"Recently my secretary came to work one morning, and she said that her
little boy had come home from school the previous afternoon, had removed
his jacket, had thrown it down on the living room couch, and had said -
Mom, I feel like Charlie Brown... And all of a sudden it occurred to me,
after all these years: this is the purpose of Charlie Brown."
Back to the dawing board: here's more treasure from the BBC Archive, to honour what would have been Charles Monroe Schulz's hundredth birthday today. Buying old Peanuts paperbacks as a child, I felt let into an
unusally adult kind of comedy, at least as funny as, but more emotionally astute than the
anarchic, boggle-eyed output of British kid's comics, and the fact that this comedy's
protagonists were people my age was, in hindsight, incredibly important. It meant you didn't have to be adult to be human. Your
feelings were valid regardless, and not just something to be marked right or
wrong.
I actually miss the tone of these pre-junket-era interviews: "I think the one overwhelming reason why your work is so popular here in
England, where very largely we think of ourselves as being a
Post-Christian Society, is that here's a man who really knows how
terrible life is. Are you happy to be looked at in that way?" asks Peter
France of the author of Happiness Is A Warm Puppy. To which the
answer turns out to be: "Yes."
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