| Title | Forty Fourth Series | | Original Price | £2.95 | | Date Cartoons Start | // | Date Cartoons End | // | | Number of Cartoons | 91 | | Published by | Daily Express Publications | ISBN | 0-85079-212-6 |
Introduction by - Magnus Magnusson, KBE It’s the Giles family
that gets me. They are so family. They are so gloriously, anarchically his
that there could be no other family like them anywhere, and yet they
somehow manage to be everybody’s family.
Nobody’s granny could be
as awful as Grandma Giles, and yet there is something about her that is
every indomitable granny who ever lived. The long-suffering mother, the
self-absorbed teenagers, the hypochondriac Auntie Vera, the demonic
children and their hapless pets — they are all hilariously over the top,
yet with all the elements of family life so sharply sensed and so utterly
recognisable that the heart warms while the stomach heaves into laughter.
Of course it’s the
little details lurking round the edges of the main subject of the cartoon
that betray the special Giles hallmark: the baby unobtrusively strangling
the cat, poor old Mum trying to do a mountain of ironing with one foot in
the dog’s dinner, Grandma tipping some gin into her bedtime cocoa. Giles
crams the whole rich messy tapestry of life into one frame and makes us
all laugh at ourselves, happy at knowing that we’re not alone.
It’s easy to forget, for
those of us besotted with the Giles family, that Giles himself is at home
anywhere in the world where human foibles and fashions could do with a bit
of gentle mockery. Giles is as much at home at Ascot and Henley as he is
among the lager louts at a football match or when he is taking an
irreverent look at politicians and statesmen, despots and tycoons — and
all the rest of us.
But why waste my breath? I
cannot imagine anyone stopping to read this when they can plunge straight
into these joyous pages to see what Giles has been getting up to this
year. . . .
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