Tammy & Misty 25 July 1981

• Sandy – a Girl Like You (artist Juliana Buch) – final episode
• A Royal Bonanza! – competition
• Bella (artist John Armstrong)
• Edie and Miss T (artist Joe Collins)
• The Breaking of Faith (artist Giorgio Giorgetti)
• Whimsical Weddings (cartoons)
• The Spirit from the Sea – Strange Story (artist Mario Capaldi)
• Linda’s Fox (artist and writer Ron Tiner)
• What about a Wedding? (writer Maureen Spurgeon)
• Wee Sue (artist Robert MacGillivray)
• Olympia Jones (artist Eduardo Feito, writer Anne Digby) – final episode
• Stella Stirrer (artist Tony Coleman)

We have already profiled the Jinty Royal Wedding issue for 1981. This time we look at how the Tammy issue for that week did the same.

Tammy did not have quite as much Royal Wedding content as Jinty. We have a competition to celebrate, with Royal Wedding souvenirs among the prizes. There are “Whimsical Wedding” cartoons, a quiz that tests your wedding know-how, and an Edie and Miss T cartoon where Miss T decides to gate-crash the Royal Wedding (below). But Tammy could have done more by having a Strange Story with a wedding theme and a Royal Wedding story in Wee Sue as Jinty did with Gypsy Rose and Tansy. Instead, they are regular stories. The Strange Story is about a fishing community that worships a spirit from the sea. A girl seeks the spirit’s help for her brother’s chest infection – by offering his cough medicine to the spirit as a gift! Will this odd offering to the sea spirit actually help her sick brother? Wee Sue gets entangled with Miss Bigger’s bird-watching efforts and ends up taking a photo of an extremely rare bird perched on Miss Bigger’s hair bun while she’s fast asleep, and in a most unbecoming position. Now that’s hilarious for us, and embarrassing for Miss Bigger!

The pages I used to read over and over in this issue were of the final episode of Olympia Jones. The Rotts’ frame-up of Olympia for animal cruelty and horse theft seems all sewn up, but it unravels at the last minute. This is because Linda Rott, the real animal abuser, succumbed to temptation to do it again – but she did not know Olympia’s friend Amanda was secretly taking photos of her doing so. The explosive panels where Linda finds this out, flies into a tantrum and gets restrained by policemen (ha, ha!) when the photographs are presented to the court are the ones I read the most on these pages. Pity the final episode didn’t dedicate more panels to the Olympics where Olympia wins her gold or telling us what happens to the scheming Rotts in the end. An extra page or episode would have helped.

On the letters page, Tammy uses the final episode of Olympia as a lead-in to promote Anne Digby’s newly published circus horse story, The Quicksilver Horse. When the Olympia Jones reprint began, the Tammy team said on the letters page that they hoped readers would like it and don’t forget to vote for it in the favourite story coupon if they did. Tammy bookends this with: “We’re glad that so many of you have enjoyed the serial Olympia Jones again, and you can read the final part later in this issue.”

Another frameup is beginning to unravel in the penultimate episode of “Linda’s Fox”. Linda finds Splinter Mallory trapped under the collapsed house next door and takes advantage of his  situation to make him agree to confess that his testimony against Linda’s father was perjured. Meanwhile, the collapsed house catastrophe has Linda’s beloved fox going on the run and taking refuge in a truck. Where will it take him?

It is also the final episode of “Sandy – A Girl Like You”. A holiday romance for Sandy’s friend Kim turns nasty when Sandy finds out the boy is not only a two-timer but also a cad who is pulling the “poor boy” routine to cadge money out of Kim, which he spends on his other girl. After a bid to convince Kim of what’s going on fails, Sandy hatches a plan to catch the rotten swine out in front of both girls, which succeeds. On the way home, Sandy’s train passes by her first boyfriend, Steve, and she calls out to him. But her voice is lost in the wind…

Bella enters her first gymnastics competition in a while, but she isn’t doing too well. So she draws on the tricks she has learned at the circus she is staying at to soup up her beam routine. The applause is thunderous. However, there are already warning signs it was not a wise move where the judges are concerned. Bella’s unpleasant rival calls it “just a vulgar bit of showing-off”, and we may have to give grudging agreement. We shall see when Bella’s marks come up next week, but Bella may be about to learn the hard way that circus tricks should be confined to the circus.

In “The Breaking of Faith”, Faith Adams does not make friends easily, so she depends a lot on the friendship she has struck with Claire Ellerman. The trouble is, there are constant doubts as to whether what Claire tells Faith about herself is the truth because she is staying at a home for problem children. For this reason Faith’s classmates keep telling her Claire is a bad lot and taking her for a ride. Faith doesn’t really know what to think and keeps oscillating between doubt and loyalty to Claire. However, this time it looks like Claire has finally been exposed as one big fibber.

Stella Smith uses the kitchen at the boarding school she works in to constantly strike back at the snob who is always picking on her. This week, Stella uses the kitchen to do something nice for a change – but it unwittingly leads to even more trouble and puts her friend’s life in danger.