Good evening.
London, England, a busy, modern city.
I want to ask you, if I may, tonight, to join me in an experiment.
An experiment to turn back time,
to suspend belief in the here and now,
and journey into the past.
Come with me now, to a London before two wars,
when the city was very different to the one we live in now.
And this house you see behind me
was the London home of one of the most powerful men of this century.
We're filming! LAUGHTER
After the success of Monty Python,
Michael Palin and Terry Jones decided to embark
on a radical, new comedy series.
Set in the heyday of empire,
Ripping Yarns was a series of nine glorious comedy dramas,
broadcast between 1976 and 1979.
Well played, boy, well played!
It featured schoolboys,
soldiers, explorers...
We only left Paddington at 4.30, and I've already lost three men.
..spies...
..and a whole host of mad colonial characters...
Excellent.
..from a long-lost era.
Set her free, Mrs Angell.
LAUGHTER
She is free, dear.
There's been no slavery in this country for donkey's years.
We've used a lot of very conventional establishment attitudes
but undermined them.
Sir. Morrison, I think you know what to do.
A way you could deal with it was with humour.
SINGLE GUNSHOT
THUD
Ripping Yarns took its inspiration from the boys' books and magazines
that were popular up until the Second World War.
I think we were celebrating the British Empire,
and the Boy's Own stories, really. I think they were celebrating that.
Before the days of video games and cartoons,
these stories fuelled the imaginations
of generations of young people.
They were tales full of empire, adventure,
British pluck, danger, derring-do.
And these colossal, larger-than-life heroes.
These are the real ripping yarns.
Until relatively recently, being a boy meant certain things.
You explored the outdoors.
I used to cycle all over the place, without anybody worrying.
We were in the forest, in the woodlands, we knew every tree.
We went wild. We'd be out all day.
'Nowadays, I think people are so worried about letting their children
'go off and do something on their own.'
You had hobbies.
I've got some very good stamps, actually, in my...
I used to get lots of stamps on approval.
Then, I realised, if I didn't write back within a week, I'd bought them.
So my father had to take me to one side and say,
stamp collecting can lead you into dangerous, dangerous ways,
rack and ruin.
St Kitts and Nevis. Natal.
Falkland Islands, unmarked.
You were expected to be resilient.
After the war, there was very little around.
And life was pretty grim.
I think that was very much the ethos to deal with the difficult times,
to make yourself a man, harden yourself up.
You respected the establishment, and you were proud to be British.
It was inculcated into us
at primary school that we were right at the heart of this empire.
We were told it was the biggest empire ever.
So, when they sat down to write what would become Ripping Yarns,
Palin and Jones looked back to their childhoods.
Compared to the groovy '70s,
the world they grew up in,
so steeped in old-fashioned pluck and Victorian values,
seemed ripe for mockery.
It was my brother who suggested we do stories from Boy's Own Paper.
All this stuff that I'd giggled at, at the back of the class in school,
these heroic attitudes.
Actually, you can see it all from a different perspective.
There's quite a lot in it which was ridiculous, absurd,
which humour could deal with.
CLASS SINGS: # My school, my school... #
The first of the Ripping Yarns was Tomkinson's Schooldays.
Sorry, Grayson.
You can call me School Bully.
You miserable little tick.
I went to a public school, and I remember
I was given a book before I went there.
My father said, "This is a book about the school, old boy."
It was called The Bending of a Twig. ALEXANDER LAUGHS
And it was all about some boy,
some young lad of initiative and individuality,
who had been sent to the school.
And then, gradually, been worn down
to become the useful member of society he was to be later on.
It was called The Bending of a Twig.
It was all really about what the schools were about,
which was getting people and giving them discipline.
CANE THWACKS
'Everything about the place seemed designed to crush the soul,
'and break down any reserve of pride I ever had.'
Thank you, Foster.
Next, please.
'Beating the headmaster was just one of those ghastly...'
Changing their nature, very slightly.
Well, turning them into, sort of, conformists.
Useful cogs. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
I think Tomkinson's Schooldays came out of Mike being horrified
when his parents sent him to boarding school.
I think there's a lot of bile in that, you know.
And I think that's what it came from.
The cruelty of it.
Oh, Lord, we give thee humble and hearty thanks for this,
thy gift of discipline.
Knowing that it is only through the constraints of others
that we come to know ourselves.
And only through true misery can we find true contentment.
LAUGHTER
Tomkinson's Schooldays pokes fun at the school story.
These tales, usually set in boys' public schools,
were popularised by the legendary Boy's Own Paper,
but appeared in hundreds of other books and magazines too.
Whether written in 1910 or 1950,
the school story never strayed far from a tried-and-tested formula.
The school story has only a few ingredients.
Public school.
Group of chums.
And an arch enemy, usually an evil headmaster,
or possibly a school bully.
There were always a few scrapes and, quite often,
a bit of healthy sporting rivalry.
And that's pretty much it.
These ingredients remain unchanged
for decade after decade after decade,
as comforting and reassuring as a mug of hot cocoa.
It's hard to convey just how popular these stories were.
They appeared weekly in The Boy's Own Paper,
and in scores of copycat magazines, like Magnet, Gem and Chums.
We need to understand what a central part of youth culture they were.
We have one survey from St Pancras in the 1930s
which found that 86% of boys were reading at least one magazine a week
and an astonishing 15% said that they were reading
six boys' weeklies every week.
Typically, stories were serialised first in the boys' weeklies,
and later published in book form, thus launching a writer's career.
One bestselling writer, almost totally forgotten today,
was Talbot Baines Reed, known as Tibbie.
He wrote the wildly popular Fifth Form At St Dominic's.
I say wildly popular, this sold over a quarter of a million copies
in 1907 alone. Absolutely fantastic book.
I'm going to read you a little bit from chapter four.
' "Well bowled, Sir, shouted Master Paul,"
'as a very swift ball from Ricketts
'took Bullinger's middle stump clean out of the ground.
' "Rattling well bowled, I say." '
You see, to us, that sounds very comical.
This is a dashed bad show, I must say.
But you have to remember, at the time,
this kind of language of the school stories was widely copied.
That's it, good egg, good egg.
Much like American slang might be picked up, like "toodley"
by children watching cartoons today.
There were "bounders of the remove" and "rotters of the fourth".
Boys "swanked" and "gassed",
and said things like, "I say", "ripping" and...
Oh, my hat!
This was a private language,
that set children apart from the boring world of adults.
The most prolific writer of school stories was Charles Hamilton,
also known as Frank Richards, Clifford Owen, Owen Conquest,
and several other pseudonyms.
Charles, Frank, Martin, whatever you want to call him,
is estimated to have written 100 million words in his lifetime.
He began a lengthy career in 1908
with a story written for the Magnet magazine, later published as a book.
Richards' character, Billy Bunter, the Fat Owl of the Remove,
is probably the most famous of all his creations.
Look out, here comes Quelch.
We look at someone like Charles Hamilton, Frank Richards,
and look at how much he is writing. It is absolutely extraordinary.
Bunter! Argh!
We're talking about, over his lifetime,
the equivalent of 1,000 full-length novels.
He's said to have invented somewhere between 50 and 100 different schools
using his various pseudonyms.
He's got these whole school stories, churning out thousands of words,
perhaps 70,000 words a week.
He is absolutely extraordinary. How can that not be pap?
'How I long to be able to hop like the second-year boys.
'And not to have to ask permission to breathe out after 10.30.'
Much of the magic of the school story came from its depiction
of arcane rules and rituals.
'There was also the compulsory fight with the grizzly bear
'which all new boys had to go through.'
You have this idea that the boy arrives on day one
and has to be broken, frankly.
Whether it's the bullying or the fagging,
or being made to stand on a table and sing a solo,
all that kind of thing is all about eradicating
what the boy was like before.
Just get rid of all of that, begin again,
and you can be made, remade in the image of the school.
Physical hardship and the occasional flogging
were all part of the fabric of school life.
Corporal punishment wasn't just regarded as
a necessary evil in schools,
but as an actual benefit to the boys.
It was character forming.
No pupil could hope to gain the respect of his peers
until he had been given six of the best.
Hello, Mumsy.
What he needs is a damned good thrashing. Clive, please.
He needs the skin taken off his back
with a triple-thonged, bamboo-backed leather strip.
That's what he needs.
'And there was St Tadger's Day when, by an old tradition,
'boys who had been at the school for less than two years,
'were allowed to be nailed to the walls by senior pupils.
I dare say, there was no nailing to the walls going on?
No nailing to the walls, but
they only stopped just short of that. THEY LAUGH
But what I liked in Tomkinson's Schooldays was that
you could do it with a twist,
so it wasn't that the boys were nailed to the walls,
it was that the boys were ALLOWED to be nailed to the walls. Yes.
That was a privilege. That was good, you got on in school.
PHONE RINGS
School bully.
Casting a dark shadow over the proceedings was the school bully.
'He had twice won the Public Schools Bullying Cup.
'And, last year, beat the extraordinarily vicious
'Ackroyd of Charterhouse at a kick-in of fags at the Hurlingham Club.'
In those days, people would say bullying was part of school,
"You'll find that, old boy, you'll have to deal with it."
Thank you, thank you, bully.
In Tomkinson, parents sent their children to that school
to be bullied by him, because he had won the Public Schools Bullying Cup.
So that was an observation, really, on where we were
with the kind of social attitudes at the time.
BICYCLE BELL
SPORTS TEAMS SHOUT
Of course, many a school story centres around
some kind of sporting contest.
Encouraging fair play and hard, physical combat
was seen as a vital part of education.
Oh!
CRASH
He won!
He's bloody won!
HE WHIMPERS
HE SHOUTS WITH JOY
The very first issue of The Boy's Own Paper in 1879
kicked off with a story called My First Football Match.
For the next 90-odd years,
the paper ran articles on almost every sport you can think of.
From the obvious ones - cricket, rugby and hockey -
to the more obscure, like Harrow Footer and the Eton Wall Game.
'Both sides push and shove, and heave and tug.'
There was this tremendous emphasis on physical education and on games.
That's why there's so much about rugby and cricket
because these are believed to be healthy.
And in the correspondence column of the Boy's Own Paper,
you get so many requests about, "How can I get stronger?
"How can I grow to be a taller boy?
"How can I become more muscular?"
And so on, so there's a terrific concern there about manliness -
how can we become more manly?
After 12 and a half miles,
I saw Venner of 5A fall and die of exhaustion.
And after 17 miles,
he was joined by Apsley, Critworth PE, Spitwell,
Emerson and Zappa Major.
This interest in sport was all part of a more general
pre-occupation with the physical.
I'm going to read you this fantastic little thing, Gorilla Hunters by
RM Ballantyne, and there's a passage here that sums it up pretty well.
He says, "Boys ought to practise leaping off heights into deep water.
"They ought never to hesitate to cross a stream on a narrow,
"unsafe plank for fear of a ducking.
"They ought never to decline to climb a tree to pull fruit,
"merely because there is a possibility of their falling off
"and breaking their necks.
"I firmly believe that boys were intended to encounter
"all kinds of risks in order to prepare them to meet
"and grapple with the risks
"and dangers incident to man's career with cool,
"cautious self-possession -
"a self-possession founded on experimental knowledge
"of the character and powers of their own spirits and muscles."
Of course, risk-taking these days in the 21st century
is something that is thought to be avoided at all costs.
It's a big part of the Boy's Own literature as well, actually,
the necessity of risk and embracing risk,
facing up to it and not avoiding it. Yeah, it was definitely part of it.
You should learn these things, and you learn the hard way.
I mean discomfort was very important
because life is going to be uncomfortable.
What are those, Uncle Jack? Oh, they're buboes, lad.
A touch of bubonic plague I picked up at the weekend.
Gosh, weren't you scared?
A bit of bubonic plague? I should say not.
As long as you get a rabid dog to lick the poison out.
Do you want to see the rats? Oh, rather. Go on, then.
Oh, that's rather good.
'Alongside school stories and sport,
'one of the big features of the Boy's Own Paper
'was the hobbies pages.'
What is that, Tomkinson?
It's a model icebreaker, sir.
It's a bit big for a model, isn't it?
It's a full-scale model, sir.
The Boy's Own Paper had a very high kind of interactive quality to it.
You could turn to the pages of how to make things, do-it-yourself,
and in these, you could make a toy yacht, a toy fire engine, furniture.
They have to make their own patterns, diagrams,
cut things out, heat wood, bend it, do all kinds of things with
apparatus that we would have no idea how to use today.
Hobbies were very important,
they were part of the established sort of way of growing up.
My father had been a great collector of birds' eggs which,
of course, now you wouldn't be allowed to take...
No, absolutely not. ..these little birds' eggs.
I went for the more predictable things. I was a trainspotter.
I also collected cheese labels.
Dad was a keen collector of stamps, so he got me going.
I collected only stamps in the British Empire.
There was no room for dullards on the hobbies pages.
They provided a stern test for the boy reader.
One of the things that I love about the Boy's Own Paper
is the way that it assumes that boys are really competent
and can be trusted with all kinds of equipment in ways that health
and safety in schools today would find absolutely shocking.
When they're preserving insects, for instance,
they're told from the very beginning that the chemist might not
sell you this because it's a dangerous poison and if he does
sell it to you, you have to be careful about how you store it
and make sure that nobody else can get it.
The Boy's Own Paper's hobbies pages had a particular
focus on science,
although there was nothing dry or classroom-y
in the way they wrote about it.
They cleverly wrapped up scientific concepts in articles
about popular hobbies
so you would learn about fluid dynamics in an article
about boat-building, or about zoology in an article about collecting insects
and, of course, it was all done with such breathless enthusiasm
that no boy could fail to be captivated.
Now, I've come here to the Royal Institution in London to conduct
an experiment that was first written up in the Boy's Own Paper in the 1880s.
So, what do you make of my spiders? I think they're fantastic.
'I'm joined by Dr Peter Wothers,
'from Cambridge University no less,
'to have a go at making exploding spiders.'
We're sort of following a recipe from a Boy's Own Paper
from the 1880s.
This is written by a chemist, John Scoffern.
And it's sold as a jape.
Basically, you make your spider here and he even says,
"You can stick it by means of a gum to the wall," and then
when your maiden aunt comes in and thinks there's
a spider on the wall, she reaches for her parasol,
gives it a prod and the result is very funny.
Now, we need the chemical part which is trying to make these things
explode. What is the compound we're going to be putting in there?
So, it's something called nitrogen triiodide, which is
an incredibly sensitive explosive.
I mean, in fact, it can't be used as an explosive
because you can't move it once it's been made.
So, how are you going to do that? What's the process?
So, I'm going to go away and make it and prepare it wet,
but as soon as it's dried, it's pretty unstable stuff.
Now, what's extraordinary, and I think laudable,
is that in a Boy's Own Paper, they're being entrusted with
the recipe for making this extremely unstable compound.
I mean, would you ever get this happening now?
Would any child be allowed to put this together themselves now?
I can't see today's chemistry sets telling you exactly how to
make this sort of compound.
We can't show you how the compound is made -
it's apparently too dangerous -
so you're going to have to look at a picture of spiders now.
And another picture.
And another. Good, aren't they?
You see, in the 1880s,
they didn't really bother with health and safety.
Once Peter returns with the explosive compound,
it's time to load up our spiders.
Careful not to drop any little bits. Right.
Is that a good quantity in there, do you think,
or should we do a bit more?
Let's have a little bit more, just don't knock the other ones.
And I wouldn't scrape too hard.
PETER LAUGHS
That's a nervous laugh, isn't it?
It's a "I've seen this before" laugh.
OK, good. Right.
So, Peter, we've both been issued with a standard issue
maiden aunt's parasol with which to prod the spiders.
So, shall I attack the first one? Yeah, attack the first one.
OK, let's give it a prod, then.
Oh!
THEY LAUGH
Yeah, that worked.
I tell you what, it's upset this one here but these... Here's a leg.
Oh, there we are, a little memento for me. Yeah.
You need a bit of a... Oh!
I wasn't doing it hard enough.
You're getting good at it now.
And if the boy reader made a mistake -
he couldn't get his spiders to explode,
or he had some other burning question,
he would send a letter to the editors of the paper,
asking for help.
They'd never publish the letters, so you'd just get the reply
so you had to kind of try
and work out what the query might have been and this is from
Boy's Own Paper, it must have been about sort of just before the war.
First War, that is, and there's just a couple here cos they're
so wonderful. "Fred L..." They'd always identify the writer.
"Fred L, one, by all means remove your moustache
"if you're only five feet high.
"It may not help your growth, but there's no harm in trying it."
What are we doing here?
"At any rate, you're sure of a little fresh air when you let it grow."
And then, "Two, it makes no difference
"if you do not overtire yourself." That's it.
So, they're just wonderful
and there's a last one here which is just, again, a lovely non-sequitur.
It's called Swallow and it has one -
"The birds must have been included in the catalogue in error.
"They're certainly not British..." It was always a very admonitory term.
"..and have never been recognised as such."
And then, "Two, have a cold bath every morning.
"Wash yourself all over, head and all."
What's that got to do with swallows? But, anyway.
The idea of the cold bath, so beloved by the Boy's Own Paper,
was first popularised by its no-nonsense correspondent
Dr Gordon Stables.
A former Arctic explorer, naval surgeon, and fanatical caravanner,
Stables had some very trenchant opinions.
He was a health nut - advocating fresh air,
lifting dumb-bells, never smoking...
..and, of course, endless cold bathing.
Take a cold tub, sir.
This is what Stables would recommend to all his readers
on a very regular basis.
In fact, a cold bath was his remedy for any kind of affliction,
whether psychological or physical.
In fact, he even advised working boys to rise at five,
scrub themselves down in a cold tub so they could get dressed,
comb their hair and be at work for six.
Ah! That is...
Ah!
OK, here goes.
ALEXANDER GASPS
Nee!
Ah!
Jeez-ha-ha!
I can feel my character building before your very eyes.
I think that's probably enough of that.
Time to get dressed, comb my hair and I can be at work by six.
The cold tub was something he advised as a remedy
for another sort of problem that worried many of his teenage readers.
Stables speaks of nervousness and certain debilitating habits
learnt at school that led to trouble that can never be shaken off.
He was referring, of course, to the menace of self-abuse.
The correspondence pages of the Boy's Own Paper are filled
with dire warnings of what might happen to boys who gave in to
these dangerous and unnatural urges.
"Those habits lead thousands to misery and illness,
"and often to death or insanity.
"You will ruin your constitution
"and earn for yourself a miserable manhood.
"Such habits often end in lunacy and suicide.
"Don't trust to quacks or men who send out pamphlets and advertise.
"Banish madness from your mind and leave the dog alone."
To our modern ears, these letters make for pure comedy,
but at the time, this was serious stuff.
The whole of British society was worried.
I will not have the trappings of whoremongery
and free-loveism under this roof. No, don't touch it. Turn away, woman.
Unless it arouses you to unseemly lubricity.
This is the devil's work!
People tried all sorts of weird and wonderful means
to prevent themselves becoming aroused.
These are called Jugum penises and... They're called what?
SHE LAUGHS
The great name of Jugum penises. Jugum?
Jugum, and they were designed to prevent what the Victorians
called "spermatorrhoea", a slightly deadly term that essentially
means the unnecessary loss of semen.
I suppose they felt there was a finite supply.
Well, it was held in very high regard
and what they thought was this unnecessary loss would make you ill,
so spermatorrhoea caused a very wide range
of debilitating diseases, both physical and mental.
And how does this work? Let's just get down to the nitty-gritty.
It's got a kind of bicycle clip.
It would've been worn at night and the idea being that,
should the sleeper become unnaturally aroused,
shall we say, the pain would wake you up
because you would engage with these teeth round the edge.
Right, OK.
There were a number of different contraptions all along similar
lines, through to whole body suits that you could wear to
bed at night, we think, that had flaps at various strategic
points that could be closed or opened, accordingly.
What are you making, mother?
Something that will cover the entire human body, dear.
You say there was a school of thought,
it becomes almost more than that,
it becomes almost the rule that you must, at all costs, avoid.
So, this was really taken up, not just within medical circles,
but by moralists, educators...
The word we come across again and again is self-pollution.
Self-pollution. Self-pollution.
So, here we've got, representing the last stage of mental
and bodily exhaustion from onanism or self-pollution.
I mean, surely, that just passes though.
That's only for a couple of days...and then he's
back on his feet again.
I mean, it could kill you, the effects could be...
But this is just, I mean, this is nonsense, isn't it?
How extraordinary. Or is it? Are you here to tell me otherwise?
Well, no, I think it sort of fuelled this anxiety and it snowballed
so everybody was terrified of the effects that this might have.
Over the years, the tone of the letters pages mellowed a little.
In the '30s,
personal issues were dealt with in a column called The Padre's Talk,
and in the '40s, by Between Ourselves.
But the advice remained much the same.
May I touch you, Captain? No!
It's bad enough with a girl, but you're a...you're a man.
Sexual thoughts were to be avoided.
Part of what the Ripping Yarns were were the things that were
unexpressed, you know.
There was a certain level of repression,
a certain level of real sexual hang-ups, that we
just touched on because you weren't allowed to touch on them
so even just referring to them made them funny.
Well, Mr Russell, since you are a man,
maybe it'll be all right for me to...
rub something on them.
Keeping boys' energies focused on innocent and improving pursuits
was one of the aims of the boys' weeklies.
In the Boy's Own Paper, much was made of the importance of bracing
outdoor activities, such as natural history, gardening and hiking.
They wanted to produce a kind of wholesome image of boyhood
that was exciting as well.
They wanted the boys to go out, to exercise, to play games,
to get involved in sport, to climb trees with jack-knifes,
to take risks, to be what we now think of as proper boys.
This focus on the great outdoors
had grown out of turn-of-the-century concerns
about the malign influence of cities.
Many people believed the country was going to the dogs,
locked into a toxic cycle of physical and moral degeneration.
After decades of industrialisation, the cities were growing
and, along with them, a huge urban underclass - poorly fed,
unfit and, it was believed, steeped in crime and immorality.
There was a kind of question in society, you know,
had the grit of the modern boy become somehow diminished?
Hello, you, boy, in the corner there. You ought to be a Boy Scout.
You're a fine-looking fella and I know you would make a jolly,
good backwoodsman by the look of you.
You're ugly enough, anyway.
Robert Baden-Powell, a columnist for the Boy's Own Paper,
founded the Scout Movement in 1908 with
the explicit intention of improving the calibre of the modern boy.
Baden-Powell hoped that by creating a youth movement
built around the countryside, about camping and wood craft,
that this would counteract the evil effects of the city
and improve the health of the nation's youth.
As well as encouraging their readers to get outdoors,
the boys' weeklies provided plenty of manly role models
to inspire them.
The strong, intrepid, outdoorsy hero is a recurring figure in boys'
fiction and, of course, nobody was more celebrated than the explorer.
Whether he was conquering the Arctic wastes or fighting his way
through the Amazon, the explorer's every move was minutely
charted by boys' books and magazines.
So, what's your expedition looking for?
Well, we're looking to see if there's a channel, a river
passage, linking the Ganges with the Brahmaputra River through Bhutan.
But this is Maidenhead.
The figure of the explorer loomed large in popular culture
until well into the 20th century.
I wanted to be an explorer from very early on,
I mean, nine or ten years old, that's what I wanted to do.
And I read stories of great explorers,
especially people who disappeared.
I don't know why I was fascinated by people who were never seen again.
There were stories like Fawcett, Colonel Fawcett.
He went to the Amazon and was never seen again.
As someone said, "Dead, believed eaten."
In 1953, I was ten years old, and that's when Everest was climbed.
Someone had gotten to the top of the highest mountain.
They'd found the source of the Amazon and the Nile
and that sort of thing, so there was very little left.
But the idea of exploration appealed to me greatly and I think it was not
just because they were brave men
but they were going to places that no-one had ever seen before.
The Boy's Own Paper published stirring tales like
In the Power Of The Pygmies and Nearly Eaten
in which a professor escapes
from a horde of voodoo-worshipping cannibals in Haiti.
Explorer novels like King Solomon's Mines
were a fixture on every boy's bookshelf.
Tales like these, usually set in remote outposts of the Empire,
provided readers with a heady mix of exoticism and danger.
The polar explorer, Rear Admiral Sir Vincent Smythe-Obelson.
Applause! Applause!
Polar exploration was a recurring theme for the Boy's Own Paper.
It printed no less than 17 articles on Scott of the Antarctic,
particularly the ill-fated Terra Nova expedition which took
the lives of Scott and his comrades.
Scott and Oates, in particular,
were really raised as the pre-eminent heroes in Britain
on the eve of the First World War
and the Boy's Own Paper played a significant part in that process.
They actually published a special plate of Captain Oates with
a line saying, "This plate of Captain Oates should find
"an honoured place in the den of every BOP reader."
And not all these explorer heroes were grown men.
In the 1920s,
we were introduced to James Marr, the 18-year-old boy scout
who accompanied Ernest Shackleton on a trip to the Antarctic.
The story of the expedition written by Marr himself was serialised
in Chums magazine and then later published as a book in 1923.
It must have been the most incredible adventure for this
young 18-year-old scout, but I imagine no picnic.
He was working as a normal member of the crew, working day and night.
Judging by the way he's writing it,
he's certainly in the teeth of it all,
he's getting the full experience.
Listen to this, "Wednesday, 28th December, 1921.
"The gale had increased to hurricane violence.
"It was a grand sight to watch those foam-decked mountains of water
"bear down upon us." I bet it was.
"The ship rose on top of them like a cork
"and then down the other side." Woo-hoo!
That's tough, that's really tough.
And remember, as I say, he's 18 years old.
I suppose if anyone questioned the sense of sending an 18-year-old
scout off on a trip like this, I suppose here's your answer.
He's getting a fantastic education sort of borne out
through his even-handed prose.
Unless, of course, maybe he was actually just writing,
"O-M-G, I was bricking it last night in those high seas,"
and maybe it just got back to base and somebody just put a red line
through it and wrote it in a slightly more Boy's Own style.
But I doubt it.
It's explorers like these -
cool to the last and indifferent to danger -
that Palin and Jones' affectionately sent up in the fifth Yarn.
In 1927, Captain Walter Snetterton,
least loved of all English explorers,
decided to go across the Andes by frog.
We are the expedition from England. I'm Captain Snetterton.
Wonderful characters.
Pervious to anything.
Mr Gregory, those frogs have been in training for months.
They're mentally and physically at their peak, a delay could be fatal.
The thing about Snetterton was, actually, that he
represents a certain type of traveller and explorer, of which
there are many around still who want to make it difficult for themselves.
I shall stay here until this frog expedition has achieved
everything it set out to achieve.
Everyone wants to be the first to do something to do something really,
really difficult which is actually, in a way, quite admirable.
I think there's something very British
and something rather good about the British kind of...
Well, we could call it...
Some would call it silliness, others would say it's independence
and testing yourself,
so he was just really that kind of explorer who'd chosen to do the most
difficult thing which was to actually ride across the Andes on a frog.
The glory days of British exploration may be over,
but there are still a few explorers out there.
I've come to Dorset to meet
the founder of Operation Raleigh, John Blashford Snell.
In his time, he's fought bandits, searched for meteorites in Bolivia,
and taken a grand piano through the South American jungle.
Careful with the frogs!
Ah, Alexander, I presume. Good morning. How very good to meet you.
Wow!
How many expeditions have you been on? Do you keep a tally?
I don't keep a tally,
but somebody told me the other day it's over 100 now. Over 100.
Do you have a particular favourite expedition?
The most dramatic one, without a doubt,
was the Blue Nile in 1968 where we literally had to fight our way
out from bandits and so on and there were crocodile attacks
and that type of thing.
You are very much in the tradition of the Great British explorer.
Do you see yourself in that? Not really, no! A nutcase, I think!
No, I suppose going back to the days of Stanley and Livingstone,
they were a little bit eccentric, probably, by modern standards.
'John's inspiration was General Gordon
'and the great Victorian explorers Stanley and Livingstone.'
These are some great heroes that I had as a young man,
who featured in the Boy's Own Paper and so on.
I remember my grandmother used to read it to me. Really?
And there were lots of things I learned from it.
I can remember in particular with Boy's Own Paper,
they taught you about making things. Yes.
I remember making a crystal radio with the instructions that
were given. You found the bits and pieces you needed?
Yeah, you made them and you can buy a few bits, but you didn't need much.
The other thing was photography.
I developed an early interest in photography and my mother,
as a result of that, gave me my first camera and there it is.
With that, I took all my first pictures.
Then, of course, everyone had to have a knife.
Nowadays, that would be frowned on.
And my first knife was given to me by my mother again.
This was a very old sheath knife, as a Boy Scout.
Yeah. And Scouts were very much part of...
My father had been a Scoutmaster and my mother had been a Guide Mistress.
A friend of mine had one of these on the Blue Nile in 2005
when his inflatable boat was attacked by a crocodile.
And so that was very useful in defence.
'During the Second World War,
'the young John made his own contribution to the war effort.'
Tell me about your Home Guard.
Well, where I was brought up, in Herefordshire, of course,
we were very concerned with making sure the Hun didn't overrun
Herefordshire and so we recruited a gang of choirboys
and choirgirls and armed them to the teeth.
Of course, Boy's Own Paper had taught us all how to make bows
and arrows, and we had spears, and we would go off everywhere,
looking for any signs of the Hun and we were...
The ARP, as they were called, used to encourage us to look for spies.
I imagine the ARP were rather glad.
Well, our job was to... If the Germans had invaded,
our job was to carry messages on our bicycles
and we had a little pouch and you were told that you had to take
this message from A to B if all the telephones stopped working.
Luckily, it didn't get to that state.
It was rather frustrating at the end of the war
when the Germans hadn't invaded!
'The Boy's Own paper was more than mere entertainment.
'It taught real practical life lessons
'to boys like the young John.'
Such was Victoria's empire, a way of life, a state of mind,
and whatever one thought of it, a mighty powerful,
impressive structure, millions upon millions, all together,
under the flag upon which the sun never sets.
But while Boy's Own tales inspired and improved
generations of readers, there was a more troubling aspect to them.
Set in far flung parts of the empire, many stories featured exotic
foreign people who were rarely seen in a very flattering light,
compared to the British.
What's the matter with them?
Ah, yes. Um... I'm not quite sure, actually.
One of the tricks,
if you like, of the stories is that fair play is endlessly
repeated as an English quality, or a British quality,
so it is characteristic of the portrayal of foreigners in
the boys' weeklies that they are duplicitous, that they
are scheming, that they are liars, and this is endlessly
contrasted with the upstanding proper English gentleman.
The papers had story after story featuring plucky
British Empire gents bestowing wisdom
and benevolence on grateful native populations.
There is something just a little bit maddening about this constant
hectoring tone that you get in some of the writing.
By no means all of it, but just a tone that suggests that
Britain knows best and the rest of the world should jolly well
be grateful for her civilising influence.
Oh, cor. I thought you were one of the nig-nogs, sir.
I wish you wouldn't call them nig-nogs, Sergeant Major.
They're rational human beings with an indigenous culture
as worthy of respect as our own. Yes, sir.
Of course, we have to put such attitudes into their historical context,
which is very different to our own, but even at the time,
some of the magazines were accused of aggressive imperialism.
For all their racism,
the boys' weeklies are at least quite even-handed
in their treatment of foreigners,
because they disparage all of them.
So an endless cast of foreigners appear.
George Orwell is pretty withering in this brilliant essay
he writes on boys' weeklies. He complains that,
"Foreigners are comics who are put there for us to laugh at.
"They're classified in much the same way as insects."
Then he goes on to list the characteristics
you will invariably find in boys' weeklies. "Frenchman - excitable.
"Wears beard, gesticulates wildly.
"Spaniard, Mexican, etc - sinister, treacherous.
"Arab, Afghan, etc - sinister, treacherous.
"Chinese - sinister, treacherous. Wears pigtail.
"Italian - excitable. Grinds barrel organ or carries stiletto."
These snooty, patronising,
even racist attitudes,
are key to the comedy in Ripping Yarns.
Nice shot, father.
APPLAUSE
Making people laugh is a way of dealing with
a lot of attitudes that we find difficult, and that, I think, is
what sort of pushed us into making them the kind of stories they are.
In many Boy's Own stories
lay a deep-rooted suspicion that Johnny Foreigner was up to no good.
This anxiety reached fever pitch in the early 20th century.
GUNSHOT
The Pathans.
Dave and Edna?
No!
The violent but proud tribe of hill people
who threaten our very existence.
I must go and be kind to them. Don't be silly, dear.
The servants have orders to come and tell us
if there's a Pathan uprising.
LAUGHTER
From the 1890s onwards, there was a growing worry about the threat
of invasion - from France, from Russia, even from the planet Mars,
and these paranoias played out on the pages of boys' literature.
This wonderful magazine, Chums, here, in 1908,
features a story called The Perils Of The Motherland,
a story of war in 1911 - set in the near future - and sees Britain
invaded by Russia. Look at the front cover, here. You can see
the plucky workers of Cradley Heath in the Midlands
fighting off the Russians with staves and hammers,
the Russians, meanwhile, with their rifles and bayonets.
There are these bricks hurling through the air.
You've got to admire those plucky Brits,
some of them just in shirtsleeves.
We have a highly trained force waiting to move into England.
600 vicars, 1,000 shepherds. Two divisions of cockneys.
44 drudges, a dozen eccentrics, 850 private nannies.
'There were lots of stories about spies.
'Almost the best example of this'
are the stories about Billy Bunter and Greyfriars School,
and a lot of those stories, published by The Magnet, around 1910,
are about the peculiar behaviour of people
who are walking along the coast, and they are seen flashing lights,
or they are speaking in funny languages.
It appears in all the papers.
It appears in the newspapers, it appears in public speeches and so on.
There was tremendous anxiety.
And born out of this pre-war paranoia was a new genre of fiction,
the espionage thriller, where one or two resourceful Brits
single-handedly saved the nation from a shadowy foreign threat.
LAUGHTER
MAN WHISPERS: My God, the Kaiser!
You see it in everything, from Erskine Childers' 1903 novel
Riddle Of The Sands...
100,000 German troops towed across the North Sea in barges
and landing on the flats of the Wash on the undefended
east coast of England with a whole grand fleet in support,
and a total element of surprise. Perfect.
..to John Buchan's classic, The 39 Steps...
..the wildly popular
Bulldog Drummond stories...
..and Ian Fleming's James Bond.
And let's not forget Winfrey's Last Case.
In the last four months, I've brought the Balkan wars to end,
averted a revolution in Russia for the second year running,
started a civil war in Persia,
annexed two new colonies...
I've been saving this country every year since 1898 and I need a holiday.
Winfrey is one of those people who, you know,
was very common in comics and literature then.
Someone who'd just solve all the problems of the world just like that,
was so incredibly competent and good and efficient.
Well done, Gerald! You've saved us again.
'And what I quite liked about that is that you've got
'all the top brass of the Army, you know,'
huge amounts of money spent on an army and an air force,
a navy and all that, and yet he just comes in and says,
"You're all wrong. I can do this."
Surely there won't be a war now. I've, er, caught them all for you.
Oh, there will, Gerald.
And it'll be a proper one, thanks to you.
And if this one's successful, they'll want to do a follow-up.
And when war broke out in July 1914,
it started a wave of war stories that would dominate
boys' literature through the next war and beyond.
Famously, or infamously, these magazines have thought,
and rightly thought, I think, to be very jingoistic,
very martial in their attitude to war
and the idea that boys would find war exciting, that they would see
it as an opportunity for adventure and to go off and be boys together.
Across the North Sea steamed the British fleet,
and off the coast of Jutland, they met.
There were inspirational tales of true life heroes,
like 16-year-old Jack Cornwell, fatally wounded
in the Battle of Jutland in 1916, and posthumously awarded a VC.
There were informational articles about uniforms, weapons,
historical battles...
..but, of course, it's impossible to tell a story like this
without referring to the greatest fictional war hero of them all.
Biggles.
Biggles was an air ace in two world wars, a charter pilot,
even an airborne detective.
At his peak, he was the most popular juvenile fiction hero in the world.
I read Biggles when I was 12, actually.
Captain WE Johns wrote Biggles. That's right. Yes.
Very impressed with the "Captain" bit.
But I read, also... I read escape stories from prisoner of war camps.
They were then coming out and people were writing their memoirs.
They were quite nasty stories, some of them, you know.
Bamboo And Bushido - I remember that, which was all about...
What happened in Bamboo And Bushido? It's about the Japanese and how
beastly they were, and the tortures of people in prison camps.
So, actually, weirdly, at quite a young age, I was exposed to
some awful behaviour, but they were very gripping stories.
GERMAN ACCENTS: What about the Red Cross?!
To hell with the Red Cross!
Listen, what's the use of having a war where nobody does anything bad to each other?
But it was the Germans who were the number-one enemy
for generations of boys.
It was perfectly OK to be critical of the Germans,
or to portray the Germans as they had been portrayed in the war,
by our cartoonists and our publicity and all that,
as all being, you know, snarling and dangerous.
Nowadays, we call that racist, but there was no racism then.
That had been identified.
We just fought a war, two wars, against the Germans -
you know, they deserved all they got, sort of thing.
Now, of course, the Germans are seen, quite rightly,
as very reasonable, decent... Of course.
..democrats and all that sort of thing, but at that time,
it was something you could use, and you could use it in comedy.
Although the comedy in Stalag Luft was more about obsessive escaping,
because I'd read so many escape stories.
HE WHISPERS: Ginger!
Ginger! The escape's on!
What? It's on, tonight. Let's go. No, no.
I don't want to go.
Gin... It's the escape!
'Just the idea that the boys all want to have a night's sleep,'
and someone comes round and says, "We're going to escape tonight."
"Oh, no, please - I'm half asleep!"
HW WHISPERS: Carter!
Oh, piss off.
Major Errol Phipps was a legend
among prisoners in the First World War.
He had attempted over 560 escapes,
200 of them before he left England.
On arrival in Germany, he escaped regularly - every day,
and twice a day at weekends.
And in the end, of course, they all escape apart from him.
Apart from him. Even the Germans escape and leave him,
and just as he's about to escape, the war ends.
CHEERING, BELLS TOLLING
Major Phipps became the only man
never to escape from Stalag Luft 112B.
He returned home a broken man,
and died three months later.
He was buried here in Totnes Churchyard,
but his body was found two years later,
over by the fence.
For the Boy's Own Paper and many other boys' weeklies, the war meant
paper shortages, an increase in price and a decline in quality.
I took it myself in the 1940s, and I remember reading it in 1940...
And it was a compact little magazine. I'll tell you what it was like.
It was a bit like a glossy diary.
It was 64 pages, but I looked at a copy only the other day,
and of those 64 pages,
most of them were black-and-white photographs of a sport, of football,
of pop singers, and there were only about 10, 12 pages of fiction.
It was all... It had become a - decent - general magazine.
It was no longer the Boy's Own Paper that it had been founded to be.
By the '60s, the paper was losing both readers and advertisers,
and was facing competition from television.
The magazine finally closed its doors in 1967.
The most famous boys' magazine of all has gone for good,
and Ripping Yarns evokes an era that many people no longer recognise.
Guard, fire!
Not above their heads!
But a few remnants of that world may still remain.
MUSIC: "Land Of Hope And Glory"
# Land of hope... #
'I don't think the world has changed completely from the old...
'the days of the public schools and all that sort of thing.'
Down you go, belly on the floor!
'I mean, near where I live in London, they have military fitness
'classes, where young bankers and lawyers come along to be shouted at
'in very cold weather, and made to run up and down hills.'
One, two, three! Come on!
And they love it. And they love it! They're disappointed if they're...
The old cold-shower regime is still there.
How was that? Felt good?
Once again, love.
What?
Not quite right.