Every Monday we feature a favourite Alex cartoon selected by our readers. We are grateful to Leigh Turner for suggesting this cartoon from 1988. It’s another one about Bridget, who is proving a disturbingly popular character in these readers’ favourite cartoons.

Bridget was a fearsome manifestation of malevolence who, as this cartoon demonstrates, subjected poor Clive to round-the-clock abuse. Like Freddy Krueger in A Nightmare on Elm Street she ensured that her hapless victim couldn’t even fall asleep without risking terrible consequences. We should state that as this is merely a cartoon strip, no cruelty to animals was actually involved and we do not endorse any form of rodent abuse.

This is one of many Alex cartoons from the late 1980s that was inspired by the Innovations Catalogue. This was a mail-order booklet that would drop out of the Sunday supplements, containing ads for all the latest, must-have gadgets for Yuppies. Finding a perverse application for the sillier devices in the catalogue was always a fascinating exercise in lateral thinking. Usually we’d have Alex find some way of using the gizmo to show off or to humiliate Clive. These jokes were quite complex to structure in that we’d have to explain what the contraption was and how it worked, as well as deliver the turnaround and the punchline. Readers may have thought that we made up some of these gadgets, but we can assure you they were all real. Some were so ridiculous that they were begging for us to take the piss out of them. The snoring wristband, for example, seemed pointless, as simply waking the sleeper up is not going to stop them snoring when they fall asleep again, but merely deprive them of sleep and make them feel grumpy the next day.

The phrase “you unspeakable fiend” is a sort of portmanteau homage to a couple of our comedic inspirations. “You unspeakable cad” was an insult much bandied about in The Wizard of Id cartoon by Johnny Hart and Brant Parker, which we both loved as kids. It was a quaint American take on what they imagined a British insult to be. Referring to someone as a “fiend” came from The Goons, which was a bit before our time, but a show we’d heard on recordings. “You unspeakable fiend” sounds like the sort of thing the lady would say to the villain in a Victorian melodrama as he tied her to a railway track.

Clive’s hamster (probably named Hammy) was never seen or referred to in the cartoon again, so maybe it did indeed fry as a result of his sleep apnoea.

If you click on the strip above you can see it in its original 80s context.

If you’ve got any suggestions for a favourite cartoon for future inclusion please email us. And do tell us if there’s a particular reason why it appealed to you.