Bill Tidy, who has died aged 89, was a cartoonist, broadcaster and raconteur whose work appeared in national newspapers and on radio and TV. He is best known for two long-running cartoon strips in the Daily Mirror and Private Eye. The Fosdyke Saga ran in the Mirror from 1971 until 1985 and stopped only when Robert Maxwell bought the paper and declared he didn’t find the strip funny. Bill was deeply upset, but turned the saga into a BBC Radio 2 series in 42 episodes, with additional scripting by John Junkin and a stage play co-written with Alan Plater.
Fosdyke was a wry reworking of John Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga novels, which followed the lives and peccadillos of aristocratic families in Dorset and London. In sharp contrast, the Fosdyke family ran a tripe factory in Salford with the slogan “Nation Shall Speak Tripe Unto Nation”. The background was soot and chimneys and Bill described it as “a classic tale of struggle, power, personalities … and tripe.”
