©2000

Noddy, mini-skirted, fur-coated and garishly made-up, buzzes down the freeway on a pink, mirror-festooned motor scooter; he is pursued by a red-faced, heavily-armed Big Ears tearing the guts out of Noddy’s old clunker with Diana and Dodi carousing in the back …
Noddy slews into the High Street of Toytown, twin exhaust pipes flaming, to find his path is blocked by a gang of gollywogs yelling ‘Yo, Motherfucker!’and other golly-like epithets and bleating about social justice. To avoid them he guns his Vespa, turns on a sixpence, and smashes through the window of the nearest sweetshop, scattering humbugs and gobstoppers everywhere. Big Ears shoots round the corner on two wheels and is set upon …

Noddy, skidding along the counter, ignores the melee outside and the lap-dancing inside and instead concentrates on negotiating the dangerous, bumpy terrain of the shopkeeper’s bald head. Responding to the latter’s phrenological protestations with a cry of ‘Poujadist Hansonite!’ he roars over his bonce, through the back door and down the steps into the lane behind the shop …

Noddy, jamming on the brakes, realises he is cornered. A mob of jeering Dwarfs, clad in Velcro and brandishing bicycle chains and broken beer bottles, surrounds his motor scooter. The lane is narrow and clammy stone walls rise menacingly on either side. There is nothing for it but to attempt a vertical challenge …

Noddy opens up the throttle and, to the general amazement of the gaping and dopey Dwarfs, sends the smoking Vespa flying straight up the opposite wall. Almost at the top, he feels the inevitable tug of gravity as it threatens to plunge him back into the baying, simian crowd. He grins grimly, noticing that by his wrist-calendar it is April 1st …

With an almost superhuman effort, Noddy spurs the shrieking Vespa over the guttering. Then he is whizzing along the roof, sending alley-cats and pigeons hurtling into the riot-torn streets. I wonder how poor old Big Ears is faring, he chuckles to himself. At that instant, he sees PC Plod standing at the end of the roof, hand raised and police whistle to his lips. ‘This is a School Zone.’ barks the gruff constable. ‘Bother!,’ says Noddy, ‘another bloody oik …’

Suddenly, a red-faced Big Ears drags himself onto the roof and lies there for a moment like a fallen Santa. The plod slopes off to chat up a child.

Balletically, Noddy dismounts and approaches his bearded adversary. Languidly, he drawls, ‘I said you could come up and see me sometime, but this is …’

Big Ears falters. But then, to Noddy’s great surprise, he tears off his beard. Noddy’s bell tinkles as he shakes his head in disbelief. It isn’t Big Ears at all — it’s … the evil Dole Fairy! She swaggers toward him, Beretta now impossibly in hand, and the derringer feels horribly cold against his chest.
‘Yes’, she smiles poisonously, ‘we had your form checked. There is no such employer as “Aberrant Genotype Press”.’ He gulps. He has failed his Activity Test, and must now pay the ultimate price, he must make the supreme sacrifice for the good of the Taxpayer. His goose, in fact, is well and truly cooked. But with characteristic rebelliousness, he makes a snap decision to fight it out. She won’t take him alive. He darts behind the scooter and reaches swiftly into his bodice. A fusillade of shots fly over his head …

[We remind readers that Noddy has been confronted by the Arch-Villain, Senator Dole Fairy. He has been tumbled for cheating on his Activity Test. A gunfight ensues. NOW READ ON …]

Noddy darts behind the scooter and reaches swiftly into his bodice. A fusillade of shots fly over his head. Of course, as in any B-grade cowboy film of the 1930s, we have fudged the cliffhanging ending of the previous section’s episode by equipping Noddy with Liz Taylor’s personal phone number. He rings Liz on a mobile swiped from the equally famous Hal Judge and she agrees to arrange a cavalcade of stars of stage and screen who will campaign against Fairy as they do against AIDS and (somewhat hypocritically) Robert Mugabe. He communicates that to the gun-toting Senator by the same means and, worried about adverse publicity, she stops shooting.

Cautiously, Noddy emerges from behind the scooter. Or, from his point of view, he pokes his head up and sees the immensely corpulent Minister holstering her weapon. From the point of view of Ms Fatima Chan, dulcimer-maker of 19 Bogus St, Cabramatta, they both look pretty stupid. They both feel pretty stupid too. As the sun sinks into the west, they run to each other in slow-motion and fall into each other’s arms while the camera focuses suggestively on the languidly flapping hem of Noddy’s skirt.

‘So, it is you!’ cries Noddy while a rising in the Ventriloquists Ghetto makes the sunset a bit redder than usual. Flames lick the base of the cloud-wrack rapidly moving in along with a cyclone, a tornado, Dorothy (he had all Frances Ethel Gumm’s records), a plague of locusts and a thunderstorm ridden by a large number of valkyrie eleisons (a South Korean brand of Catholic station wagon).
‘Mais oui.’ says Dole, who drove a vin ordinaire. ‘Mon cheri, I ‘ave meessed you so much. I will zerefore stop shootinque at you.’ She showers him with kisses, well he hadn’t had a shower that morning. ‘Eeergh – la poo stinque. Merde! You ‘ave not ‘ad a washez-vous today. Disgustinque. But, mah little raspberet, Ah have waiteed for zis momént seence we burned down ze Sorbonne een 1968. Viva la Revolutión!

Yes, ‘Dole Fairy’ steps out of her elaborate disguise and is transformed into — Brigitte Bardot! ‘Keep zese greasy woggez-vous out of La Belle France! Feed ‘em all pork! Jean-Marie Le Pen and Mon Sewer Sarkoma forever!’ she cries, crunching on some crackling. Noddy thinks of his own deplorably Welsh background and wisely decides to say nothing, a bit like Rabid Vegan. A muezzin starts chanting up the road, dem bones, dem bones … Toytown’s local branch of Aryan Nation turns out in droves to Save the White Race. Meanwhile, the main cause of infant mortality amongst the poor members of this, the richest nation on earth, is rat-bite. The media focus on Noddy’s skirt and the coming counter-revolution.

All of a sudden, a dirty great pudding comes flying through the air. On it are some emotionally-unstable Ventriloquists, characteristically unkempt and each playing the ud on this pathetic substitute for a magic carpet. Meanwhile, the real Big Ears is hauling himself out of a spot of bother. Running over a few protesting gollywogs and IEDs and blowing away the rest, he slams the car into a concrete pillar. Leaving the occupants to fend for themselves, he bolts into the sweetshop, leaps athletically over the counter, tramples the shopkeeper who is struggling up from the floor with a tyremark on his head, and races down the steps into a socially resentful crowd of Dwarfs …

Noddy sees his pursuer in one of the scooter’s many mirrors. He screeches to a halt before PC Plod, slips him a swifty and turns the Vespa on a threepence. Big Ears comes to a sudden stop, puffing. The two face each other across a grey expanse of broken tiles, cat fur and pigeon droppings.The sun is at its zenith …

‘So’, says Big Ears, ‘it has come to this.’ His hand hovers over his hot Beretta. Noddy calmly steps from the motor-cycle, and notes how Big Ears’ gaze is drawn to his fabulous legs. A derringer is secreted in his bodice; it feels good.

Then Noddy — Brigitte has sloped off to chat up some wildlife and David Attenborough — gapes as Big Ears is turned into a pillar of reindeer poo. His wrist calendar was slow; it’s Christmas Eve.

Below, the Ventriloquists are out of control, despite large doses of Marinetti. Each carries a backpack full of semtex. Their leader, a swarthy fellow with a gigantic nose and drooping black moustache, holds aloft a tattered glove puppet which booms out the terrible Ventriloquist war-cry — dottle of deer! dottle of deer! They begin to scale the walls. Proudly Nordic, Noddy and Brigitte had hoped to walk ‘and in ‘and into the sunset (at least as far as the end of the roof) but now it looks like they’ll have to fight it out with the windscreen-washing Underclass …

TO BE CONTINUED