Beau Peep was a popular British comic strip written by Roger Kettle and illustrated by Andrew Christine.
The strip features the misadventures of the eponymous lead character, Beau Peep, an inept and cowardly British man who joins the tough and hardy French Foreign Legion in the deserts of North Africa to escape his terrifying wife Doris back home.
Beau Peep was first published in the launch issue of British newspaper The Daily Star on 2 November 1978, and ran until late 2016.
This strip was commissioned in 1989 by Mirror Group Newspapers in an attempt to lure the Beau Peep fan base from the Daily Star.
[1][2] On the forum of the official Beau Peep website, writer Roger Kettle also claims to have been inspired by the American comic strip Peanuts by Charles M. Schulz, in that like Schulz's creation Charlie Brown, Beau Peep is a "loveable loser".
A new collection of strips called "The Return of Beau Peep" was published by CreateSpace (ISBN 1463693281) in February 2012.
This resulted in a huge sales loss for the paper and demands from fans for Beau Peep to be brought back.
According to his file, which Beau secretly reads while supposedly cleaning up the sergeant's desk, he is an "utterly brainless idiot" and suffering from "terminal ugliness".
Beau does however view himself as a brave, gallant, witty, handsome, intellectual, and cultured individual, and does appear to be cleverer than the majority of people in the fort.
When he was young, Beau wanted to be a concert pianist, or a great conductor, and often attempts to escape the confines of his dreary existence by going down to the saloon at the local casbah and getting blind drunk.
Doris is described as very ugly, having many chins, a large frame, an ape-like stance, short legs, and generally terrifying.
One of the most significant supporting characters of the comic strip, this nomadic Arab lives alone in the desert, and is never named.
He was exiled from a local Tuareg tribe for 'nicking' (stealing), and will not be allowed back unless he proves himself by presenting the head of an enemy warrior.
He also believes he is a talented golfer (he calls himself Tiger Nomad) and has many times tried to be elected as an MP (slogan: "Vote for me or I set the dogs on You").
Honest Abdul is a travelling salesman in the desert and the owner of a merchant caravan selling all manner of goods.
He also cheats the Nomad numerous times, such as selling him a rubber duck which Abdul claimed was an "enemy detector."
Bidet has a distinct loathing of the cowardly and useless Beau Peep, whom he regrets ever taking on in the first place and has had to endure for the past twenty years.
He also has a bad temper, once holding Beau over the wall of the fort by the ankles because he made a joke about Egon's cooking.
The fort's resident bully, Pierre is a towering hulk of a man, completely unhinged, and whom nobody will dare call "mad" to his face.
An exotic belly dancer and stripper at the local saloon, the men at the fort go crazy for her, especially Dennis, who is madly in love with her.
Expect to hear "The Camels Are Coming" in a future Eurovision Song Contest where Hamish intends to enter it.
Other characters occasionally appear in the strip and include: Astro the Soothsayer, a fortune teller with a tent in the desert.