Andy Capp Non-smoker!
Forget Italian masters. Here's the latest sculpture perpetrated in England, unveiled yesterday: Andy Capp by Shropshire sculptress Jane Robbins. Nothing like him! The cap is all wrong for a start. This monstrosity in bronze cost £30,000. And it's politically correct, which Andy never was: he's lost his cigarette! An Andy Capp without a fag in his mouth is like Wallace without Gromit, Batman without Robin, Gordon Brown without Tony Blair.
posted by Unknown @ 29.6.07
8 comments
8 Comments:
It would have helped if she had etched the pattern into the cloth cap, but yes, the shape is OFF. And yes where is the fag? Did andy quit smoking and start wearing a patch?
Not as far as I know. He wouldn't have been Andy Capp if he had.
I stopped smoking on Tuesday. At 10:35, at 11:15, again at 12:20, then at 14:10….. In fact I stopped smoking so many times on Tuesday that it worried me, so I stopped stopping smoking for a couple of days. I didn’t stop smoking at all on Wednesday or Thursday. I have only stopped smoking 3 times today [Friday].
Mark Twain had the last word on this. He said "Giving up smoking is the easiest thing in the world to do. I've done it myself, hundreds of times!"
Actually the later Andy Capp cartoons did show him without the previously ever-present cigarette, so the artist is not wrong on this.
Hi, Private!
I didn't know that. But the classic Andy Capp always had a cigarette dangling from his mouth. Without it, he's a sanitized Andy Capp. That contradicts the whole essence of the creation.
I looked into this further and found out that Andy stopped smoking at the same time his creator, Reg Smythe, did - sadly too late to prevent Smythe from eventually dying of lung cancer. Smythe also stopped depicting Andy beating his wife. Apparently both characters were based on Smythe's own parents.
Interesting. So it wasn't political correctness that sanitized Andy Capp, but Reg Smythe's giving up smoking. He wouldn't want to be reminded of his own need for a cigarette.
Thanks for the information.
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