wailing, crying, screaming for them. The mum she’s with sympathises and a chorus of other women all give their opinions about how to manage – when Trish just smacks Willy, he stops crying in surprise, and she buys him the sweets anyway.
• Peaceful twilight years George’s Aunt Weber comes to stay and is sitting comfortably in front of the television when she starts saying ’89’, repeatedly. George and Wendy look at each other and then have a sotto voce conversation about how the old lady’s going gaga, and Wendy very patronisingly asks if that’s her age. To which Winny shocks her and the reader by replying that, No, 89 is the number of violent TV deaths she’s seen so far this month. ‘They say today’s children see over 10,000 TV murders by the time they’re 15… I’ve seen over 120,000.’ Now that is quite funny.
• Perspectives Over dinner George, Wendy and a beardy socialist friend discuss the issues of the day – the arms race, collapse of detente, nuclear war, the economy, nationalism, pollution, destruction of the ozone layer, unemployment… Later than night George has a nightmare but, in ironic counterpoint to all these big weighty subjects, his subconscious is harassed by worries that his library books are three weeks overdue, he might be getting Wendy’s cold, and that something’s dropped off the car.
• A dog’s life A split screen narrative in which a colleague of George’s at the Poly – Pierce – goes through a typical day, nicking George’s parking space, trying it on with a secretary, criticising George and the other lefties for being so soft, nicking the office projector and so on. In the parallel set of pictures we see the adventures of Pierce’s dog during the day, the doggy equivalent of all Pierce’s actions. Except that at the end of the day Pierce gets home late to a chilly reception from his wife, while the dog gets home to be embraced and rewarded.
• Sharing George gets home from a draining day to find that Wendy has done all the chores even though it’s ‘his’ turn .He gets quite cross, explaining that he wanted to do the shopping, cooking, cleaning and washing up and her having done it has left him feeling deprived. ‘It was MY TURN to feel really OPPRESSED.’
• No smoking George takes the train and is driven mad by the loud sounds all the other passengers make, listening to the radio, eating an apple, slurping a cup of tea etc.
• Bon brush George is cleaning the toilet while Wendy goes out to night class, but his cleaning  conjures up a genii, a middle-aged woman of a genii who proceeds to be shocked that he’s doing the housework and insists a woman’s place is in the home and a load of other sexist cant, so that George pushes her back into the toilet, rams the lid down and flushes it.
• Il Fondo George and Wendy go to the cinema to see an Italian movie. George drifts off and is thinking about new sheets for the bed, when the characters proceed to strip off and (presumably) have sex, at which George goes all red in the face and… notices Wendy looking at him. Oops, quick, time to hide that male sex drive. So he readjusts his thoughts until he is condemning the film as ‘appalling, horribly sexist, revolting and exploitative.’ When he hurriedly tells Wendy all this as they leave the cinema she smiles and agrees. Phew.
• Cheers In a pub some leery businessman spends the entire strip chatting up the young woman they’ve promoted to management, patronising and insulting her about how pretty she is, until the woman throws her drink over the guy and storms out, leaving him spluttering: ‘There! See! What have I always said – they’re IRRATIONAL… EMOTIONAL… & completely UNPREDICTABLE.’
• Uneasy riders George and Wendy’s daughter is a stunningly sexy teenager who wears tight clothes, low tops and is going out with a motorcycle courier. Off she zooms and George and Wendy tut tut and reminisce about their heady days in the 1950s, going by scooter to a cool coffee bar and onto the Royal Court theatre.
• The natural order Wendy drops little Benji off with one of her neighbours and is appalled to hear the mum telling her boy that he has to be a doctor and the daughters that they have to be nurses. Sexist stereotyping! In fact as soon as the adults have gone this is exactly what the little girls do, playing with their dolly and not letting Benji get a look in. But when they hear the grown-ups returning, the girls give the doll to Benji and tell the admiring Wendy that he’s been a nurse while one of the girls has been acting a mother and brain surgeon. In other words, they know how to play Wendy’s politically correct prejudices. And this is 1979, 40 years ago!
• Well known facts Another split strip concept, where the children are walking back from school telling each other things their mums have told them like, if you step on the cracks a bear will get you, or if you swallow apple pips a tree will grow in your tummy. This is ironically counterpointed by the mums’ conversations which are all about ‘my mum says’ and ‘my doctor told me’ and ‘my architect friend said’ and so on. Moral: we never really grow up.
• Art gallery George takes his kids to an art gallery and delivers long high-falutin lectures about the politico-historical realities behind each painting, while the kids yawn and want to leave. I think the joke is that their regular Sunday morning visits, complete with lecture, are identical in format to the kind of preachy sermonising George and Wendy hated about the church their parents took them to.
• Temptation’s way Belinda Weber goes into town on the tube wearing an extraordinarily sexy black leather figure-hugging outfit and thinks she’s being touched up in the tube carriage. Instead it is a feminist who has covered her with stickers saying ‘This garment exploits women’.
• Daily dose Jocasta Wright catches the tube and looks at all the images and stories about women in the papers and magazines the commuters are reading, leading to a large cartoon of ‘the Seven Ages of Media Women’
• A Messy Business Jocasta is walking down the street when she steps in some dog poo, then catches up with a dog on a leash and stares daggers at it, imagines killing it, imagines it dead, imagines the newspaper headlines about herself being a dog killer, and so walks past the dog, smiling cheesily at it. The dog says ‘Chicken’ to her.
• Promises, promises A female friend insists on showing Wendy the photos from Sue’s wedding. Every single one involves someone who is divorced or splitting up or remarrying. By the time they get to the photo of the happy bride, and her friend comments that they’re getting married rather young, Wendy sardonically comments, don’t worry: ‘It’s just a PHASE she’s going through.’
• L’après-midi d’une divorcée A divorced mum is waiting for her husband to come and collect the kids. The delay allows her to work herself into a frenzy of anger and frustration at him so that when he finally knocks on the door, she opens it holding her child dressed as a cowboy who demands, ‘Your money or your life, Daddy.’
• Theory and practice is another split screen, on one side the successive stages of a happy and equable divorce, on the other side a set of mathematical equations depicting an extremely fractious and rancorous divorce.
• How the other half lives A divorced woman phones her ex-husband imagining him snug in a big bed with his dishy new girlfriend. In fact he is living in a sad bedsit surrounded by rubbish, and is imagining her living in domestic bliss with happy kids stroking the pet labrador. They’re both angry and deluded.
• Company loves misery At a smart house party a group of women bill and coo over a male friend of theirs who’s recently got divorced. But when he turns up in the company of the stunning young fox, Belinda Weber, their giggly fondness turns to bitterness and spite.
• Going solo Wendy phones a friend of hers who’s recently got divorced, Ellen, a creator of hand-crafted wooden house signs. Ellen goes to great lengths to tell Wendy how happy she is to be single, to be living by herself, to be free, not to be dominated by some man. But after Wendy hangs up. Ellen bursts into bitter tears.
• Putting the bootee in At a nice house party Nigel, married with two kids, deduces that single Avril earns three times what he does, and start chatting her up, without realising how patronising and sexist he is being. Finally, his heavily pregnant wife comes to collect him and he manages to really anger her by thoughtlessly remarking: ‘Y’know… I really admire women like that, who make something of their lives’, implying that his wife, by ‘merely having babies, has wasted hers.
• Rich desserts Tow mums are visiting. Christine has a small baby. the other mums bills and coos and makes an enormous fuss over baby, talking horrible baby talk and putting her up on her shoulder where… the baby proceeds to be copiously sick, much to the first mums’ amusement.
• Mother knows best Trish is taken out for tea by her mother-in-law, Stanhope’s mother, who proceeds to lecture her about how a mother ought to be at the beck and call of her children, nothing is too good for them… until she spies a mother across the restaurant breast-feeding her baby, at which point she is overcome with disgust and disapproval… much to Trish’s ill-concealed glee.
• The shape of things to come A joke reveal strip – in which we meet George, Wendy and other parents in the kitchen catering to a raucous party, complaining about the guests, the gatecrashers, throwing up behind the flowers, dancing lasciviously and then… the final big picture reveals that they’re supervising a party not of adults but of 11-year-olds making themselves sick on fizzy drinks and chocolate and gyrating to pop music whose sexy lyrics they can’t possibly understand.
• At Tobit’s fourth birthday party the well-dressed hostess explains that she simply couldn’t do without her wonderful au pair, Lizzie, who looks after the kids, arranges everything, makes it possible for swish mum to have a jet-setting career. But then she says wonderful Lizzie is leaving her to go and study in America at which all the other mums say, How awful, How dreadful, Oh poor you etc. And then, a second later, realise that they’re saying that the academic success of this woman Lizzie is dreadful… at which point they all rush to correct themselves, How simply wonderful for her etc.
• Tres snub George and Wendy attend a party of appalling snobs and social climbers at Mrs Brinsley Bowe’s bijou residence, which George regards as excellent field work into ‘a discourse of totemic bricolage’.
• An acid experience Old friend of George and Wendy’s, American ethno-botanist is staying and is thrilled to meet ferociously sexy Belinda and her cool, shaded boyfriend. Hair-banded, hairy old hippy Frisbee tries to co-opt them into his memories of rebellion and the summer of love, giving them a big bear hug and proclaiming Love, man – while the two youngsters have thought bubbles with KILL in big letters.
• Sex’n’drugs Wendy worries that Belinda is going out in a very low-cut top which reveals her boobs, but Belinda tells her to calm down, she’s not having sex or taking drugs, like her old hippy parents did at her age.

• Pupa power Wendy is round a fellow mum’s who begins criticising some fiml or TV programme for being sexist and her teenage kids start taking the mickey out of her: ‘Sexism! sexism! That’s all you talk about’ which sets the mum off ranting about how she’d hoped to bring up two kids to share her liberal values but appears to have raised ‘two SLUGS who lie about chewing holes in everything I stand for.’
• The joke strip where Jocasta and another girl have gone for a day’s sketching in the countryside accompanied by two of their male tutors. When the old tutors criticise the cynicism of the t-shirts the girls are wearing Jocasta spontaneously takes hers off, and then her jeans (made in South Africa) and then her trainers (made in a Latin American dictatorship) and then her panties (made from multi-national man-made fibre) – until she is sitting naked next to the two clothed men in a pastiche of the famous Manet painting, Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe.

• Manners Friends go and stay at Stanhope and Trisha’s country cottage and at the end of the weekend tell him what a divine time they had, slept like logs, simply the best… then spend the entire drive back to London complaining how ghastly it was.
• Loss and profit Benji steals George’s car keys and hides them in the garden. George gets angry with him at which point Wendy intervenes to coax Benji and offer him sweets. At which point Benji confesses where he hid them and is rewarded. So that he learns that crime really does pay.
• L’Étranger George and Wendy are on the beach in the south of France, very white and pasty among the bronzed foreign bodies. Wendy begins to take her bikini off but then is overcome with doubts, prompting George to explain to the other beach occupiers, in his bad French, that they are not embarrassed about going naked, it’s just that the day before they got sunburn on their naughty bits.
• A little turbulence The insufferably good-humoured drunk Edmund Heep is on a holiday flight which runs into really bad turbulence during which all the passengers beg God that they’ll mend their ways if only the plane survives.
• Jocasta and friends are hitch-hiking through France and are eating at a seafood restaurant when they can’t helping the noisy Germans and (as usual) the braying confident upper middle class Brits telling their kids how to crack and eat lobster claws, leading Jocasta to bubble-think a parody of the poster for Jaws called Claws in which a giant lobster reaches upto munch the all-unwary swimmer.
• Edmund and Jo Heep have gone on holiday to a hotel in England where they are embarrassed by their obnoxious punk teenage sons until… Julian gets the letter with his O-level results proclaiming that he’s got all nine, and his parents, the waitress and even the other guests are all full of approval and admiration.
• All good gifts around us As the time of the Harvest Festival approaches the curate has been canvassing goods to display at the church and tells the vicar the middle classes have been most generous of all… but then reveals all the gifts are pies and cakes and quiches which come from their freezers. Quite why this is funny or satirical or has point eludes me.
• The last days of peace A broad satirical strip which appears to take the Conservative Party election victory as the pretext for thinking that The Great War Against Inflation is coming in which creches and daycare centres and hostels for the old and so on will all close down, women will be forced back into the kitchen and men will go to the front to fight inflation. It seemed an arch, strained and unfunny allegory which ends with a pastiche of the famous poster with a child sitting on her father’s knee asking, ‘Daddy what did you do during the war?’
• Zuppa Inglese George takes his two eldest daughters out for an Italian meal and grows increasingly irritated as the waiters hover round the two nubile glamour pusses like flies on poo, until he snaps and tells them to leave them alone. The comedy derives from the fact that George tries to explain that his daughters are not sex objects to be objectified, while the Italian maitre d’ entirely misinterprets him, rereading George’s anger as being like traditional Italian protectiveness towards his womenfolks’ ‘honour’ – and the more worked up George becomes, the more the Italian staff respect his machismo and old-fashioned sense of honour.
• Facts of life At a summer dinner in the garden the kids innocently ask their parents where babies come from and George gives a factually accurate account of wombs and sperm while Wendy talks about love and romance – and then all the adults overhear the kids repeating this garbled version of misinformation.
• Sweet sorrow Her mother is taking little Katya to nursery school for the first time and the little girl cries with apprehension while the mum reassures her about all the good things and games and friends she’ll meet. Having left her little girl there, the mum comes away upset and crying and Wendy repeats to her all the advantages and pluses which we have just heard the mum reassuring Katya with.
• Listen with mother Wendy takes her smallest children to the local art gallery where she is in the middle of explaining what the Camden Town School of artists was trying to achieve when she looks up and realises she’s attracted quite a crowd of adult listeners.
• A divided self At the offices of Beazeley and Buffin Jocasta shows Stanhope the artwork for a new beauty product which features an impossibly dishy model and, while Stanhope describes in words the numerous ‘feminine’ qualities the product is meant to symbolise, Jocasta does ironic dances and pirouettes round the office, ending up tied up in knots, almost as if… a sexist, patriarchal society places impossible demands on women.
• Vigilance Jocasta is visting a friend and when it comes time to leave, the friend says she’ll accompany her to the busstop and on the way they discuss how ten years after Liberation women are still not safe to walk the streets at night, all the time aware that a sinister figure is following them through the dark alleys and slowly gaining on them who is… eventually revealed to be the friend’s dad who was concerned and has been following all the time to make sure they’re OK.
• This sporting life Relatives pop in to visit the Heep family who, we learn, live in a semi under the motorway flyover. The relatives try to make the most of Edmund’s two unprepossessing punk sons who cadge a fiver off them on the pretext that they’re going on a sponsored run. Five minutes later the punks walk back in and when the surprised relative asks why it was such a short run, the punks take off their leather jackets to reveal t-shirts with the slogan ‘Sponsored Motorway Dash’ – they run from one side to the other dodging the traffic.
• Breath of a salesman TV reporter Gareth french pops into the castle and Ball for a quick one but is accosted by the unbearable Edmund Heep who proceeds to breathe foul pickled onion and scotch egg fumes all over him.
• Piggy in the middle Benji has a cold so Belinda is reading him a storybook about rich pigs and poor pigs, but Wendy interrupts and criticises the book for having such appalling stereotypes in it such as the mummy pig being in the kitchen cooking all the time and – this being a cartoon – the piggy character start arguing back against Wendy’s political correctness during all of which bickering… Benji has happily fallen asleep.
• A la recherche du temps perdu Rummaging in the attic Belinda uncovers a pair of fading hippy jeans which revolt her but Wendy explains how it was hand patched and festooned with logos and peace signs and so on, and lectures Belinda that they were the generation who cared… Yeah, and who ‘ROTTED the FABRIC of SOCIETY’ thinks Belinda, with her Lady Di haircut and Thatcherite values.
• Sheep and goats Sitting on a crowded bus Wendy and a load of other passengers are forced to put up with the ranting of a scuzzy old bigot raving against immigrants, and reds, and long-haired scroungers, and bloody feminists taking our jobs… until the conductor tells him there’s no standing room and he’ll have to get off. At which point Wendy nervously says ‘what a horrible old man’ and then, in the dead silence, realises that everyone else on the bus agreed with him.
• They’re never ever satisfied Wendy is buying presents for all the kids in a toyshop ad when she gets to the till the middle-aged teller is at first all sweetness and light about watching their little faces light up until… she suddenly lets her guard down and reveals how much she loathes Christmas and thinks modern children are spoiled, after all she never had a paint box, she was never given a brand new bike at Christmas, she…
• Showing off Wendy is off studying while George looks after the kids who beg him to make robin costumes for the school’s Christmas play or they’ll be the only ones without a costume. George piously thinks that going that extra mile, doing those little extra tasks, is what true equality is all about and so dutifully runs up two beautiful robin costumes. Only to attend the performance and realise that his two kids are the only ones with robin outfits and overhear other mums in the audience tut-tutting that some parents really do have too much time on their hands.
• Perquisites Jocasta goes to the office of her dad, Stanhope, hoping to cadge some Christmas money but instead marvelling at the array of luxury goods he’s been sent by various clients, which are listed in special folksy Christmas font as in the song the twelve days of Christmas. Jocasta points out how fattening or toxic (cigars) they are and ironically wishes her dad ‘a Merry Cholesterol’.
• Jocasta gives us her view of Christmas, a jaded cynical view which appears to be Simmonds’s since it appears in all her books, a time of boozy pub goers, and cash till ringing up phenomenal sales, and she wishes all of her relatives captious or spiteful presents, for example a lizard-skin belt for her trendy stepmother, but a size too small… etc.
• In the last strip George and Wendy are in bed when they’re woken by their youngest, Benji, who has a tummy ache and wants a story. Wendy dozes listening to George’s voice reading the story but… which suddenly gives a jolt, becomes very adult, and starts talking George’s characteristic pseudo-intellectual twaddle. Sneaking downstairs Wendy is astonished to find that Father Christmas is in the front room sharing a drink with her husband.

A lot of information, isn’t it, a lot of stories? Not many are funny, most spark. at most, a wry smile of recognition. Some puzzled me with their curious lack of purpose. But there is no doubt that having read all of them carefully, you do build up quite a deep sense of the Weber family and their children and friends and circle and a slightly mocking affection for their well-intentioned foibles.

I think little Benji is my favourite character. All things considered, I think I’d like a piece of chocolate cake, a balloon and a carry home.

Credit

All images are copyright Posy Simmonds. All images are used under fair play legislation for the purpose of analysis and criticism. All images used are freely available on the internet.

Related links

• Mrs Weber’s Omnibus on Amazon

Other Posy reviews

• Mrs Weber’s Diary (1979)
• True Love (1981)
• Pick of Posy (1982)
• Very Posy (1985)
• Pure Posy (1987)
• Mustn’t Grumble (1993)
• Gemma Bovery (1999)
• Literary Life (2003)
• Tamara Drewe (2007)
• Cassandra Darke (2018)

• Posy Simmonds: A Retrospective @ the House of Illustration