The Man from Uncle TV
From Tony Bannister:
uncle-tv.com is dedicated to keeping alive the series of “Uncle” books written by J.P.Martin and is also about my attempts to develop them into an animated film.
The books are a riot of nonsense and invention. Uncle is an elephant - although he could just as well have been anything else - who is fabulously rich and rides about on a traction engine. His house is surrounded by a moat and includes one hundred skyscrapers. There are haunted towers and a shop where a bicycle costs a half-penny and another in which a broken mouse-trap is priced at five hundred pounds. Transport is by water chute, Iift and switchback railway. Uncle and his friends, a very odd lot, have a perpetual feud with the Badfort Crowd and there are exciting battles conducted in a most unconventional way and with no permanent casualties.
Intriguingly one publisher rejected the books on the grounds that they were amoral and said Uncle was “a fascist” whereas The Listener reviewing the first book said “Uncle is a savage attack on a capitalist society.”
The author, a clergyman, originally wrote the stories in the 1930s for his own children and they were eventually published in the 1960s. Sadly they are now out of print.
The books were illustrated by the then little known Quentin Blake who is now, of course, a very popular author and illustrator of children�s books. In fact the price of second hand copies of the books is quite high because of the illustrations.
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