5 July 2004
Mr Benn
This is the second time a Mr Benn has figured on www.mosselabyrinth.co.uk. The first Mr Benn to get in was Tony, the brilliant, indefatigable politician and campaigner, who sent in a list of his 10 favourite books for our Bookfriends pages. Unsurprisingly, his top ten includes Das Kapital.
The second Mr Benn is a character created by David McKee and seen on BBC television in the early 1970s.
I was reminded of Mr Benn by a friend who, for all the time I've known him, has been a minicab driver. Strolling through town the other day I did an absurd double take, seeing him standing behind a butcher's counter. It was as if he had stepped out of one life into another - as if he had taken on another rôle in some play whose script had been changed without my knowledge ...
Now, David McKee's Mr Benn is, apparently, a businessman. He wears a pinstriped suit and a black bowler hat. He exudes bourgeois confidence - stolid, respectable.
But Mr Benn is a fantasist. In each animated episode he visits a fancy-dress shop where he is greeted by a mustachioed shopkeeper who appears 'as if by magic'.
The shopkeeper does not wear a bowler hat. He has a fez, the odd, red felt north African tarboosh with the shape of a truncated cone. I like this differentiation of characters by their hats ...
Anyway, the shopkeeper invites Mr Benn to try on a fancy dress costume in one of the changing rooms at the back of the shop. If you watch the early scenes attentively, you will form some idea of what the costume might be. He might have seen children playing at space explorers - so he will dress as an astronaut. He might have waited for the bus to go by before crossing the road - so he will dress up as a conductor ...
Mr Benn leaves the shop through a magic door at the back of the changing room, entering a world suggested by his costume. He has an adventure in his new rôle - an adventure which, perhaps, the pinstriped and bowler-hatted Mr Benn would have eschewed.
Each adventure ends with the re-appearance of the shopkeeper in the world of the adventure, calling Mr Benn back into the changing room where he must put back on his stolid, respectable costume. Mr Benn leaves the shop and re-enters the street with nothing to show for his adventure but his memories and some small physical souvenir brought back from the other world.
This is good story-telling: open-ended, imaginative, clear. It has a resonance for me because that's how I work - I imagine my characters into situations to see how they will react.
But there is also Mr Benn's mysterious other world ...
Like Mr Benn in his costumed adventure, I truly live inside the Labyrinth ...
