Tiger by the tale
AFTER Sean Lock’s death last week, fans of the absurdist comic were calling for a book he wrote to be published as a tribute.
Appearing on panel show 8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown in 2016, Sean re-imagined the classic children’s story, The Tiger Who Came to Tea.
But The Tiger Who Came for a Pint proved a bit more graphic, with the striped protagonist gagging for a lager to wash down the zookeeper he’d just devoured.
Tiger was barred from The Kings Head for mauling the darts team so he headed for Wetherspoons, where he got absolutely paralytic on rum, ate the meat raffle and peed up the bar before George the deputy manager called him a cab.
Hitler
But neither Tiger, nor Pavel, the Station Cars driver, were ever seen again. Thankfully, Judith Kerr’s original is a far gentler affair.
A friendly Tiger invites himself for tea at Sophie’s before scoffing everything in the house, draining the taps of water and leaving.
Then Dad arrives home to find Mum has nothing for his supper – so he takes the whole family to a cafe instead.
Tiger is still a bestseller and was recently turned into a stage play.
And yet generations of fans have somehow missed the terrible truth – that its harmful, old-fashioned stereotypes cause men to rape and assault women.
This week a campaign group called Zero Tolerance highlighted its concerns about the story. Why is tiger male, not female or gender neutral? Why is Mum just a housewife? And why does Dad get in from work and promptly “save the day”? Well, because that’s how Judith Kerr wrote it in 1968, long before woke warriors made ridiculous quantum leaps of logic.
Like the assertion that “gender stereotypes are harmful and they reinforce gender inequality, and that gender inequality is the cause of violence against women and girls, such as rape and sexual harassment”.
And, a spokeswoman for Zero Tolerance explained: “We need to recognise these aren’t just stories.” Aren’t they?
I had the privilege of interviewing Judith Kerr shortly before her death in 2019. We talked about her Mog series
and When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, the semiautobiographical account of her family’s escape from Germany in 1933. But she was really fed up with critics and interviewers still looking for a hidden message in The Tiger Who Came To Tea.
Was the striped protagonist a subliminal metaphor for her childhood angst and trauma?
“He had absolutely nothing to do with the Nazis,” Judith said. “The tiger was just a tiger.”and stories can just be stories.
Delightful or absurd flights of fancy which, with a bit of effort from parents or teachers, can even start conversations about changing times and attitudes.
And reading too much into them kills the magic.