Whilst the majority of entries in the book would probably have had you sent to the headmasters office quicker than a very quick thing, they were certainly all amusing to read and at the very least wish you had the guts to do at school for real.

The kind of things you might find included tips like how to fake an illness to get a day off school, excuses for why you hadn’t done your homework, ways of out smarting the school bully and so on.

There were also some rather amusing fake educational entries, with my favourite being the entry on why fire engines are red, which went something like this:-

• Fire engines have six wheels and six firemen
• Six plus six is twelve
• Twelve inches make a ruler
• Queen Elizabeth was a ruler
• Elizabeth knighted Drake
• Drake sailed the seven seas
• In the seas there are fish
• Fish have fins
• Fins live in Finland
• Finland is next to Russia
• The Russian flag is red
• And that’s why fire engines are red!

OK, some dodgy logic, and sadly no longer true thanks to the Russian flag bit at the very least, but once you’d memorised all that it was one of those great ways of impressing your mates in the school playground.

The book proved incredibly popular, so much so that there were two further volumes published.

The concept proved very popular and as well as several follow up Wally books, it has also been applied to other famous characters, and one of these is Asterix the Gaul, in a book entitled, funnily enough, Where’s Asterix?

Where’s Asterix contains 12 action packed double page scenes in which it is your task to locate the famous French character. To add to the fun each scene also lists a number of other things for you to try and find, turning the book into a game in the process. You award yourself one laurel wreath for everything you find, and two every time you locate Asterix himself. If you manage to attain between 50 and 65 wreaths you can declare yourself a champion Asterix spotter!

The book was originally published in France a few years back, and has finally made it’s way to the UK thanks to Orion publishing, who deal with all the Asterix books in the UK. Since I’m sure a great many younger readers of today will probably not be that familiar with Asterix and his friends, the book also includes a useful introduction showing you what all the funny named characters are, including Asterix’s best friend Obelix and his dog Dogmatix. I still can’t believe that the potion providing druid is called Getafix…

It’s a good fun book, and whilst I enjoyed it knowing a little about Asterix, my three year old daughter also found it highly amusing too, especially liking the page where a number of knocked out Roman centurions are lying on the roofs of some houses.

If I have one complaint though, it’s that some of the things you are asked to find are made rather difficult due to them being positioned right in the middle of the page join, but otherwise it’s a very nice book, and is very reasonably priced at £8.99 for a slightly bigger than A4 sized hardback.

Both my wife and myself had very vague memories of seeing Elmer before, and let’s face it he’s not hard to forget, as he’s an elephant made out of patchwork colours, rather than bog standard elephant grey. I certainly couldn’t remember having read Elmer as a child, and it turns out the reason for that is because Elmer didn’t actually come along until 1989, by which time I had already sat my GCSEs, and multicoloured elephants weren’t part of the English syllabus.

What also caught my eye was the name of the author, David McKee, as he also was the man behind some of the more memorable animated shows from my youth, Mr. Benn and King Rollo.

So, having a child now allows me to catch up with something from the Eighties which I myself missed the first time round, and I must say I’ve been quite enjoying it.

In the first book, which is titled simply Elmer, we discover our patchwork friend is a bit of a joker. One day he gets bored of being different and heads off to find a bush laden with elephant coloured berries, which he promptly rolls around in to make himself look grey. He then goes back to the rest of his herd to play a trick on them.

This was the first in a series of what is now around twenty books, and in some of these we are introduced to two other members of Elmer’s family who are also rather uniquely coloured. First there is his cousin Wilbur, who could come in useful at car races as he is covered in black and white checks.

He is also a accomplished ventriloquist. Then there is Grandpa Eldo, who is a golden coloured elephant, and Rose, a young elephant who comes from another herd of elephants who are all completely pink in colour.

I think my favourite story from the one’s we got in our bag full has to be Elmer On Stilts, not only because the idea of elephants trying to hide from hunters by walking around on stilts is supremely silly, but also because the hunters in question look as if they have been lifted straight from an episode of Mr. Benn!

There obviously wasn’t a National garage close to us though, as I remember we only had a couple of the freebie Smurf toys. My sister had a Smurfette one, and I remember having a Smurf that was black instead of blue. It always puzzled me at the time why he was black, but in this case I have to thank Wikipedia for putting my mind at rest, as the black Smurf was actually a blue Smurf who was bitten by a fly and went a little insane. He was the central plot for one of the Smurf comics.

Before National used Smurfs as a promotional aid though, I had never heard of them, despite the fact they were actually created way back in 1958 by Belgian cartoonist Peyo. Whilst they are known in Belgium as De Smurfen, which is where the English name for them comes from, they were first given a French name, Les Schtroumpfs.

This odd name came from Peyo asking a French friend to pass him the salt at a meal, but he had forgotten what the French word for salt was, so said “pass me the schtroumpf” instead. This led to Peyo and his friend continuing their conversation substituting the word schtroumpf in place of other words, thus inventing the manner in which the Smurfs tend to speak, substituting the word Smurf for other verbs and nouns. Whilst you could normally work out what they were saying from context, “I’m smurfing my smurf to the smurf” could mean anything really.

The Smurfs are of course little blue creatures who run around wearing funny little pointy white hats and white trousers (which appear to encompass the feet as well). Many of the Smurfs add to this ensemble to reflect their character, such as Brainy Smurf wearing trousers, or Smurf elder Papa Smurf having a beard and wearing red instead of blue.

Quite how the race has survived so long is a bit of a mystery given there appear to be no female Smurfs. OK, Smurfette is quite obviously female, but she isn’t actually a true Smurf, as she was actually created by Gargamel the wizard, the Smurf’s main enemy who was always trying to eradicate them, eat them or, bizarrely, turn them into gold…

In 1981 Hanna Barbera created a cartoon version of The Smurfs, and I certainly remember enjoying watching it. As with most TV shows from my youth it had an infectious theme tune (Laaaa-laaaa-le-laa-laa-laaaa, laaaa-le-la-la-laaaaa, come on you remember it, and I bet you’ll be singing it now after reading this).

So popular was The Smurfs cartoon that it ran until 1989 and notched up an impressive 256 episodes, containing over 400 individual stories.

At the time of writing, there is also a live action/CGI mix Smurfs film in the works, due for release in the second half of 2011.

Meg is a witch who dresses in typical witch fashion, with a big black cloak and tall pointy hat, and travels in typical witch fashion on a broomstick. She has the typical witch pet too, a rather scraggy looking black cat called Mog, who accompanies Meg on all her adventures. There’s also an owl, named Owl, who also lives with Meg and Mog, but being the wise bird he is doesn’t always get involved with Meg and Mog’s outings.

In the first book we see Meg and Mog arise from bed on Halloween (in the night of course, she is a witch after all), have their “breakfast” and then set out to meet the rest of Meg’s coven to cast a midnight spell, which sadly ends badly for the other witches, as they all get turned into frogs!

The Meg and Mog series began in the Seventies, but several titles were published in the Eighties and Nineties too. The books were written by Helen Nicoll and illustrated by the hard to pronounce Jan Pieńkowski. Meg and Mog are drawn in a very simple cartoon style, with a lot of block colour in the surroundings to make up for the fact that Meg and Mog are drawn in bold black and white throughout, with a splash of yellow for Mog and Owl’s eyes.

There have now been almost twenty Meg and Mog stories released, with a host of other activity books and such like too. In the Eighties Meg and Mog was even turned into a stage play featuring Maureen Lipman as Meg, and later a cartoon series too.

Barbapapa was a series of originally French language books, and later a cartoon series (which is how I mainly remember it), created by Annette Tison and Talus Taylor. The first book was published in 1970, whilst the most recent appeared as recently as 2005!

So who is this Barbapapa then? Well, he’s a big pink blob, who’s natural shape appears to be something like a pear. I say natural shape as he has the ability to squish and mould himself into any shape he chooses (a bit like The New Shmoo, another obscure reference for you there).

Whilst something big, pink and amorphous might seem terrifying, Barbapapa was anything but. He was a friendly sort who liked to help out people with problems however he could, which usually meant he would transform himself into some object or other that would prove particularly useful for the situation at hand.

He may well of started off on his own, but it wasn’t long before he got himself a family. First he met Barbamama, a female blob who was jet black in colour, and with curves that suggested a more feminine form. I guess the writers probably regretted their choice of colour for Barbapapa at this point, as pink might have made more sense for a female of the species, but there you go. However along with her shape, she also wore a ring of flowers around the top of her head, to make her look just a little more girl like.

The pair went on to have a family of Barbababies, each of which tended to have a different area of expertise. The female children had a natural shape most like their mother, whilst the boys generally looked more like their father. Each of the children was also a different colour, and unsurprisingly had a name starting with Barba!

The children were Barbalala (green and musical), Barbabright (blue with an interest in all things scientific), Barbabelle (violet in hue, and the self proclaimed beauty of the bunch), Barbazoo (the yellow ecologist and animal lover), Barbalib (the orange book worm), Barbabeau (black, an artist, and the only hairy one, at least as far as we can tell), and finally Barbabravo (red, strong and sporty, although also fancied himself as a bit of a detective).

I can’t say I’ve seen much in the way of Barbapapa related items in the shops myself, but a quick search on Amazon and eBay seems to suggest there is still a great deal of interest in the lovable pink blob, as there are books, DVDs, clothes and toys readily available (check out the links below for evidence!). The characters have proved very popular in Japan, which might explain why so many interesting items are available, but I also wonder if Barbapapa is still very popular in his native France?

Written by Paul R Jackson, volumes one and two of Here’s A House – A Celebration of Play School, are now available. The first volume covers the genesis of Play School and covers it’s run from the mid Sixties through to the Seventies. Of possibly more interest to regular readers of this site though will be the new second volume, which covers the Eighties and Nineties, and also talks about the other versions of Play School that spun off from the original in different countries.

Each book contains details of major milestones and events for the programme for the relevant decades, and also features entries on each of the many presenters and contributions from the many people who were involved in the creation of this wonderful piece of television history.

For more information check out the pages on Kaleidoscope Publishings website for Volume 1 and Volume 2.

One of the aspects of this book that I enjoyed the most was that whilst most of the vehicles depicted within it were very realistic, in so far as a cartoon style drawing can be considered realistic, some of them were just plain silly, like a car whose bodywork was in the shape of a crocodile or perhaps even more absurd, a pickle!

This book can be considered part of Richard Scarry’s invented world of Busytown, a fun place populated with Scarry’s unique style of animal characters, who tended to look quite rotund with little arms and legs and very little in the way of a neck. Busytown might have been bizarre in places, but again most of it was quite realistic in nature, making the books educational as well as fun for the young reader.

Richard Scarry was born in 1919 in Boston, where he attended the Museum of Fine Arts School. His first book was Two Little Miners, which was published by Little Golden Books in 1949, but arguably the book which cemented his future popularity was Richard Scarry’s Best Word Book Ever, which contained well over a thousand images of every day objects, all labeled with the name of the object. It was published in 1963, and over the next 12 years sold 7 million copies!

In the 1980s some of Scarry’s books were made into cartoons, most notably the books in his “Best Ever” series. In the 1990s Busytown also got the animated treatment, with the cartoon series The Busy World of Richard Scarry.

Richard Scarry died in 1994, aged 74. Over his career he published more than 300 books, selling over 100 million copies in total worldwide. His books have been translated into numerous languages, such was the popular appeal of his illustrative style.