The Keeper of the Cheese and the Lemon Merchant

We've all heard the phrase "I don't how they got away with it back then!" when talking about some childhood TV show with a little bit of risque content. A lot of the time, you can reply that, no, Captain Pugwash never did feature characters called Master Bates and Seaman Stains. Yet in the case of The Ren and Stimpy Show, you do have to wonder.

As I remember, from the long distant fog of my youth, it was shown on BBC2 around 6pm in the evening and even back then, I recognised this was the kind of thing usually shown for kids at that time. For one thing, the canine half of this cat/dog duo was clearly a bit off his rocker, given his frequent bursts of physical and verbal abuse to his partner, along with the occasional desire to kill him with "one quick snap" of the neck.

On top of that, it never held back from the gross-out humour. Extreme close up shots would show some well-detailed shots of, say, Ren's gums rotting away due to his lax dental hygiene. One entire episode was devoted to Stimpy's first fart, which had a personality of it's own and left to try life in the big city.

Such berserk humour had me won over from the start. Frequent 'adverts' plugged Log, a children's toy that was simply a block of wood which was "better than bad, it's good". The world's superhero was Powdered Toast Man and frequent interjections would be provided by Mr Horse, who would shake his head and assert that "No Sir, I don't like it".

The key episodes, for me, were those where Ren's sanity was pushed far, far beyond the point of breaking. Space Madness was a particularly brilliant example of this, were the strain of a decades-long voyage with Stimpy was enough to make him believe a bar of a soap was his "beloved ice-cream bar", the joy of eating which made him utter the fantastic line "we're not hitch-hiking anymore - we're riding!". Eventually, his joy gave way to paranoia that Stimpy desired to take his dear dairy product away from him, eventually resulting in the duo being deleted from history. Most famously, Stimpy's Invention saw Ren saddled with a 'Happy Helmet' that forced him to be happy all day, every day, which is a pretty sick idea in anybodies mind.

Of course, such oddness couldn't last and eventually Nickeloden got rid of the creator/mastermind (and voice of Ren) John Kricfalusi to make a heavily sanitised version before cancelling it altogether. The voice of Stimpy, Billy West, would go on to bigger fame as the voice of Fry (and the Professor, and Zapp Branigan) on Futurama. A slighty dubious run as Ren and Stimpy "Adult Party Cartoon" (made without West) appeared in 2003. All the same, it's easy to see the shows influence on, say, Spongebob Squarepants - which will always get my seal of approval as long as Squidward appears in it.

Happily, however, those wonderful early cartoons are out there on DVD. I picked up a copy of the first two series a while ago and was very happy to find out that they'd stood up brilliantly. In fact, being a bit older, the humour seemed to work even better. Plus now I know who Frank Zappa is when he turns up to provide the voice of the Pope!