The Situation is Hopeless

By Ronald Searle (Penguin Books)
ISBN: 978-0-67064-731-6 (HB) 978-0-1-4006-312-7 (TPB)

This book includes Discriminatory Content produced for satirical effect.

I should stop watching the news before writing these recommendations…

Sometimes there is simply no need for complex story-telling. Just occasionally the graphic narrative only needs a title and the talents of an artistic phenomenon to convey not just a story, not only shades of depth and texture but also, most magically, the pure emotion of a situation made real with line and colour.

Ronald Searle, globetrotting British expatriate caricaturist and commentator, made pictorial wonders for decades. His surreal and abstract grotesques charmed generations whilst he either made telling points or just made us want to laugh until we burst.

This slim collection of full colour animal drawings, criminally out-of-print (but mercifully readily available and inexpensive from a number of internet-based retailers) was – and remains – one of his dark, sardonic and manic best.

Searle was one of a very gifted few (I’d number Ken Reid, Leo Baxendale, Murray Ball and Hunt Emerson among them) who actually draw funny lines. No matter how little or how much they need to say, they can imbue the merest blot or scratch of ink with character, intent and wicked, wicked will.

During WWII he was a Japanese POW at the infamous Changi Prison. In 1944 the second St Trinian’s cartoon ever was drawn in that hellhole and it survived along with his incredible war sketches to see print once peace broke out. Searle was a slave worker on the Siam-Burma Railroad (a ghastly story for another time and place) and daily risked his life both in making pictures and by keeping them.

His mordantly funny cartoons appeared in many places such as Punch, Lilliput, The Sunday Express, and other collections of his work include Hurrah for St. Trinian’s!, The Female Approach, Back to the Slaughterhouse, The Terror of St. Trinian’s, Souls in Torment, Merry England, etc., The St. Trinian’s Story, Which Way Did He Go? and Pardong m’sieur.

His intensely manic mirthwork has influenced countless other cartoonists. His unique visualisation and darkly comic satirical cynicism in the St. Trinian’s drawings and utterly captivating vision of boarding school life as embodied in the classically grotesque Nigel Molesworth (created with Geoffry Willans for Punch and released to enormous success as Down With Skool!, How to be Topp!, Whizz For Atomms! and Back in the Jug Agane) influenced generations of children and adults, playing its part in shaping our post-war national character and language.

And have I mentioned yet that his drawings are really, really funny?

Featuring such visual delights as ‘Imbecile rodent confident that it has a foolproof claim against the Disney Organization’, ‘Loquacious parrot convinced that it is teaching man a basic vocabulary’, ‘Aggressive chicken applying Kung Fu to a Peking Duck’ and ‘Baby seal under the impression that clubs are centres of social activity’ the 32 masterpieces of edgy madcappery in The Situation is Hopeless could make a brick laugh out loud.

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