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By FRANK GARDNERMorning in Moscow and we were outside the headquarters of Russian intelligence, the FSB. Amazingly, we had permission to film as we retraced the footsteps of the fictional young Belgian reporter in Tintin In The Land Of The Soviets. In the book, written in 1929,north face on sale, Tintin is continually being followed and plotted against by shadowy Bolshevik figures, evil-looking men with spike beards and long coats, clutching a ticking bomb destined to finish off the nosy reporter from Brussels. We were given a rather more subtle reception. Slowly, quietly, almost imperceptibly, a limo with blacked-out windows emerged from the building that houses the modern-day equivalent of the KGB. On the trail: Frank Gardner tests an original 1929 Amilcar, a model used in the Tintin booksWith a purr of its engines,women north face sale, it crossed Lubyanka Square, synonymous with the infamous jail where political prisoners were taken for interrogation in Soviet times, and drew up next to us. We braced ourselves for Russian officialdom,north face jackets clearance, a demand to see papers, perhaps, or passports.More...From ballet to blistering barnacles! Billy Elliot star Jamie Bell on why he hopes Tintin WON'T turn him into a big starBut instead, the black limo remained beside us, motionless, for several minutes. ‘They’re probably taking pictures,’ said our cameraman. But no windows slid down, no spies stepped out, it was just a none-too-subtle message: ‘We know you are here and we are watching you.’ Not that we had anything to hide. Our mission was simple: to unravel the mystery of the hidden first Tintin book, the prototype that went on to spawn the comic-book phenomenon and the new movie, The Adventures Of Tintin: The Secret Of The Unicorn, that comes out later this week in the UK. Modern treatment: An image from the latest incarnation of the boy reporter, The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret Of The UnicornTintin is now the world’s most successful cartoon character, with his books translated into 70 languages.Like many others growing up in Seventies Britain, I devoured Tintin books as a boy. Flight 714, The Blue Lotus, The Black Island – these were all adventure fantasies that took me far away from the classroom and my overdue Latin homework. I loved the de******ion and detail of far-off places drawn by Tintin’s Belgian creator Herg? – the slowly turning ceiling fans in Jakarta airport or the look of surprise on an East European soldier’s face in King Ottokar’s Sceptre.But there was one Tintin book I had never read. In fact I had never even heard of it until this year: Tintin In The Land Of The Soviets. This, I learned, was because it was not published in English until 1989, a full 60 years after Herg? wrote it, and by then I was out of shorts and into a job, reading newspapers instead of cartoon strips. Comic book hero: Tintin with his faithful canine companion SnowyI decided to find out why it was kept hidden for so long – and began my quest in a quiet village in Buckinghamshire. Here I met Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper, who devoted 30 years of her life to translating the Tintin books from the original French into English. Now in her 80s, she showed me her rough notebooks, scribblings where she came up with the quaint curses spluttered by the irascible but lovable Captain Haddock. ‘Ten thousand blue blistering barnacles . . . yes, that was mine,’ she said proudly.Herg?, whom she knew well, was just 21 when he wrote his first Tintin book. It was 1929 and he was working his way up the ladder from the bottom at the Belgian newspaper Le Petit Vingti?me. The editor saw his sketches and thought them so good that he asked him to produce a weekly children’s comic strip that came out everyThursday as a supplement to the main paper. All over Belgium, schoolchildren would wait eagerly for the next week’s episode about the plucky young reporterTintin who got into countless scrapes and adventures. Sometimes they would have to wait a whole week to know if their hero would be executed by firing squad. Leading role: British actor Jamie Bell plays Tintin in the latest filmHerg?’s real name was Georges Remi – he just reversed his initials so in French they sounded like ‘Herr Jay’. His editor, an admirer of the Italian fascist dictator Mussolini, had a loathing for communism and for the Bolsheviks who had seized power in Russia after the 1917 Revolution. He commissioned Herg? to ‘send Tintin off’ by train to Russia to find out what life was like under communism. No prizes for guessing it’s not going to be a flattering de******ion. Almost from the start, he is followed by a Bolshevik assassin who blows up Tintin’s train, yet our hero survives, naturally.I’d enjoyed a rather smoother journey to Brussels, loading on to Eurostar my adapted hand bike that turns my wheelchair into a go-faster trike. The hand bike – which I use after I was shot and partly paralysed in my legs while on assignment in Saudi Arabia in 2004 – is capable of mounting curbs and rough ground. This, said my film crew, was very much in the spirit of Tintin, who was always jumping onto new modes of transport to either pursue or escape from his villains.My hand bike soon became a theme that ran through our film, allowing me to glide with ease over cobbled European squares that would otherwise have had me lurching forward in mywheelchair in jarring, kangaroo hops. At Brussels Midi station, as if in affirmation of my quest, I was greeted by a giant, wall-high poster of... Tintin on a train. Thiscity clearly loves its poster child. In a leafy suburb,women north face denali jackets, I pitched up atthe Herg? Foundation’s Tintin Museum where, with great solemnity, a manin white gloves produced from the vaults one of the original art works drawn by Herg? in Indian ink. Already, I could see his artistic style developing. Honoured: Director Steven Spielberg (left) receives the Commander of the Order of the Crown decoration from Belgium's Finance Minister Didier Reynders during a ceremony ahead of yesterday's world movie premiere Top team: Director Steven Spielberg (second left) , actor Jamie Bell, (right), French-Moroccan actor Gad Elmaleh (left) and visual effects supervisor Joe Letteri, address the media ahead of last night's world premiere But in cafes and bistros, where I went on to meet ‘Tintinologists’ and historians, I learned Herg? was ashamed and embarrassed by his first work, Tintin In The Land Of The Soviets. He felt the drawings were crude and the narrative naive. He did not want it translated, thinking his later works, which were in colour, were much superior. It remained untranslated for six decades. So that was one mystery solved. But how did Tintin, the cub reporter, get his trademark quiff? After all, inthe opening pages of this first book he didn’t have one. I travelled onto Berlin, where Tintin is arrested but escapes from the stodgy-lookingGerman police by leaping into a Mercedes Open Tourer.Iwas in luck. In a back-street garage I met a classic-car enthusiast whohas lovingly restored this exact model from 1928. With the roof down and the sun out, we accelerated towards the Reichstag and the Brandenburg Gate. As we picked up speed,canada goose coats, I could feel my hair being swept backwards, which I noted from the pages of the book was how Tintin acquired his quiff. I spent the rest of the trip working to suppress any imitation on my own head in case people thought: ‘Does that Frank Gardner guy think he’s Tintin or something?’ Pride of Belgium: A poster promotes the latest film in Brussels,canada goose jakke, where Tintin creator Herge is a national heroIn Tintin In The Land Of The Soviets, the young Belgian reporter drives east, ultimately crossing the border into Russia. When he sees the iconic onion domes of Moscow’s St Basil’s Cathedral, he exclaims to his faithful canine companion: ‘Look Snowy, Moscow!’ Herg?, who had never been there himself,north face outlet, goes on to depict a half-derelict city where starving children queue for bread, rationed out by cruel commissars who demand to know first if the child is a communist. A ‘no’ answer gets a kick from a leather boot. Surelyan absurd depiction, I thought, as we drove into central Moscow past glitzy shops, international brand names and affluent young Russians withmoney to spend. The city had changed beyond recognition from the drab grey place I first visited in Cold War times, but to grab a piece of nostalgia we checked in to the Sovietsky Hotel, a throwback to Politburo days. There were faded red carpets, an enormous portrait of Stalin, an upholstered piano bar and a photo plaque that announced ‘Margaret Thatcher stayed here’. But we were here on a quest, to find out if today’s Russians thought Herg?’s unflattering portrayal of their country in 1929 had any foundation. Because I have to say that my first impression of Herg?’s Land Of The Soviets was not a positive one. The drawings were crude, the plots improbable and it seemed almost as if theauthor had set out to denigrate everything Russian. Business as usual: Tintin and Capt. Haddock get into plenty of scrapes in the latest filmEarlier, in Brussels, I had learned that one of Herg?’s scenes bore a striking similarity to a passage from the angry memoirs of a Belgian consul who described a local election under the Bolsheviks. All those in favour of communism had to raise their hands, anyone with other ideas had pistols pointed at them. Another scene in Tintin showed a party of visiting British trade unionists being shown round a factory and being ‘taken in’ by Soviet propaganda.Yet another scene showed commissars persecuting the kulaks, the peasant farmers whose grain they came to steal.So surely this was just crude anti-Soviet propaganda by an artist with a fertile imagination and a fascist boss? In a Moscow apartment block, I put this question to Irena, a historian and daughter of a former KGB colonel. Well, she replied, some of the scenes are of course ‘fantastical’ (a new word for me and one I shall now use at every opportunity).But she said the spirit of the story was in keeping with what was going on in Russia at the time. One of the great tragedies of the 20th Century, she went on, was the wholesale persecution of the kulak farmers by the Bolsheviks. ‘Literally thousands perished.’ It was time to head out to the countryside, but not before the film crew pulled the sort of stunt you normally see done to Karl Pilkington on the series An Idiot Abroad. ‘With your limited Russian,’ said Graham the director as we pulled up at one of Moscow’s many grandiose train stations, ‘we’d like to see you get your own ticket and negotiate your own way on to the train.’ This, I suppose, served me right for showing off all six words of Russian I remembered from my last trip. But the Russian railway staff,canada goose expedition parka jakke, despite their dour demeanour, were incredibly helpful. Getting myself out to a provincial Russian village, I found, was easier than catching a train from Paddington. In sprawling countryside dotted with onion-dome churches, I met up with Vladimir, a farmer with several hectares. I showed him Herg?’s Tintin In The Land Of The Soviets and its tales of kulak persecution and he scoffed. ‘Of course this is accurate,’ he said, seeming almost insulted to be asked. ‘Even today we farmers have problems with the authorities.’ As if on cue, a police car drove up and an angry ************ in Russian ensued. ‘I tell him to get lost,’ said Vladimir. ‘He wants me to pay him a bribe to let me sell my vegetables on my land. My own land! This I will not do.’ I wondered what Tintin would have done at this point and concluded that he would probably have ended up pacing round a Russian jail. It was time to head home, my head full of contradictions. Now at last I understood what lay behind Herg?’s first-ever Tintin comic book, his motivation and its historical con****.Would I have become a Tintin fan if this was the first book I had picked up? Probably not. But like his fans at the time, it left me feeling that this adventure was far from over. I was ready for the next one.The Adventures Of Tintin With Frank Gardner is on BBC2 at 8pm on Sunday, October 30. Print this articleRead laterEmail to a friend Share this article: FacebookTwitterDigg itNewsvineDeliciousMySpaceNowpublicRedditComments (13)Here's what readers have had to say so far. Why notdebate this issue live on our message boards.The comments below have not been moderated.NewestOldestBest ratedWorst ratedView allIt was not a matter of "thousands" TENS OF MILLIONS of people were murdered by the Marxists in then Soviet Union during this period - see the works of Robert Conquest (and many others).Perhaps Mr Gardiner will at least read (if he has not already done so) the chapter "The Peasant Plague" in the third volume of Gulag Archipelago - which gives an account of the fate of millions in just one period of Soviet oppression. Nor will blaming Stalin do as he was, if anything, less extreme than Lenin had been during "War Communism" (and,canada goose outlet, contrary to the mythology, V.I.U. always intended to get back to a system like this) and Lenin was just following the doctrines of Karl Marx.On Mussolini,north face fleece, far from being the opposite of socialism he was a life long socialist (indeed he had been one of the most senior Marxists in Europe) - he viewed Fascism as a pragmatic development of Marxism (to make it compatible with the modern world) although, yes, orthodox Marxists regarded Mussolini as a heretic.- Paul Marks, Kettering, United Kingdom., 24/10/2014 10:18Click to rateRating1Report abuseSo FRANK GARDNER, the Author, got into a job, reading newspapers instead of cartoon strips.? Is there a difference ? - RON THE GRUMP, PETERBOROUGH, 23/10/2014 21:03Click to rateRating2Report abuseto be precise, this is exciting!- alex, NY expat, 23/10/2014 2:17"Precisely, exiting, Thomson...!" (yes, I DID write 'exiting', not 'exciting', because we KNOW that one or the other of the Twins would get it wrong... "Ten Thousand Blue Blistering Barnacles!" - priceless! - G. Fawkes, The Tower, 23/10/2014 19:01Click to rateRating5Report abusei love tintin - but im on the fence till i see the first film.im not greatly encouraged that spielberg has taken 3 or 4 of the books and mashed them altogther. so we have a bit of 'secret of the unicorn' and its sequel 'red rackhams treasure,' plus some of the 'crab with the golden claws' and a little of 'the blue lotus.' not sure about that at all.its interesting that when spielberg was approached to do harry potter he wanted to do the same thing and mash the 7 books up into 3 films. fortunately warner brothers said no.i hate to think if speilberg had got hold of 'the lord of the rings'im also not sure about this motion capture/cartoony effect. i hated the 'polar express' and 'beowulf' that used the same technique. either go live action/realism or go to traditional cartoon techniques. these tintin characters just look creepy and weird. perhaps i will be blown away and the tintin film will be great. just hope they dont ruin tintin. - Elaine Downs, Oban, 23/10/2014 16:27Click to rateRating9Report abuse" we checked in to the Sovietsky Hotel, a throwback to Politburo days. There were faded red carpets, an enormous portrait of Stalin, "I wonder if there are any hotels in Germany with enormous portraits of Hitler?- BillyH, Manchester, 23/10/2014 10:43Click to rateRating2Report abusethat guy does not look like tintin at all. tintin has no chin. does tintin have a girlfriend in the movie or is he sticking with captain haddock? hope Spielberg has not messed this up. - zip reeper, london, uk, 23/10/2014 10:37Click to rateRating24Report abuseThe views expressed in the contents above are those of our users and do not necessarily reflect the views of MailOnline.We are no longer accepting comments on this article. Liverpool new boy Adam eyes silverware after completing £9m switch to Anfield canada goose expedition parka jakke soft cloth boots sale 622 men north face denali jackets soft cloth boots sale 942 canada goose outlet soft cloth boots sale 218
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