Radio West (or... ITC on the wireless)

“It’s brilliant!” I declared to Tim Beddows, visiting him back in 2019. “It’s like ITC on the radio! You’ve got to listen to it.” I’m not sure if he ever did, and if not, this is the story of what he sadly missed out on...

I have the radio on most days. I’m not listening to it as such: it’s merely a kind of background noise to take the edge off the silence that you get from living alone. Now and then, some random item will emerge from the drone and catch my attention. It was a few years ago now and I was in the middle of doing the washing-up (the always-on radio being located in the kitchen). I tend to have the set tuned to Radio 4 Extra by default: it avoids having to listen to the news (too depressing) or any of the contemporary ‘comedies’ on Radio 4 (too depressing – and not remotely funny). On this particular evening, I began to take more notice than usual of whatever programme was being transmitted. As I gradually tuned in my attention, I slowly realised that this programme was hysterically funny. It wasn’t meant to be. It was the earnest over-the-top acting that amused me, along with a script that mined every cliché in the melodramatic crime caper grab-bag. What on earth was it? I began to recognise certain voices in the cast – Francis de Wolff, Hamilton Dyce and other familiar names from British film and TV of the 1960s. Bestriding the whole production like a vocal colossus was the redoubtable Mr. Voice Over himself – the voice of Barrett Homes, Protect and Survive and a thousand and one other endeavours: Patrick Allen. How come I’d never come across this programme before?

The serial I’d stumbled across was, in fact, Battle For Inspector West, one of a number of radio adaptations of John Creasey’s novels featuring Roger ‘Handsome’ West, the youngest (and corniest) Chief Inspector in Scotland Yard. The novels are 100% nonsense: I speak from experience. Blood-thirsty, exploitative and, for their time, surprisingly violent. Realism doesn’t get a look in, and it’s hardly surprising considering the volume of Creasey’s output. According to the Radio Times blurb that accompanied the first Inspector West broadcast in 1967, Creasey’s books had sold more than twenty-five million copies across seventeen different languages. They may be of questionable literary merit, but you can’t argue with statistics like that. And that was nearly sixty years ago, so heaven knows how many more sales have been clocked up since then.

Spanning the years 1942-1978, Creasey turned in a staggering forty-three Inspector West novels, in addition to his many other series. Other long-running creations included The Toff, Gideon of Scotland Yard, and the Baron… two of which went on to become staples of the ITC action adventure genre. And ITC is where we’re going with this.

Having accidentally discovered the series, I stuck with it to the end – or, if you prefer, the following day, because I’d come in at episode five of six and the serial was being broadcast on a daily basis. No matter, because a few months later, the Inspector was back, and this time I was primed and ready for action…

Those radio Wests (if you’ll excuse a Shoestring-esque pun) were the closest thing I’d ever heard to ITC on the wireless, and I’ve been recommending them as such ever since to anyone who’ll listen. Stand by for West is breakneck, bonkers and ludicrously over-acted, not to mention chock-full of familiar voices that will be instantly recognisable to anyone who enjoys old British TV and movies of a certain era. The name of Patrick Allen alone should be enough to sell the series to anyone of that stripe, but as a bonus we get his real-life spouse Sarah Lawson filling the same role in the series as the Inspector’s wife, Janet.

The Inspector West serials are, in a word, brilliant. Not to be taken seriously, you understand. But hugely entertaining. Of the six produced for BBC Radio, only three appear to be extant: the aforementioned Battle for Inspector West (1967), along with Inspector West at Home (1968) and Inspector West at Bay (1969). Missing in action are A Beauty for Inspector West, Inspector West Cries Wolf (both 1970) and Inspector West Makes Haste (1971). The series was given the overall title Stand by For West and debuted on the BBC Light Programme before transferring to Radio 4. The programmes were typically transmitted mid-evening and many of them must have clashed with the actual ITC productions as they went out on television. We seldom had the radio on in the evening, which is one reason why I never got to hear them until more recently.

It wasn’t until 2019 that the serials found their way onto Radio 4 Extra’s playlist and they’ve been in more or less constant rotation ever since, clocking up on average one run per year. The good news (if you’ve read thus far and want to hear them for yourself) is that the first of them, Battle for Inspector West commenced its third repeat run on 4 Extra today (20.11.24), and will be available on catch up for the next month. Battle is my personal favourite of the three, but they all come highly recommended. This first serial is notable for Francis de Wolff’s performance in the role of super-villain ‘Carosian’ (his name, presumably, intended as a homonym for ‘corrosion’), a man who kills people using ‘the largest Alsatian dog I’ve ever seen’, and is planning the ultimate crime wave that will tear London apart unless West can stop him. “I want Carosian!” he barks at Assistant Commisioner Sir Guy Chatworth (Hamilton Dyce) “I want him badly!” And that’s one of the better lines of dialogue. If you go for radio drama of the “look, he’s holding a gun” variety, you’ll find all that and much more besides. Patrick Allen is in full-on voiceover man mode, even when complimenting his wife Janet on the quality of his breakfast: “mmm, that smells good.” Honestly, I’m not making this up.

Each episode begins the same way, with a melodramatic trumpet fanfare, grim shouty announcer and some screeching car tyres. Start as you mean to go on…

If the dreaded AI wants to achieve something actually worthwhile, as opposed to trying to make the entire creative industry redundant, it might set itself the task of turning these audio classics into full visual extravaganzas. They can scrape Allen and Lawson from Night of the Big Heat, and take it from there...

New listeners start here: Stand by for West

Sixty Years On... The Singing, Ringing Tree

19 November, 1964

It was a grey, late autumn afternoon. The afternoon had been dull and drearily anticyclonic. We were in the living room of our home in Lichfield, my brother and myself, television turned on, curtains closed, coals glowing in the open fire (we had no central heating). On the television, Blue Peter, presented by Valerie Singleton and Christopher Trace. Chris was probably adding bits to his model railway and I’m sure Val must have been doing things with sticky-backed plastic even then. Were they making their Christmas advent crown, or did that come later? I’m pretty sure Bleep and Booster must have got a look in – their second serial had begun back in September.

5.30 rolls around. Suddenly, the friendly family atmosphere of Blue Peter is swept aside on a chilly breeze from the German Democratic Republic. Here comes something strange, the stuff of nightmares. Once seen, never forgotten.

The Singing, Ringing Tree, an East German fairytale fantasy, had been filmed in colour back in 1957. Now the BBC had bought it to be shown as part of their new Tales From Europe strand of imported classic serials, editing the feature-length original into three episodes. It was broadcast, of course, in black and white. I've since seen it in colour but in my memory it remains in monochrome, dream-like and still unsettling.

Tales From Europe had been running for only a few weeks, commencing on Thursday 1 October with The Tinderbox. Heidi followed, spanning four weeks from 22 October to 12 November. Did I watch them? I don’t remember. Fairy tales weren’t really my thing. Even in storybook form I found them a bit much to take, usually on account of the creepy illustrations that always seemed to accompany them. Now the same thing was about to happen on television.

Everyone who remembers The Singing, Ringing Tree remembers being scared by it. Ask them what they found scary and they will always give the same answer: the dwarf. I don’t think he put in an appearance until week two; but even before he did, there was already a slightly disturbing quality about The Singing, Ringing Tree. The whole production looked like a strange dream brought to life. It was all shot on a soundstage, and I think that was the key to its unsettling vibe – the scenes supposedly set outdoors had a weird artificiality about them, the tree itself being a notable example. I remember getting the same vibe five years later from Star Trek.

Fortunately, the serial only ran for three weeks, but it would be repeated several times. I’d got Tales From Europe marked down as one to avoid when it turned up again in 1966, but I still somehow managed to see fragments of The Singing, Ringing Tree on its second outing. By this time, I was ready to hide behind the sofa or change channels as soon as the dwarf appeared. Why was he so scary? I still have no idea. I think it was his face rather than his size that frightened me, and his strange way of moving, in little leaps and gestures.

The serial was repeated on no less than six occasions. On its third and fourth outings, in 1969 and 1971, I avoided it altogether. It was back yet again in 1976 and 1977, and even as late as 1980 it was being scheduled in the early evening. These later broadcasts added an extra dimension to the viewing experience – colour. 

I wouldn’t get to see it in colour myself until much later. It was 28 December 1999, in fact, when I sat down to watch the VHS copy I’d got from my friend Tim Beddows, who had recently released it on his up and coming Network label. Network's video of the The Singing, Ringing Tree was the first time it had been widely available for decades. Rather than re-editing it into its serial form, it was presented as a complete feature film, albeit with the addition of Tony Bilbow’s English narration, which Tim managed to obtain at not inconsiderable effort. It was later released on DVD and, eventually, blu ray. For anyone who knew Tim well, as I did, there’s a kind of melancholic irony in the series’ original transmission date of 19 November. I won’t say any more, but if you know, you know.

Seeing the film again after so many years was a strange experience, but watching it in colour felt somehow wrong. To me, The Singing, Ringing Tree belongs in black and white, the half forgotten memory of a nightmare from childhood. And yet, even in colour, it retains that eerie other worldliness that had spooked so many young viewers back in the 1960s. The colour was sumptuous, but also slightly weird, with a kind of antique quality. It's fifties colour, as you can see from the frame grab above.

On the evening of Thursday 19 November 1964, The Singing, Ringing Tree and Blue Peter were the sum total of children’s television on the recently rechristened BBC1, with programmes not commencing until 5.05pm. Programmes later in the evening included Tonight at 6.55pm, followed by Top of the Pops (now into its eleventh month on air), and sitcom Meet the Wife – which would be deservedly forgotten today were it not for a passing reference on the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper album. This was followed by the weepy medical drama Doctor Kildare, whose theme music is still lodged in my mind six decades later.

For years, the mere mention of The Singing, Ringing Tree was enough to give me an instant mental picture of our living room on that dark November evening a lifetime ago. It still does. Far off in time it may be, but I remember it with unusual clarity. When people talk about the past being a different country, I think this is really what they mean: a place of the imagination, populated by bad-tempered princesses, outsized fish, talking bears and that scary little man...

SCOOP! The tale of a teenage comic creator

 

I wrote recently about how, back in 2014, I got to realise a childhood ambition by editing a one-off edition of TV21. I’d been drawing the characters and hardware from the Gerry Anderson series since I was old enough to make marks with a pen or pencil, and from the age of eight had been creating my own comics. This, I told myself (and anyone who asked) was what I would do for a living when I grew up. I was partly right, but mostly wrong.

As you might imagine, my first attempts at comics were crude affairs, drawn in biro, pencil crayon and felt-tip pens, laughable for the childish excitability of their plots (plots?), and the scribbly nature of my early artwork. Almost every strip ended in an explosion, none more memorably than my take on the ITC action adventure series Department S. To avoid having to draw the characters, I had them race around in a vehicle I christened the ‘Department S van’. After two episodes of dodging bullets and swerving through minefields, it plunged over a ledge and exploded…

This risible endeavour had formed part of a comic I drew some time around 1970 or 71, which I chistened TV Exciting. I misspelled the masthead every time, so that its actual title was ‘TV Exiting’. Its contents included UFO, Fireball XL5, Thunderbirds and Star Trek in addition to the aforementioned Department S, and like all my comic endeavours at that time, it lasted for only two editions. A year or so earlier, I’d started drawing a large picture of Captain Scarlet in coloured pencils. It was evidently too much for me and I set it aside, adding a note at the bottom of the page as a reminder to myself: ‘half finished – do another time.’ That pretty well summed up all of my creative endeavours and to some extent still does. The ‘two issue’ rule applied to every home made comic I ever created. Some never made it to one issue, whilst others didn’t even get as far as a completed front cover. But all rules were made to be broken, and in my case there was one notable exception...

It was during the long summer holiday in 1974 that I embarked on my most ambitious project to date – my own version of TV21. It had newspaper-style covers, and content that reflected the 1965 era of the original. I christened this new project ‘Scoop!’ – taking as my inspiration the headline on the cover of issue 13 of the original run of TV21, which I’d seen reproduced in an annual. I based my new comic on the first year of TV21, and like the original, I gave it a dateline in the future: Issue one was cover dated August 16 2064, ninety years and one week from the day I started drawing it, Friday 9 August 1974.

My new 10-page comic featured Supercar, Fireball XL5 and Stingray, a Stop Press page, some humour strips (Oink the seal, Zoonie the Lazoon and Mitch Monkey) and on the back cover, The Daleks (of course). Lady Penelope didn’t get a look in: I simply could not draw female characters. For the same reason, Marina and Atlanta were conspicuously absent from my Stingray strip, and I think Venus managed just two appearances in Fireball XL5.

Page from my 1974 diary: I didn't have time for much else, and it wasn't even half term!

The storylines were a mash-up of ideas and plot lines drawn from pretty well every Gerry Anderson comic I’d ever seen, with plenty of concepts borrowed from TV episodes. I knew Stingray, Fireball XL5 and The Daleks well enough, but was fairly clueless when it came to Supercar, a series I’d not seen since the age of two, and of which I owned no books or comics. The strip reached a height of absurdity in an episode that sees Supercar called to London airport where a Fireflash airliner has just crashed, only to find Masterspy waiting in a police uniform with a camera hidden in his cap badge... if in doubt, rip off an episode of Thunderbirds…

Elsewhere, I borrowed ideas by the truckload, usually from TV21. My first Fireball XL5 serial featured the famous Astran characters, and the next storyline saw the ship shot to pieces by an escaped convict, revisiting the ‘Electrode 909’ storyline, which I’d come across in our school’s comic box a few years earlier. None of the plots made a great deal of sense, which was unsurprising, given that I was making them up as I went along. But what I lacked in editorial style, I made up for in enthusiasm and work ethic.

By the time the school holidays drew to a close I was already onto issue 3. Drawing Scoop! took up every spare minute I could find, usually on Sunday afternoons to the accompaniment of the Top 40 rundown. To this day, should I chance to hear Paper Lace’s single ‘The Black Eyed Boys’ (a chart entry during those weeks), I can almost see the exact frame I was drawing at the time. I would draw in my customary position, lying full length on the floor. I’ve tried to work out why I favoured this unusual method and can only conclude that it allowed me to get my face right up close to the page I was working on. I didn’t need glasses, but bending over a table can be back breaking. Maybe I’d made a breakthrough in ergonomics...

Either way, those Sunday afternoons fairly flew by, fuelled by our mum’s ‘bun loaf’ and sardines on toast. The autumn wore on and I just kept on drawing. Fifty years ago this week, my diary reports that I had already reached issue number eleven. Eleven!!? This was unheard of!

For the first few weeks, I was drawing more or less entirely from memory. References? I didn’t need them: I could draw pretty well all the Gerry Anderson vehicles and characters in my sleep. But from issue four onwards, I began to copy frames from Mike Noble’s Fireball XL5 strip, using Countdown reprints as reference. The quality of my artwork suddenly went up appreciably – but only for those frames where I had an original to copy. Elsewhere, my figure work was as dodgy as ever, and some of my framing left a lot to be desired, with speech balloons sometimes obscuring a character’s whole body! I did the same thing with Stingray, and revisiting those comics today, it’s immediately obvious where I’ve copied a Ron Embleton original. That said, my copying was of a pretty high standard, especially as I was trying to reproduce in biro and felt tip effects that the original artists had created with inks and airbrush.

Fireball XL5 drawn in my best Mike Noble knock-off style. Scoop! No. 4, September 1974

By the time I reached issue seven or eight, Scoop! had become a Mike Yarwood version of TV21, with all the strips based on my impressions of the originals. If I’d had a style of my own, I was leaving it behind. Only Supercar remained ‘all my own work’, and in contrast to the other strips, was not drawn in the manner of TV21 (which had inexplicably turned it into a humour strip).

At issue 9, I upped the page count to twelve, dropping the Oink, Zoonie and Mitch strips and bringing in Get Smart! and Burke’s Law. I’d avoided the latter for the simple reason of knowing nothing about the series, but during the autumn had chanced upon a copy of the first TV21 Annual at a jumble sale. It contained a couple of Burke’s Law strips, which gave me enough to go on.

My output remained prolific. By Monday 18 November, I was already up to issue 12. That’s almost a whole comic every week since starting it in August. All this was on top of any homework we’d been set, and in addition to various other illustrative efforts, including a comic based on the adventures of a friend from school who looked and acted like Peter Tork out of the Monkees. I was a one-man publishing venture, at the age of 13. I was also up to issue number 13 by now, which introduced real photographic covers, featuring pictures snipped out of old editions of TV21. I saw nothing wrong with such mutilation: I’d been compiling TV21 photos into scrapbooks for some time, with the result that my 1968-69 era copies were beginning to look somewhat battle-scarred.

In the run up to Christmas 74, things slowed down somewhat. By this time I was also drawing a Scoop! Annual alongside the weekly comic. I worked right up to the 22nd of December when Christmas stuff like visits to relatives and watching all the festive episodes on television kicked drawing activities into touch.

Number 13 was finished on Tuesday 14 January 1975, and I made a start on the cover of No.14. Then, on 25 January 1975, I pushed the envelope a little too far…

Anyone who knows the history of British comics will be familiar with the phenomenon of a publisher starting too many titles and resorting to closure and amalgamation. And that’s exactly what happened with me. Alongside Scoop!, I decided to start a companion comic, based loosely on the line-up from TV Tornado, with strips including Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and The Man from UNCLE. It even came with a free gift in the shape of an UNCLE identity badge. I called this new endeavour Ricochet, and according to my diary it was ‘intended for June ‘75’ – forward planning, no less!

Issue number one of this new comic was, staggeringly, completed in less than twenty four hours, and by Monday 27 January I was onto issue 2 with its free gift of an elastic band-firing Man From UNCLE gun. Comic editing and marketing? I had it taped, and I wasn’t yet fourteen.

Meanwhile, Hodgibits – the comic featuring the Peter Tork lookalike – completed its third issue on Friday 31 January. By Sunday 2 February, I was still working on Scoop! 14 and a separate Thunderbirds special (which got no further than a front cover). Sunday 16 February saw me working on Ricochet No. 2 and the Scoop! Annual (which would eventually get finished). A week later, as if I hadn’t given myself enough to do, I embarked on a Cybermen Annual, getting as far as a cover and a couple of text stories. This was still a work in progress on Sunday 2 March, but two days later came the fatal diary entry: ‘Leave the Cybermen Annual for a while as there is no time to do it.’ The time to do it never came, but the Cybermen Annual still exists in its incompleted form, a testament to over enthusiasm if nothing else.

I wasn’t finished, either: Saturday 15 March saw me start yet another drawing project, no less than a Tintin book, ambitiously entitled The Second Moon. It wasn’t my first such effort either. This one had a cover, drawn in my best Hergé knock-off felt tip and biro style, and… not a lot else. From the success of Scoop! I’d fallen back into the old ways: ‘half finished… do another time.’

I wasn’t done with Scoop! just yet, though – my most successful creation to date was still getting some attention on Saturday 22 March, when I added a Supercar story to the still incomplete annual. But this was to be the last mention of Scoop! in the diary for two months. On Friday 23 May I finally finished number 14 of the comic and the following day started work on number 15, possibly inspired by ITV having been blacked out by industrial action. 

Whilst it had taken TV21 52 issues to introduce a Thunderbirds strip, I couldn’t wait that long. My work rate may have been prodigious, but there was no way I could complete that many editions. So it was that, with issue 16 of Scoop! I yet again revamped the format. Photos were now featuring not only on the covers but on the inside Stop Press pages, saving me a bit of drawing, but exacting a heavy price on my surviving copies of TV21.

Thunderbirds joins the line-up, Scoop! No.16, June 1975

Scoop! 16 was still in progress in mid June, when I embarked on a second Fireball XL5 Annual. Hang on, I hear you say: a ‘second’ Fireball XL5 Annual? Well, yes. My summer holiday project of 1973 had been a Fireball XL5 Annual, inspired by a dream of seeing the cover and contents of a non-existent edition. This took me through into the early summer of 1974, and it can’t have been long after completing it that I set out on the Scoop! project.

By 10 July, I was working on issue 17 of the comic, telling my diary that I would ‘catch up on Scoop in the summer holiday.’ Fine words, no parsnips buttered. However, I was about to cause a minor sensation when I exhibited Scoop! at our school hobbies competition. Surprisingly, perhaps, no one scoffed at the sight of a 14-year-old showing off comics of Gerry Anderson series. After all, I’d drawn 17 issues of a comic and you couldn’t argue with that level of productivity. The comics looked quite impressive set out on my drawing board (I know… I’d had a drawing board since Christmas 1972 but I still lay on the living room floor to make my comics).

Everyone who saw my creations was impressed. The exhibition was open to parents, one of whom was involved in the print business in some way, and gave me his business card. This was widely interpreted as my having ‘made it’ in some way – as if this guy was somehow going to set me up in business when in reality he just saw me as a potential client who might want his comics printing. I knew differently. These weren’t original creations – they were based on copyrights owned by ATV/ITC and I couldn’t just go printing and distributing them willy-nilly. Even at that age, I knew what I was doing in my self-made publishing empire – copyrights, marketing, promotion…

After its success at the hobbies competition, you might have expected me to make good on my promise to ‘catch up on Scoop’ during the summer holidays. But no. Change was on the horizon – change in the shape of a brand-new Gerry Anderson series, Space:1999. I can’t adequately describe the excitement of seeing this lavish new production when it aired on Thursday 4 September 1975. The following week, immediately after watching episode 2 (Force of Life), I started work on a new Space:1999 comic. It couldn’t go into Scoop! in much the same way that Joe 90 couldn’t go into TV21, so it got a title to itself. Never mind that I barely knew the series after just two weeks on air: I already had the annual, and had read a couple of the prematurely published novelisations earlier in the year. The plot managed to cram in practically everything we came to know, love and laugh at about Space:1999 – huge alien spaceships, Eagle crashes, Alphans going mad on the lunar surface, people being killed and brought back to life, massive planets that appear out of nowhere, lost space probes that reappear mysteriously from the past... it was also completely incoherent – exactly like the real thing.

Despite this new venture, I kept up with Scoop! and by Sunday 9 November was working on issue 20. Then, on Saturday 29 November, on top of everything else, I started making another new annual, this time based on Supercar – whereby hangs a tale that must wait to be told another time.

Issue 20 looked as if it might be the end of Scoop! Looking back over more than a year’s work, I could see the improvements that had taken place. My drawing was now a lot better, and the hand-lettered headlines that had looked a bit cranky on the first few editions were now greatly improved. Maybe it was time to start again?

It would me take nearly a year to get around to it, but Scoop! was briefly revived in much improved quality in 1976. This time I had a typewriter with which to produce the newspaper-style covers, and my drawing style had matured considerably. By Saturday 15 January 1977, I was working on the third of a new series, and had already got going on a brand new Scoop! Annual as early as October of the previous year. The new series of the comic had reached number 6 by late March, but wouldn’t get any further. This was, after all, the year in which I was expected to sit for my ‘O’ levels.

Scoop!'s short-lived second series, 1976-77

For the best part of four years, I’d devoted a vast tranche of my spare time to drawing Gerry Anderson comics, but now I’d reached the end of the line. A few years later, a real-life comic called Scoop appeared in newsagents. But – horror – it was about football (I have always detested football). How dare they use my comic’s title for a bloody soccer magazine! And how inappropriate a title! Football comics had titles like Score, Scorcher or Striker. I suppose Scoop also began with the letter S… 

In a way, it seems ironic that my Gerry Anderson comic title should have been appropriated by a football publication, because that’s exactly what happened to the original TV21 – an editorial team took charge who neither understood nor cared about the comic they’d inherited and immediately introduced inappropriate content – ie. football features – to howls of derision from loyal readers.

* * *

My home-made comics may be 50 years old, but they have all survived, more or less intact. The staples have long ago turned to rust, and any sellotape I may have used in appending photographs has yellowed and dried out. I wonder what will become of them when I’m no longer around to curate my own personal history? Will they be a source of mirth to some house clearance company charged with sending them to recycling? Will someone discover them and bring them together in a kind of naive art publication? I’m not sure that my teenage comics would be deserving of that kind of immortality. I created them to amuse myself, to practise drawing and to while away the hours when I wasn’t at school, asleep or watching television. They’re probably a testament to something or other – naive ambition, persistence, teenage enthusiasm, I don’t know. 

One further question to be answered is when and why did I stop making comics? I was still drawing strips up to around 1982, but the following year I started my first job. This, I'm sure, was a major factor in bringing an end to my creative endeavours – lack of available time. All the titles shown in this blog were created in a sustained burst of activity lasting from 1973 to 77, a work rate which simply couldn't be maintained and to which I never returned. Back in 1975, if anyone had asked me what career path I might follow, I'd have answered without hesitation: comics. Of course, I didn’t know anything of the reality of life for the long-distance comic creator: poor pay, long hours, no rights in your own creations, struggling to make ends meet, tied to the drawing board with impossible deadlines to meet, mental and physical illness, nervous breakdown... As the saying goes, you should be careful what you wish for.

Perhaps I was too careful, because aside from a year or so working on nursery comics for the BBC back in the 1990s, comics and I have never come together. It took until 2014 for me to stake out my own little bit of Gerry Anderson territory, forty years on from Scoop! That’s now ten years in the past, Scoop! has reached its half century and am I any closer to being recognised as a ‘name’ in the world of comic creators? Well, you know the answer to that one... 

Keep scrolling down and you'll see a few more examples from my 'archives'...

Some of my output spanning the years 1973-76. Two of the 'annuals' were completed,
but often they got no further than a cover and a few pages.

Stingray, featuring frames copied from Ron Embleton's originals, Scoop! No.5, September 1974

The last page from the last edition, The Daleks, drawn in the manner of Richard Jennings, 1977