Gervase Phinn: In rude health

My mother was a bit straitlaced about certain things. As a child, I could never understand why she took such a dislike to the apparently innocent and very funny songs of George Formby. When I was 10, I bought a ukulele and it was suggested by the shopkeeper that I might like a copy of The George Formby Song Book to go with it. My mother shook her head. "Rude little man," she said.

I imagined that she was referring to the shopkeeper. For me, an innocent, My Little Stick of Blackpool Rock was about a little stick of Blackpool rock and nothing more. Why should George, singing about "the little ukulele in my hand", offend my mother? She clearly knew what he meant, even if I did not.

When we were on holiday in Blackpool, she would never let us brothers linger outside the shops to read the comic postcards. We would sneak back when she was out of sight to join the many holidaymakers gathered around the shop fronts chuckling at the captions. I never knew what they were laughing at but I joined in.

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There seems to me to be something peculiarly British about our fascination with the rude innuendo and we still cannot resist pausing outside those seaside shops. The illustrations, many by Donald McGill, feature the usual stock characters of busty blondes and nagging wives, henpecked husbands and innocent vicars, honeymooning couples and gormless soldiers. Many depict the vastly overweight woman in tight striped bathing costume usually in the company of an extremely shapely blonde and a small harassed-looking man. One showed such a man poking at a shell and the woman commenting: "He always has trouble getting his winkle out."

George Orwell, in his essay The Art of Donald McGill, considered such postcards – despite what he described as their "overpowering vulgarity" and "the utter low-ness of mental atmosphere" – to be an art form. He argued that they "stand for the worm's eye view of life, for the music hall world where marriage is a dirty joke and a comic disaster, where the rent is always behind and the clothes are always up the spout, where the lawyer is always a crook and the Scotsman always a miser, where the newly-weds make fools of themselves on the hideous beds of seaside lodging houses".

Throughout history there has been a fondness in this country of the rude and the risqu. It is something ingrained in the British character. Some would say that it shapes our humour, politics and even fine art.

Hogarth, "the father of British art", gave us a world of vulgar realism and the outrageous cartoons of Gillray and Cruikshank had all the grossness of human physicality. In the same century, Jonathan Swift, Dean of St Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin and of plain-speaking Yorkshire stock, wrote Gulliver's Travels, arguably the fiercest and rudest attack on humanity ever written. Then there was Laurence Sterne, an Irishman who was vicar of Sutton-on-the Forest when he wrote Tristram Shandy. In this tradition came the music hall's Miss Marie Lloyd with her "naughty" songs and Max Miller who delighted audiences with his blue jokes, Frankie Howerd and Benny Hill, the Carry-on films and Joe Orton, Private Eye and Little Britain. I suggested to my son, Matthew, an artist living in London, that when I am next down there we might go together to the Rude Britannia: British Comic Art exhibition at Tate Britain. "No, dad," he said. "It's a bit on the rude side for you." His grandmother would have been proud of him.

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