Discovering Scarfolk: a wonderfully witty and subversively dark parody of life growing up in Britain in the 1970s and 1980s

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At the turn of the millennium I gave up my job as a graphic designer to focus on screenwriting, which I struggled at for the best part of a decade, even though I sold a few scripts. Unfortunately, it’s also indicative of our time that, with the findings of Operation Yewtree, even the once seemingly innocent and loved aspects of our childhoods have been exposed as far from innocent.

Discovering Scarfolk - Richard Littler - Google Books

While the illustrations achieve that Orwellian body with Kafkaesque aftertaste, it's the written accompaniment that brings the Monty Python flavor notes, and this is not nearly as successful. Scarfolk designs often play with the modernist aesthetic of actual Penguin covers, like these three above. Littler mined the dark side of his childhood to create pamphlets, posters, book covers, album art, audio clips, and television shorts—remnants of life in a paranoid, totalitarian 1970s community, where even babies are not to be trusted. I had thought Scarfolk a personal interpretation of the 1970s filtered through my own (numerous) childhood neuroticisms, fears and memory fragments; Scarfolk certainly does not reflect what for many is the decade of flares, discos and lava lamps. The card had proved so effective that, not only could it effortlessly beat every other card, it also killed the losing player within moments of the game ending.

My wife has actual footage of me in a reading chair, this book prominently open in my lap, and light snores coming from my direction. Nowthe Scarfolk universe is expanding—Littler has written a book, Discovering Scarfolk, and he’s working ona television show.

Discovering Scarfolk by Richard Littler | Waterstones

The aesthetic is utilitarian, inspired by public sector materials in the United Kingdom such as public information films and posters issued by the Central Office of Information and British Transport Films during the 1970s. Though pushing people off buildings was all the rage in 1970s Scarfolk, it was quite damaging to concrete paving. Unbeknownst to the clandestine groups, however, specially-trained police mime experts had infiltrated the meetings and reported everything they saw to Scarfolk's police commissioner who, keen to outdo his predecessor's record, had created the public information campaign to boost arrest numbers.Telephone helplines were set up to provide legal aid to the many who were accused of talking (and not talking) and faced punitive tongue removal. Germans are not as prone to the frequent redecoration of their homes as Brits are, so 1970s décor is still visible everywhere.