Hands up those of you who remember the cartoon character Billy Parallelogram. For decades in the last century he appeared weekly in The Pabulum, a comic which also featured Magnet Boy! The Boy Magnet. Whereas all Magnet Boy! The Boy Magnet’s adventures followed a strict, unchanging formula, you could never guess what might happen in the Billy Parallelogram strip. Sometimes he was accompanied by his cousin, Tilly Dodecahedron, or by the Massed Hordes Of Gruesome And Frightening Things From The Pit Of Foulness.
Sometimes the weekly adventure might be as simplistic as Billy Parallelogram buying an accordion and learning how to play it. There were serial stories, too, spread over two or three months, where Billy Parallelogram would be shown teaching children how to cultivate wheat, or to devise spring, prong and lever mechanisms to automate household tasks, or even to compose majestic symphonies for full orchestra so emotionally charged that listeners would blub into their handkerchiefs. His cousin Tilly Dodecahedron’s appearances often signalled storylines involving bees, turpentine, silhouetteists, farm implements and Dakkadakkadakka. This last was a speciality of the Billy Parallelogram strips, an ill-defined yet curiously unnerving monster goblin with bulging eyes and forehead, seemingly bent on destroying the universe but always distracted by parlour games such as snakes-and-ladders or gluttons-and-rhubarb.
One of Weems’ vile henchmen from the popular cartoon strip “Billy Parallelogram”.
- Horse Begone ( An unfortunate encounter with the Woohoohoodiwoodadooronron Woman )
- Tadeusz Kapisko and his Ears of Wheat
- Dobson in the Land of Nod
- When Haddo-Haddo becomes Musto; Or, The Greaves of Way-O
- Give me a Glossary ( an explanation of “When Haddo-Haddo becomes Musto” )
- Nomenclature of diminuitive persons who plunge down 150-Ft Cliffs and survive with hardly a scratch.
- Billy Parallelogram
- Metal of the week: Tin
- Dietary News ( Foods of the future )
This episode was first broadcast on the 7th September 2005.
