Happy #NationalBurgerDay everybody! And there's really only one story I can tell today...
Let's look back at the Wimpy Bar!
The Wimpy chain originally began in 1934 in Chicago. The name was inspired by the character of J. Wellington Wimpy from the Popeye cartoons created by E. C. Segar.
And in 1954 the company sold a license to J. Lyons & Co - owners of the Lyons Corner House - to use the Wimpy name in the United Kingdom.
Fast food was finally coming to Britain!
For twenty years Wimpy was the dominant hamburger chain in the UK. McDonald's would not enter the British market until 1974, followed two years later by Burger King.
Wimpy built on the Lyons Corner House business model of fast table service for people wanting a quick meal: no cutlery, pre-packaged condiments and a wipe-clean table.
Sounds a bit like Nandos...
The Wimpy Bar was a well known feature of many towns and cities in Britain and Ireland throughout the 70s and 80s. In July 1977, the business was acquired by United Biscuits.
Under this new management Wimpy began to phase out table service and adopted the more traditional counter service of rivals McDonald's.
Wimpy's UK mascot was Mr Wimpy, an orange figure dressed as an oversized Beefeater. He was famous enough to feature in his own video game.
And no children's party was complete without a Mr Wimpy surprise: normally a badge and a comic rather than a personal appearance alas.
Wimpy did have some bizarre ideas though. In the early 1970s it stopped admitting unaccompanied women after midnight as they might be prostitutes. In protest the Wembly Women's Lib group stormed the Golders Green branch after midnight demanding to be served!
In 1989 Wimpy was sold to Grand Metropolitan, who began converting many of them into more profitable Burger King outlets.
Around 70 Wimpy Bars still exist in the UK today, now owned by South African company Famous Brands.
In its heyday the Wimpy Bar was the place to go. Even Phil Lynott hung out there.
Perhaps in retrospect Wimpys wasn't the true taste of America was yearning for. But we loved it regardless, because it was there and it was ours.
Wimpy was the home of the Shanty Salad, the Big Bender and the lethal Brown Derby dessert. For many people it was a childhood right of passage and one of the few exciting places to visit on their local High Street.
Its glory days will never fade. Wimpy - Twitter sales you!
(Fun fact: Paul Darrow reprised his role as Avon from Blakes 7 for a 1985 Wimpy ad:
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Many readers have asked me over the years what my definition of pulp is. I've thought about it a lot, and the definition I keep coming back to... well it may surprise you.
Let me try and set it out.
There are lots of definitions of pulp out there: in books, in academic papers and on the web. And most circle back to the same three points: the medium, the story type and the method of writing.
Pulp is of course a type of cheap, coarse paper stock. Its use in magazine production from the 1890s onwards led to it becoming a shorthand term for the kind of fiction found in low cost story magazines.
let's take a look at the extraordinary work of Victorian illustrator and cat lover Louis Wain!
Louis Wain was born in London in 1860. Although he is best known for his drawings of cats he started out as a Victorian press illustrator. His work is highly collectable.
Wain had a very difficult life; born with a cleft lip he was not allowed to attend school. His freelance drawing work supported his mother and sisters after his father died. Aged 23 he married his sisters' governess, Emily Richardson, 10 years his senior.
Over the years a number of people have asked me if I have a favourite pulp film. Well I do. It's this one.
This is the story of Alphaville...
Alphaville: une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution (1965) was Jean-Luc Godard’s ninth feature film. A heady mix of spy noir, science fiction and the Nouvelle Vague at its heart is a poetic conflict between a hard-boiled secret agent and a supercomputer’s brave new world.
British writer Peter Cheyney had created the fictitious American investigator Lemmy Caution in 1936. As well as appearing in 10 novels Caution featured in over a dozen post-war French films, mostly played by singer Eddie Constantine whom Godard was keen to work with.
Al Hartley may have been famous for his work on Archie Comics, but in the 1970s he was drawn to a very different scene: God.
Today in pulp I look back at Hartley's work for Spire Christian Comics - a publisher that set out to spread the groovy gospel...
Spire Christian Comics was an offshoot of Spire Books, a mass-market religious paperback line launched in 1963 by the Fleming H. Revell company. The point of Spire Books was to get religious novels into secular stores, so a move into comic books in 1972 seemed a logical choice.
The idea was to create comic book versions of popular Spire Books like The Cross and the Switchblade; David Wilkinson's autobiographical tale of being a pastor in 1960s New York. It had already been turned into a film, but who could make it into a comic?
It was a phenomenon, spawning a franchise that has lasted over fifty years. It's also a story with many surprising influences.
Today in pulp I look back at a sociological science-fiction classic, released today in 1968: Planet Of The Apes!
Pierre Boulle is probably best known for his 1952 novel Bridge On The River Kwai, based on his wartime experiences in Indochina. So it was possibly a surprise when 11 years later he authored a science fiction novel.
However Boulle had been a Free French secret agent during the war. He was captured in 1943 by Vichy forces in Vietnam and sentenced to hard labour. This experience of capture would shape his novel La Planète Des Singes.