Charlie Brooker has been reading the Mr Men

Charlie Brooker has been reading the Mr Men:

Revisiting the books, I was surprised to discover that despite forgetting most of the storylines, the visuals felt so familiar, they can't have ever left my mind. When I was young, I wanted to be a cartoonist. As a teenager, I even managed to make a career of it for a few years. Back then I figured I'd formed this ambition thanks to the comics I'd read when I was about twelve. No, looking back at some of my ham-fisted drawings of the time, I realise the Mr Men must have kicked the yearning off years before that. I was unconsciously sampling and regurgitating whole sections of Roger Hargreaves' visual repertoire. The way Roger Hargreaves drew a shoe is still the way a shoe looks when I picture it. Same with a house. Or a hat. Or a butcher. Or a wizard. Or a cloud.