{"id":2436,"date":"2012-08-07T18:57:10","date_gmt":"2012-08-07T17:57:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/History-of-the-OU\/?p=2436"},"modified":"2012-08-20T19:24:09","modified_gmt":"2012-08-20T18:24:09","slug":"open-to-satire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/History-of-the-OU\/?p=2436","title":{"rendered":"Open to satire?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Should a public figure\u00a0or institution be brave enough to wish, with the poet Robert Burns, ‘to see oursels as ithers see us’, the cartoonist’s art is likely to remind them of another adage: be careful what you wish for.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The British Cartoon Archive at the University of Kent <\/a>provides a window onto the ways in which people and organisations have been portrayed through the ages.\u00a0\u00a0As a national institution,\u00a0The Open University hasn’t\u00a0evaded capture by the caricaturist’s ink.\u00a0 This group of cartoons<\/a>\u00a0evokes an evolving pen portrait in which the ‘University of the Air’ lived up to its name in at least one respect: it was difficult to pin down in a visual medium.\u00a0 With no substantial image of its own, the OU was not so much used as a target for satire in its own right, as a means for cartoonists to satirise some of their more\u00a0‘usual suspects’.\u00a0\u00a0Groups of people and themes\u00a0caricatured via their association with the OU\u00a0included politicians, television, students, changing social mores and class aspiration.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The earliest appearance of the OU in cartoons followed immediately on Harold Wilson’s speech in which a ‘University of the Air’ was first proposed.\u00a0 Cartoonists used the opportunity to\u00a0poke fun at\u00a0both Labour and Conservatives: the Daily Mail<\/em>‘s Emmwood suggested a ‘potted curriculum’ for the proposed university consisting of\u00a0 spoof game shows, with Labour’s \u00a0Wilson as\u00a0the host\u00a0\u00a0in ‘Double Your Diplomas’, while the Daily Mirror<\/em>‘s Franklin linked the ‘Air’ in the proposed university’s working name to the alleged hot air of ‘unmaterialised Tory education promises’.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Throughout the 1960s television was satirised in several cartoons, in which\u00a0lightweight programmes and habitual viewing are unconvincingly\u00a0excused as being part of a\u00a0degree.\u00a0 A cartoon from September 1963 varies this theme by\u00a0articulating the aim of the propposed university in opening access to education for lower income groups, while gently mocking class aspiration: the Sunday Mirror’<\/em>s David Langon has two behatted, handbag-wielding\u00a0ladies passing a woman scrubbing her front step.\u00a0 They dismiss her claim that ‘her boy is up at University’ – he is, in fact,\u00a0visible in an upstairs window, viewing a university programme.<\/p>\n

\u00a0The reputation of students as demonstrators is juxtaposed with the age of mature OU students in a cartoon of a protesting grand-dad in Franklin’s Daily Mirror <\/em>cartoon of 1969.\u00a0 A more youthful couple personify both changing sexual mores and the OU’s curiculum in the Daily Mirror<\/em> in 1975, where Waite shows a young woman and her bearded boyfriend\u00a0 being interrupted by family members while ‘studying inter-personal relationships’ in front of an OU television broadcast.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Cartoons featuring the OU seem to reveal more about attitudes to politics, broadcasting and social issues than about how the OU itself was perceived, but perhaps this underlines the\u00a0acceptance of the OU as an iconic\u00a0feature of national\u00a0life.\u00a0 Thomas Kemnitz has argued that while the cartoon does not reveal much about the ‘intellectual bases of opinion’, it ‘can provide insights into the popular attitudes that underlay public opinion, insights that may be more difficult to glean from written material or from other evidence of behaviour’. (Kemnitz, 1973. pp 86, 93)<\/p>\n

\u00a0The OU’s presence in the cartoons held by the\u00a0British Cartoon Archive is often as a short-hand for various aspirations: to the provision of accessible education regardless of class or age; to the use of television for education and\u00a0to emerging new academic disciplines and approaches.\u00a0 What is often satirised is the gap between these aspirations and the perceived foibles of politicians, broadcasters, students and society at large.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Acknowledgements:<\/p>\n

‘The Cartoon as a Historical Source’, Thomas Milton Kemnitz, The Journal of Interdisciplinary History<\/cite> , Vol. 4, No. 1, The Historian and the Arts (Summer, 1973), pp. 81-93 Published by: The MIT Press<\/a>; Article Stable URL: http:\/\/www.jstor.org\/stable\/202359<\/p>\n

\u00a0Photo made available by Cast a Line under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License \u00a9\u00a0Cast a Line.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Cartoons have also been considered here<\/a>\u00a0and here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Should a public figure or institution be brave enough to wish, with the poet Robert Burns, ‘to see oursels as ithers see us’, the cartoonist’s art is likely to remind them of another adage: be careful what you wish for. <\/p>\n

The British Cartoon Archive at the University of Kent provides a window onto the ways in which people and organisations have been portrayed through the ages. As a national institution, The Open University hasn’t evaded capture by the caricaturist’s ink. This group of cartoons evokes an evolving pen portrait in which the ‘University of the Air’ lived up to its name in at least one respect: it was difficult to pin down in a visual medium. With no substantial image of its own, the OU was not so much used as a target for satire in its own right, as a means for cartoonists to satirise some of their more ‘usual suspects’. Groups of people and themes caricatured via their association with the OU included politicians, television, students, changing social mores and class aspiration.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,183,8,68,166,44,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2436","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bbc","category-higher-education","category-history-of-the-ou","category-ideas","category-advertising","category-people","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/History-of-the-OU\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2436","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/History-of-the-OU\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/History-of-the-OU\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/History-of-the-OU\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/History-of-the-OU\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2436"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/History-of-the-OU\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2436\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2456,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/History-of-the-OU\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2436\/revisions\/2456"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/History-of-the-OU\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2436"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/History-of-the-OU\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2436"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/History-of-the-OU\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2436"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}