Monthly Archives: December 2025

Tammy 6 January 1979 – Christmas issue

1979, Issues, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Cover artist: John Richardson

Bella (artist John Armstrong, writer Primrose Cumming) – final episode

Bessie Bunter (artist Cecil Orr)

Dancer Entranced (artist Angeles Felices) – final episode

The Upper Crust (artist Giorgio Giorgetti)

Bella – Winning Letters

Edie (artist Joe Collins)

Giftorama – final part

Molly Mills and the TV Pioneer (artist Douglas Perry, writer Maureen Spurgeon) – final episode

The Christmas Fairy (artist Bob Harvey) – Strange Story

Wee Sue (artist Robert MacGillivray)

TEAM in Action (artist Carmona)

Greetings to All of Our Readers (artist Robert MacGillivray) – Christmas feature

Comparing Tammy to Jinty during the IPC strike in December 1978, it’s really weird to see how the titles were affected. This is Tammy’s full-on Christmas issue, but it’s dated 6 January 1979, and her previous issue was dated 23 December. What happened to the 30 December 1978 issue? We can only assume Tammy lost it because of the strike. Yet Jinty had her 30 December issue, with a cover caption celebrating the end of the strike. “Yippee! Your favourite paper is back!” But during the three previous weeks, there were no Jintys while the Tammys continued, although not in full size (not that you’d notice as the essentials were there). A note from the editor in this issue says Tammy is back to full size after three weeks of thinner Tammys. 

Christmas does not normally feature in Bella as her stories usually finish before the festive season starts. But this time, she goes right up to the Christmas issue and finishes her story with a Christmas feast in Australia. She sure is surprised to have Christmas in the heat of summer. Welcome to the Southern Hemisphere, Bella.  

Bella also gets a spread of letters on “We all love Bella because…” It’s reproduced here for insights on why Bella was so popular. No mention of what really sold Bella for me, though – how John Armstrong made those gymnastics moves so realistically anatomical it was mouthwatering. To this day, it remains unmatched. 

Molly Mills incorporates Christmas into the final episode of her story by having the TV pioneer help her make a special Christmas film for her family. In the days before home movies and Skype this must have been incredible for them.

Bessie and Mary Moldsworth go carol singing and fall foul of forgers, but they escape – thanks to Bessie’s hefty weight – and raise the alarm. The capture of the criminals is a relief for the police, as they were dreading having to sacrifice their Christmas hunting them. Bessie and Mary get a Christmas reward and Bessie gets the best present she could possibly have – food. 

Wee Sue also falls foul of criminals in her Christmas story. It’s a racket where crooks set themselves up as Store Santas to rob stores by hiding the loot in their Santa sacks. But the worst of it is how they give Santa a bad name by bullying the kids and giving them broken toys. 

In “The Upper Crust”, giving the kids at the orphanage broken toys thrown out of their homes is how the super-snobs of High Hills “do their best to brighten up the festive time for others”. Seeing this, Clarinda shows up with better presents for the kids. All of a sudden, the snobs are off to buy equally nice presents – they’re not going to be upstaged by her. 

The Storyteller brings us “The Christmas Fairy”, a fairy ornament of gypsy origin said to bring good luck and happiness each festive season. It must be said the family have had fantastic Christmases since they got the fairy, but this year the fairy is really put to the test when sister Kathy is in hospital in a coma just days before Christmas. Come Christmas Eve, her condition remains unchanged. Someone – or something – really needs to wave a magic wand, or the family will have an Unmerry Christmas.

Finally, on the back cover we have the Tammy gang all together for a Christmas feature (below), brought to us by the ever-popular Robert MacGillivray. 

It’s the final episode of “Dancer Entranced”, where Mesmeri’s metronome gives Trina Carr, a hopeless ballerina, the power to dance brilliantly via hypnotism, but being dependent on the metronome to dance has caused problems. She has to lose that dependency, something the final episode must resolve. Mesmeri himself provides the answer, and it’s one that takes Trina by surprise.

It looks like “TEAM in Action” is approaching its final episode as well. The girls finally have the school paper ready for binding and publication, but disaster strikes – cleaners sprucing up the school for inspection have chucked all their work in the trash!

Characters: Wee Sue, older Cover Girl (Tammy), Miss Bigger, younger Cover Girl (June), Edie, Bessie, Bella, Mary Moldsworth, Court House pupil.

Tammy 23 December 1978

1978, Issues, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Bella (artist John Armstrong, writer Primrose Cumming)
The Upper Crust (artist Giorgio Giorgetti)
Dancer Entranced (artist Angeles Felices)
Molly Mills and the TV Pioneer (artist Douglas Perry, writer Maureen Spurgeon)
Giftorama – part 3
Bessie Bunter (Arthur Martin)
Power of the Stones (artist Tony Coleman) – Strange Story
Wee Sue (artist Robert MacGillivray)
TEAM in Action (Carmona)
Tuck-in with Tammy

Tammy’s countdown to Christmas is really kicking in now with the covers. The Tammy annual made for a frequent Christmas gag during the Cover Girls run, which must have added to its advertising. Don’t be too worried that the Cover Girls don’t have enough money left for the annual – previous covers have suggested they get more Tammy annuals than they can shake a stick at on Christmas morning.

Christmas themes are now appearing in the regular strips. Wee Sue is getting ready for a Christmas party at the youth club, but Miss Bigger causes problems. An unexpected turn of events has everything work out happily, and Miss Bigger even plays Santa at the party with presents for everybody. This week’s Bessie Bunter story adds to the Christmas ambience with a panto flavour where Bessie gets knocked out and dreams she’s Cinderella. The Bessie regulars have such hilarious alternate roles in this one that the episode is included below.

Another feature over the Christmas/New Year period was clearing out old stories to make way for new ones in the New Year. One is “Dancer Entranced”, which reaches its penultimate episode this week. Bella sounds like she is also on her penultimate episode, with the final one set to be a banger with medals or nothing at a gymnastics event to beat a dirty business rival. Next year we will find out if she’s still stuck in Australia or has made her way back to Britain, but we won’t know until she returns in the second quarter. Molly and the TV Pioneer must be ending pretty soon too. “The Upper Crust” and “TEAM in Action” don’t look like they’ll be ending just yet, so we will see them in the New Year.

Luck comes in all shapes and sizes, as three girls discover in this week’s Strange Story. They uncover three stones that seem to have powers that cause bad luck. They hastily get rid of them, only to discover the stones had the power to bring good luck and the strokes of bad luck were blessings in disguise.

Tammy 16 December 1978

1978, Issues, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Cover artist: John Richardson
Bella (artist John Armstrong, writer Primrose Cumming)
The Upper Crust (artist Giorgio Giorgetti)
Dancer Entranced (artist Angeles Felices)
Molly Mills and the TV Pioneer (artist Douglas Perry, writer Maureen Spurgeon)
Giftorama – part 2
Bessie Bunter (artist Arthur Martin)
Terror in the Garden – Strange Story
Wee Sue (artist Robert MacGillivray)
TEAM in Action (artist Carmona)

Among the really fun Cover Girl Tammy covers are the ones where Tammy makes in-jokes about herself. This is one such cover. The list of Tammy-based ingredients, from left to right: Molly Mills, Bella, One Girl and Her Dog (currently on hiatus), Dancer Entranced, Bessie Bunter and The Upper Crust. To make things even more interesting, there’s an appearance from the Cover Girls’ mum. Sometimes their parents do appear on the cover, apparently enjoying Tammy as much as their daughters do. Perhaps it’s Tammy’s way of paying homage to her adult readers, who are often mentioned in the letters she prints. Mum baking something from Tammy might be a reference Tammy’s recipe feature, “Tuck-in with Tammy”. And what is Mum making? I always thought it was Christmas pudding, a bow to Tammy’s countdown to Christmas.

In Molly Mills, the Stanton Hall staff are auditioning for parts in the TV pioneer’s show. Lord Stanton isn’t impressed with what they’re doing when they’re supposed to be working. We have to say we aren’t impressed with their hammy performances either, though we get a lot of laughs out of them. But things get less funny for Molly when an unfortunate mishap gets her threatened with the sack.

Bella’s flying high in a hot air balloon to help advertise the outfit she works for. But things go a bit wrong when the balloon loses its moorings, causing them to drift away when they have a vital gymnastics event to enter.

In this week’s Strange Story, a governess freaks out after reading that her high-spirited charge is headed for a swing with a sinister history. Apparently, it was converted from a gallows used to execute condemned witches. But what’s really strange about this one is that it’s not brought to us by our regular Storyteller. It’s a completely different person (below), and he only appears this once. A guest artist, currently unidentified, was used for the story; perhaps they didn’t know what the Storyteller was supposed to look like. Or maybe someone forgot instructions on how to draw the Storyteller in the script.

In Tammy’s current ballet story, “Dancer Entranced”, things take a violent turn. Jealous Dora sets a gang of toughs on Trina to fix her once and for all. But it backfires on Dora, with her getting duffed up instead until Trina and her friends come to the rescue. Following this, Dora stops being Trina’s enemy, but the hypnotist’s metronome, without which Trina cannot dance, got broken in the fight. Has Dora fixed Trina after all?

Ballet is also the theme in this week’s Bessie Bunter story. Stackers has decided to add ballet to the school curriculum. We really have to question her judgement on this, especially with Bessie in the ballet class. Sure enough, there are soon more than enough scrapes for Stackers to cancel the ballet class.

Sue wants an autograph from a celebrity, but autograph hunters are banned from the theatre where he is performing, and the doorman enforcing the rule is a gorilla. Sue’s big brain has to come up with something to get that autograph. Breaking her arm is not exactly what she had in mind, but guess who signs her cast?

Talk about paint bombs. In “The Upper Crust”, Mavis, determined to bring down Clarinda Carrington-Crust, rigs a tin of paint over a door at school to fall down on her. However, Clarinda, with a little help from her father, turns the tables – and the paint – right on Mavis and her gang. But the paint ruins a girl’s watch. Who’s going to put things right? Certainly not Mavis, who is too snobby to take responsibility or have any sympathy for the girl.

Teachers skiving off? That’s a new one in “Team in Action”. Toni and Anthea sneak out of school to cover a fashion show when the head denies permission to attend. In town, they spot their teacher, Miss Gravel, who is supposed to be off sick. Either she’s made a miraculous recovery or … but they’re not thinking about that – they’re ducking for cover before they’re spotted.

Tammy 9 December 1978

1978, Issues, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Cover artist: John Richardson

Bella (John Armstrong, writer Primrose Cumming)
The Upper Crust (artist Giorgio Giorgetti)
Dancer Entranced (artist Angeles Felices)
Molly Mills and the TV Pioneer (artist Douglas Perry, writer Maureen Spurgeon)
Giftorama – part one
The Trysting Tree (artist Bob Harvey) – Strange Story
Bessie Bunter (artist Arthur Martin)
Wee Sue
Team in Action (artist Carmona)
Tuck-In with Tammy – feature

One of the most interesting aspects of the strikes that bedevilled IPC was how they affected the titles. Apparently, the effects were not always the same. Take the December 1978 strike, for example. It caused Jinty to lose three issues that month, from 9 to 23 December. Tammy retained her issues, starting with this one, but she did not go entirely unaffected. The 30 December issue informs us that due to the strike, those issues were smaller than usual. Well, at least she had them and Tammy readers were not deprived over that period. This issue also begins Tammy’s countdown to Christmas 1978 with part one of Giftorama, a four-part feature on making Christmas gifts and decorations, plus a New Year calendar.

Bella’s new job in Australia is more friendly than the one that brought her to Australia, but it’s not without its difficulties. This week, she has to deal with an Indigenous tribe who have taken a superstitious view of the gym apparatus she’s required to demonstrate for a company. They’ve stolen it – and they’re going to sacrifice it!

A lesson on ancient Rome gives Bessie dreams of that place, but they turn into horrible nightmares of being thrown to the lions. A misunderstanding gets Sue into awesome trouble with Miss Bigger, but it is eventually sorted out, and everything ends happily for them both. Molly is into TV pioneering with Lord Stanton’s cousin Iggy, but his production keeps hitting problems. However, there’s a hilarious moment in this episode (below) when the staff catch bully butler Pickering on candid camera.

The trouble with miracle objects that seem to give protagonists the power to perform brilliantly when they were hopeless before is that they grow too dependent on them, and without them, they’re screwed. Such is the case of the hypnotist’s metronome that gives Trine Carr, “Dancer Entranced”, the power to dance brilliantly, but only when it’s ticking. She herself says as much by the end of the episode that she has realised the dependency problem. And she has the added problem of a jealous rival. What if she discovers Trine’s dependency on the metronome?

If you’ve got interfering parents who keep pushing you into what they want and not listening to what you want, this week’s Strange Story (below) is for you. It’s one of my favourites, and it has an extra mystery: the Storyteller, who has no given name, leaves us with his initials and us wondering what they stand for (does Man of Mystery spring to mind?).

Anthea, the “A” in “TEAM in Action”, has a track record of sticking her foot in it with bright ideas. It’s already got her expelled from one school, and she’s in trouble again when she arranges for a band to play at the school festival without checking them out first. She just assumed they were an old-style band, ideal for the school staff and governors, but she discovers too late that they are a punk rock band! Never assume, Anthea.

Clarinda Carrington-Crust has ruffled a lot of feathers and left a lot of people scratching their heads ever since she and her parents moved into super-snobby High Hills. Nobody really knows what to make of her. She seems to be a snob like everyone else in school. But we’re progressively getting hints of Clarinda being the secret helper of ordinary people against the snobs. This week, she secretly helps elderly people avoid the grotty snobs who have been roped by the school into an old people’s help programme. But Clarinda’s arch-enemy, Mavis Blunt, is getting increasingly suspicious of her, and by the end of this week’s episode, she’s really out to bring her down.

Tammy 2 December 1978

1978, Issues, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Cover artist: John Richardson

Bella (artist John Armstrong, writer Primrose Cumming)

The Upper Crust (artist Giorgio Giorgetti)

Dancer Entranced (artist Angeles Felices)

One Girl and Her Dog… (artist Mario Capaldi)

The Moon Stallion (artist Mario Capaldi) – adaptation

Molly Mills and the TV Pioneer (artist Douglas Perry, writer Maureen Spurgeon)

Face at the Window (artist Hugo D’Adderio) – Strange Story

Wee Sue (artist Mike White)

TEAM in Action (artist Carmona)

A Horse for Your Hobby – Feature 

It’s December, so we are having a countdown to Christmas with Tammy issues from December 1978. There is no hint of Christmas yet in Tammy, either on the cover or inside with Christmas how-to-make features. Everything is pretty much business as usual, except that there is no Bessie Bunter this week.

Mario Capaldi does double duty with “One Girl and Her Dog” and “The Moon Stallion”. But the former goes on hiatus with the next issue, which must have made things easier for Capaldi.

Bella battles a venomous snake in the Australian Outback, but it’s already bitten one of her friends, and they are miles from the nearest hospital. Luckily, they have an Aborigine friend on hand who soon proves Aborigine know-how can do the job just as well.

In “The Upper Crust”, Clarinda Carrington-Crust, a newcomer to snobby High Hills, is disliked by even the snobs at her school for her super-snobby ways. But there have been more and more and more hints that Clarinda is really a secret helper for people who get picked on by the snobs for not being posh. This week, she seems to be secretly helping a girl on the road to stage stardom.

An unusually excessive number of rejects from the clothes factory is pushing up fashion prices in Milltown. By the time Wee Sue discovers why, she’s become the fall guy for a clothes racket and has an angry mob and the police chasing after her. She needs to prove who the real racketeers are, and fast!

The TV Pioneer is almost sent packing from Stanton Hall, but Molly finds a way for him to stay. However, she soon finds that pioneering has its difficulties for even a relative of Lord Stanton – and the latest is him in danger of falling off the roof. 

In this week’s Strange Story, Mary finds the manor she inherited from her uncle is not exactly welcoming. It’s rotting and rundown, the staff warn her of a curse that could threaten her life and urge her to leave, and then it looks like the curse is coming true when she refuses to do so. In the end, it turns out the curse was just a ruse – but there is a final twist that indicates there was something spooky going on after all.

Jealous Dora tries to put Trina Carr, “Dancer Entranced”, out of an upcoming dance show by trying to get her hurt. Good thing she hasn’t discovered Trina’s dependency on the metronome to dance. But now, well-meaning meddling from Trina’s aunt could succeed where Dora’s trickery has failed.

The entertainment abilities of “TEAM in Action” get them out of trouble when they unwittingly crash Sir Reginald’s party. But fresh trouble is never far away for TEAM, and this time it starts with one of Anthea’s bright ideas – ideas that have gotten her expelled in the past.