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

See What You Started, Charlie Brown...

A pop cultural myth has just turned 65 – a ‘legendary’ figure who existed only in the imagination of a fictional character. It was on 26 October 1959 that readers of the Peanuts newspaper strip were introduced to a character who would never appear in person, but whose yearly no-shows became an event much anticipated by those who followed the adventures of Charlie Brown and friends.

In the Peanuts strip of 26.10.59, Linus is seen writing a letter not to Santa Claus but to the ‘Great Pumpkin’, a Halloween legend whom he imagines will rise up from the Pumpkin patch and deliver toys to all the good children of the world. Over the coming week, he eagerly anticipates the Great Pumpkin’s arrival: one strip sees him suggesting to his sister Lucy that the gang should all go out singing ‘Pumpkin Carols’, whilst in another he waxes lyrical to Charlie Brown about this season of goodwill. The following year it was all played out again, with new variations. By 1966, with the TV special ‘It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown’, Linus’ fixation had arguably become a minor icon of pop culture. The Great Pumpkin was, of course, a delusion, deriving only from the tradition of using pumpkins to carve Halloween Jack-O-Lanterns. As a concept it originated in the mind of Charles Schulz and his creation Linus.

Part of Schulz’ working method was to look for ideas that he could develop across a week or more of daily strips, creating mini-serials with storylines that evolved from day to day. Many such examples involved the sparring relationship between siblings Linus and Lucy Van Pelt. Introduced as a toddler, by the late 50s Linus had become the ‘soul’ of the strip, much given to philosophical and theological ponderings, but also prone to delusional ideas and liable to become a nervous wreck were he ever separated from his famous ‘security blanket’.

On 26 October 1959, Schulz began a mini-serial that would run and run as he explored the many aspects of Linus’ unfounded belief in the Great Pumpkin. It was never explained how or where Linus conceived of the idea: it emerged fully formed in his child’s imagination, and he expressed surprise when others failed to share in his belief.

Linus introduces Lucy to the concept of the Great Pumpkin (26.10.59)

By the second year of the saga, Linus had convinced Charlie Brown to spend Halloween in the pumpkin patch, to await the Great Pumpkin’s arrival. This strip laid out one fundamental tenet of Linus’ Halloween credo, namely that the Great Pumpkin would appear only in a pumpkin patch he deemed to be ‘sincere’: a ‘small, homey’ kind of pumpkin patch as opposed to a large, commercial endeavour. On this occasion, Linus faints at the sight of what he imagines to be the Great Pumpkin (it is, in fact, Snoopy), and goes away contented, wishing the Great Pumpkin a safe journey. But in future years he and others were to be eternally disappointed. Charlie Brown’s sister Sally is especially put out when she too spends the night in the pumpkin patch, thereby missing all the fun of Halloween.

When I first read the Peanuts strips in the late 1960s, I was intrigued by the emphasis placed on Halloween, and the tradition of ‘trick or treat’ which was, at that time, unheard of in England. The practice of ‘guising’ – children in costume going from door to door in hope of receiving food or coins – was popular in Scotland and Ireland and is recorded as far back as 1895, but ‘trick or treat’ was certainly not a part of my childhood growing up in England. That’s not to say that we didn’t have Halloween traditions. Apple-bobbing was familiar to me, and I can remember Blue Peter making paper lanterns and suchlike. Our mother grew up in rural Ireland in the early 20th century and was familiar with many Halloween traditions including the carved Jack-o-Lantern, traditionally a turnip.

I know. A turnip. Baldrick would have been in his element. As to pumpkins, great or otherwise, you couldn’t even get hold of them, certainly not in the prodigious quantities one sees today. Back in the 60s and early 70s, you could certainly buy a certain amount of Halloween merchandise, mostly in the form of papier maché monster masks. But for English children, Halloween was eclipsed by bonfire night, and the big push in seasonal merchandising was very much aimed at the Guy Fawkes crowd. In place of trick or treat, we had ‘penny for the Guy’, with the stuffed effigy of Fawkes, destined for the top of the bonfire, being wheeled around the streets in an old pram by children hopeful of earning some small change with which to buy fireworks.

Banning the sale of fireworks to under-18s provided an incentive to merchandisers to shift focus away from Guy Fawkes, and the past thirty years has seen a veritable glut of seasonal promotions aimed at Halloween revellers: I’ve seen everything from chocolates to electric guitars given a seasonal promotional spin with spooky overtones. We’ve also seen the acceptance of a new Halloween iconography, strongly featuring the colours orange and black (and to a lesser extent, purple). As a designer, I began to notice this trend as it emerged a couple of decades ago. Now, any and every product aimed at children is liable to be given a ghoulish makeover, with Halloween merchandise hitting the shelves from mid September onwards. It is also practically impossible to set foot in any pub – particularly those aimed at a family clientele – without being asssulted on all sides by ghosts, skeletons, huge spiders, vampires and all the other impedimenta of horror movie cliché. Shop windows – even those of relatively restrained enterprises such as accountants and jewellers – are also similarly bedecked. Yet this is only a relatively recent development.

My diary entry for Monday 31 October 1988 makes mention of ‘silly things in pub – decorations, masks etc.’ This was the first time I’d seen anything like this, and is an early indicator of the growing trend towards Halloween décor in public places. The pumpkin iconography had not yet developed to the extent we see today, but pumpkins themselves were slowly becoming easier to obtain; and one now started to see groups of kids in horror garb going from door to door doing trick or treat.

The question I wanted to address in this blog was simple: how much, if indeed any of this focus on Halloween – trick or treat in particular – can be laid at the doorstep of Charlie Brown? The Peanuts strip had been a regular feature of the Daily Sketch (latterly the Daily Mail) since the 1950s, and from the early 70s onwards, character merchandising had seen the iconography extend into such arenas as greetings cards and gifts. But not Pumpkin cards. The Charlie Brown Halloween special was first broadcast by the BBC, with no regard for seasonal continuity, in February 1976, with similarly mistimed repeats in September 1982 and December 1984. The latter two broadcasts may have helped to promote the idea of trick or treat in the minds of young viewers, but other US imports (including an entire film franchise) have played their part in popularising American seasonal traditions at the expense of our own.

Over in America, the merchandising and gifting industries needed no inspiration from Linus, Charlie Brown or the mythical Great Pumpkin. Schulz must have thought it a great joke to portray Linus addressing ‘Pumpkin cards’ but Halloween cards had been around for decades, having originated in the 1890s. Trick or treat, however, was a much more recent arrival, evolving from the earlier practise of ‘guising’ and emerging initially in central Canada, before spreading across the United States during the 1930s (the earliest recorded example was in 1917). The Peanuts strip certainly played its part in promoting the tradition, with the earliest references occurring in 1951, before Linus was even conceived; but rather than Charlie Brown, Wikipedia cites the film ET as having done the heavy lifting of introducing the trick or treat concept to a generation of British children. 

Charlie Brown goes trick or treating, but typically, he's a day late (01.11.51)

Linus’ misplaced faith in the Great Pumpkin has been the subject of various existential and theological interpretations. In one of the earliest strips, he reproaches himself for having been ‘the victim of false doctine.’ There was a lot to play with here, as Schulz quickly recognised. Yet the inspiration for the first Great Pumpkin serial was simply the humour to be derived from a child’s confusing the traditions of Halloween with those of Christmas. Year after year saw Linus return to the pumpkin patch in the hope that his sincerity would be repaid. Was Schulz secretly hoping to persuade real life children to take up this fake tradition? Or was he encouraging us to examine the way we buy unquestioningly into systems of belief? Had the internet been available in Linus’ day, he would have had no trouble recruiting converts to his cause. There are a lot more unlikely things online today than a flying, anthropomorphic pumpkin with a sack of toys, and people seem prepared to believe in them.

Maybe the Great Pumpkin is among us already. If so, he’ll have to be orange, occupy a privileged position, and have the power of convincing the media to believe in his false doctrine. He may not arrive in time for Halloween, but I’d advise anyone in the USA to check their pumpkin patch on the night of November 5th...

Two Plums and a Bell...

 

Adam Faith manhandles a knocked-off 'one armed bandit' in Budgie, 1971

If you think the title of this post sounds a bit rude, you clearly don’t remember the iconic era of mechanical fruit machines, otherwise known as one-armed bandits, that were once to be found in pubs, clubs and arcades not just in Britain but, as Nicholas Parsons used to say, ‘around the world.’ They’re long gone, of course, replaced by modern, electronic versions replete with features including ‘nudge’, ‘hold’ and a baffling array of other options.

‘Play our fruit machines’ said a notice on the display screen in a local pub. The machines in question were, of course, electronic, and the example I could see in a nearby alcove didn’t even have any of the ‘classic’ fruit iconography. This set me thinking: where and how did it all get started? The idea of a gambling machine that pays out on a range of pre-determined combinations is simple enough, but why choose fruit for the winning lines and who made that decision? I decided to look into it in as much depth as the internet will allow…

First thing I learned is that the term ‘fruit machine’ is specifically British. Elsewhere, such devices are known by the more prosaic name of ‘slot machines.’ Everyone who has ever played or merely watched another player pumping their small change into one of them will be familiar with the fruity iconography employed on the spinning drums: an orange, a lemon, a couple of cherries, a plum, and a watermelon (always sliced so as to display its red interior). In addition, there were a range of other symbols including a bell, and a graphic that simply had the word ‘BAR’ inside a black rectangle. To earn a payout, the spinning drums had to stop at a matching line of three identical icons, or various pre-set combinations, eg two bells and a ‘bar’, in orientations specified by the machine’s mechanics (or, latterly, electronics).

The first such machines, built by the Sittman and Pitt company of Brooklyn, New York, were much more overt about their gambling origins, and featured spinning drums decorated not with fruit, but with 50 different playing card faces across five drums. The machines were in essence a form of mechanised poker, with a ‘winning hand’ paying out not in cash but credits for beer, cigarettes and so on. The odds were improved in favour of the ‘house’ by removing two cards from the full deck, and the drums in the machine could also be rearranged to reduce the likelihood of a winning line. 

Sittman and Pitt’s machine appeared in 1891, but around the same time, Charles Fey of San Francisco had come up with a simpler, three-drum system, with symbols of horseshoes, diamonds, hearts and a Liberty Bell, the latter giving its name to the machine and explaining why the image of a golden bell continued to feature on slot machines for decades to come. Unlike the poker-based machine, Fey’s were able to pay out in nickel increments, up to a maximum of 50 cents, for which the player had to score three Liberty Bells in a row. The machines became hugely popular very quickly, and other manufacturers also adopted the Liberty Bell image. 

So where did the fruit come in? In fact, the explanation is both simple, and logical. An early variant of the machine payed out in fruit-flavoured chewing gum, with a choice of lemon, cherry, orange or plum. The Liberty Bell was retained, along with an image of a stick – or ‘bar’ – of Bell-Fruit Gum. The new symbols proved very popular, and had the added advantage of distancing the machines from their poker derivation. Other manufacturers jumped on the bandwagon and, somewhere along the way, a watermelon was added to the list of fruity iconography. The machines were not popular with the state courts in the USA, with two test cases finding that a mint vending machine was in fact a gambling device. But there was no holding back their popularity and it didn’t take long for the machines – now dispensing hard cash as opposed to chewing gum – to conquer the world.

Mechanical machines held sway until the 1960s, when the first electro-mechanical variants began to appear. I can still remember seeing the first such examples here in Britain, towards the end of the decade. But when visiting amusement arcades (almost always at the seaside) I still favoured the traditional ‘one-armed bandit’. There was something more appealing about cranking a handle and hearing the drums spinning inside the machine, a kind of visceral quality that the electronic versions lacked. Back in the 60s, we played for pennies, and no more considered it a form of gambling than we did the penny falls machines in those same seaside arcades. Later, the machines were uprated to accept 5p and 10p coins, which meant that you could end up spending a lot more, but the jackpot payouts were accordingly more attractive. Who could resist the sight and sound of all those shiny coins being disgorged into the chrome-plated hopper at the bottom of the machine?

It was believed – rightly or wrongly I can’t be sure – that the mechanical fruit machines could be ‘primed’ somehow by giving the lever a special sort of jerk. In reality, the only jerks were the ones who kept pumping in their shiny shillings. But those machines had a very definite appeal, and even when the payout was in mere copper coins, you couldn’t help feeling like a king when all that cash was dropped in your lap.

The new electro-mechanical machines were much bigger than their predecessors, and a lot more flashy, with most examples including animated light displays and even music. New features like ‘nudge’ and ‘hold’ were easy enough to grasp, but before long a bewildering range of options was on offer to the player, all of them, to my mind, detracting from the brilliant simplicity of simply pulling a handle and letting fate (or the devious machinations of the machine’s owners) take its course.

I always felt – correctly, as it turns out – that the electronic machines must be easier to ‘fix’ to increase the odds against jackpot payouts. As Wikipedia’s article on the subject has it, ‘the odds of losing symbols appearing on the payline became disproportionate to their actual frequency on the physical reel’ as a result of electronics incorporated into the design. It was often believed that the old mechanical machines could be rigged to avoid jackpot paylines, and I’m sure this was the case; but once electronics arrived on the scene, it was no longer a mere game of chance: the system was actively working against you.

When microprocessors entered the arena of gaming machines, the odds against winning became even higher. Makers could now assign specific probabilities to every symbol on every reel, goading players into parting with still more money after a near miss when the machine stopped just short of a winning line. In the 1980s, machines began to incorporate a system that directed coins into one of two reservoirs – one as payment for the owner, the other as potential prize money. As the prize money reservoir filled up, the odds on winning increased. This explains the phenomenon of watching a loser pumping money into a machine for ages, only for the next player to step up and immediately score a winning line. By the same token, with the prize money depleted, the odds against a jackpot were considerably higher.

Today’s machines no longer make use of mechanical components, and now employ as many as five reels within a computerised display. If you’re ever tempted by one of these devices, think again – the odds against winning can be as high as 300 million to one. You’ve got more chance of winning the lottery or being hit by an asteroid.

There was one form of gaming machine that it was possible to defeat, by sheer brain power. In the 1980s, our local pub introduced a quiz machine that payed out handsomely if you could make it through the various stages towards the jackpot level. A group of us – all ex-grammar school boys, with plenty of trivial and general knowledge at our disposal – took on the machine and began to score jackpots of over £30 a time. My diary for 1986 records that on one evening, a team of five of us walked away with £6 each. Someone must have tumbled, because the machine was soon removed, later to be replaced by a new variant based on the TV game Blockbusters, which was ‘much harder’ according to the diary. In a fair game of cash for answers, it was all too easy to beat the system and I’m sure we weren’t the only ones cashing in. One night, the machine even ran out of money! But as far as any other gaming machine goes, there is only ever one guaranteed winner – the company who supplies it!

The Last TV21

 

No, that's not the cover – this is an early draft that I rejected before publication

It came out ten years ago this autumn, and was never an officially sanctioned edition, but for some fans, the one and only edition of TV21 that I edited is now considered as ‘canon’. It’s included on DVD collections of the comic’s original run, which is gratifying... if somewhat surprising.

It all started at the kitchen table of Tim Beddows. We were kicking around ideas for items we could include in a packaged DVD release of the documentary Filmed in Supermarionation, which Network had commissioned from producer Stephen La Riviere. Tim wanted a big, deluxe packaging job, and I’d been considering some kind of limited edition model of a Thunderbird craft, but such an item would have proved prohibitively expensive. As a sort of wild idea, I threw out the notion of doing our own edition of TV21. Somewhat to my surprise, Tim immediately liked it. But if we were going to do it, I’d have to do it myself – there could be no farming it out to a publisher or other content creator.

I didn’t mind this at all. I’d been making my own editions of TV21 since the late 1960s, when a tiny reproduction of the first ever cover in that week’s edition prompted me to have a go at imagining what the actual comic might have been like. This home made endeavour does not survive, but the second edition does, and was included on the ‘Shades Page’ of the 2014 edition.

I knew from the outset that I couldn’t possibly produce a complete, 24-page TV21 comic single-handed, and aside from one or two contacts, I had little or no idea where to look to solicit contributions. In the end, I was able to contact John Freeman, who spread the word via his Downthetubes website, and I also knew David Lloyd, who put word out amongst the comic fraternity. Within a fairly short time, I was receiving emails from comic creators around the world.

One thing I was certain of was that we needed some original TV21 contributors on board. I’d previously commissioned Mike Noble to paint a cover for a DVD release of Fireball XL5, but Mike was in poor health and although I made an approach, he was sadly unable to contribute anything. I had better luck with John M. Burns, whose TV21 pages had been confined to the black and white adventure strips Catch or Kill and Front Page. While I ended up including the latter in our edition, I wanted John Burns in full colour. He agreed to produce a double page spread, on condition that the script was written by a known author. I was more than capable of writing any kind of Gerry Anderson comic strip, but John didn’t know this and my name carried no clout in the serious world of comics. For this reason, I asked John Freeman to write the script (he also wrote Agent 21 for us). His Lady Penelope story was one of only two in the whole comic that were entirely self-contained (the other being Project SWORD). I think John Freeman also wrote our Joe 90 strip, and I solicited futher contributions from comics expert Shaqui le Vesconte (Project SWORD and Captain Scarlet). The rest was down to me.

John Burns' Lady Penelope spread before the captions were added (I now own the original)

I can see from my records that this work didn’t really get started until June 2014 – a perilously tight deadline for an October production date. As well as John Burns, our ‘originals’ line-up included Martin Asbury – not a bona fide TV21 artist, but well known for his contributions to Look-in, Countdown and many others – and Gerry Embleton. I was particularly pleased to have Gerry on the project, as his artwork had been included in one of the first books I ever owned – the Fireball XL5 annual published in 1963. He had been a semi-regular on TV21, filling in for his brother Ron during his occasional breaks from the Stingray strip, and I also knew his work from the nursery comic Robin, not to mention illustrations for various bubble gum card sets during the 60s and early 70s. Gerry was given Stingray to illustrate, from a script written by myself.

One of the concepts I came up with was to have the stories revisiting pilot episodes of the various series, although in the end this was only carried through to the Thunderbirds strip, which saw a MkII Fireflash being hijacked by the Hood. British artist Martin Baines drew and coloured this strip in his customary detailed style. I’d sort of hoped he might have restyled the Fireflash, but he drew it faithful to the original. It had to be updated somehow, so we changed its colour scheme to red. For the record, my original Captain Scarlet story, which saw an assassination attempt taking place at a rebuilt London Car-Vu, ended up as a separate comic, illustrated by Paul McCaffrey, that was produced to accompany our blu-ray release of the series.

By early June, I had enough artists signed up to set the ball rolling, and on the 5^th of the month, I sent out a short briefing document. In it, I made it clear that the intention was to replicate the look and feel of the original as closely as possible, and although welcoming digital art, I specfically mentioned that we did not want 3d illustrations, and asked that the digital artists might endeavour to give their work as much of an ‘analogue’ feel as possible. I also stipulated that the artwork should not bleed off the pages, a trend in modern comics that I’ve never liked, and which would have been totally alien to the TV21 asethetic.

The Secret Service, which never appeared in TV21, was one of my favourite pages from the comic.
Artwork by 'Baretti'.

The old guard stuck with tradtion, and I received large artwork boards from Messrs. Embleton and Asbury, with John Burns’ sumptuous Lady Penelope strip arriving in a cardboard roll. This caused me some problems (and cost me a parking fine) when I needed to get it scanned, eventually using a bureau in Derby that had an oversized scanner on the premises. Also supplying original art was noted cutaway specialist Graham Bleathman who, for reasons I don’t remember, provided a painting of the Martian probe rocket and transporter from the Thunderbirds episode Day of Disaster.

I knew that all this artwork would take time to create, and in the meantime I faced the not inconsiderable task of artworking the huge reprint of Stephen La Riviere’s book that was to accompany the box set. In doing this, I had the pick of hundreds of interesting stills, many of them very rare. Having seen the book in its original form, I elected to use, as far as possible, shots that had not been seen too many times before.

Back on the comic, the first pieces of artwork were beginning to arrive. The very first to turn up was Martin Asbury’s Captain Scarlet, in black indian ink on Bristol board, for which he apologised in advance, not having had recourse to such techniques for many years. I scanned the artwork in sections and joined it all together: those scans are dated 21.07.14. Next to meet the deadline was Martin Baines, whose Thunderbirds pages are dated 30.07.14, just under two months from the original brief. John Burns’ Lady Penelope was with me by the end of August, with others continuing to trickle through during the first weeks of September. And don’t forget that looming production deadline. September 5th was the art deadline I’d specified on the brief, and in the end few of the artists actually made it. Production wise, we had a bit of leeway, as the comic wouldn’t take long to print, and in the event was the very last item of the box set to reach the printer. But what those artists all failed to realise as they overshot the deadline was that even after receipt of their pages, I still had to add all the balloons and lettering myself. In the case of Martin Asbury, I also had to add colour to his black line work, a not inconsiderable task.

Somehow, in the midst of all this, I found myself drawing a strip, something I had originally planned not to do. However, with two pages going spare, and time on my hands while I waited for more artwork to arrive, I set myself the task of drawing Zero-X in the style of TV21’s art editor Jim Watson, whose distinctive if idiosyncratic work had featured on the original strip during 1968. This endeavour earned me a friendly, telephonic lesson in comic art from John Burns when he saw the results. There was no point trying to explain that I’d been trying to do a pastiche of Watson’s work. I very nearly omitted the credit from my pages (in a kind of homage to Countdown, I’d included art credits for all the contributors). Either way, my pages were completed by 3rd September, some way ahead of the remaining ‘real’ artists.

The last to arrive was Gerry Embleton’s Stingray. He’d had an accident with a bottle of ink and had to redraw one frame (I still have the damaged original somewhere). While Burns’ Lady Penelope was dramatically coloured, and high in contrast, I felt the Stingray panels were a little anaemic by comparison. I suppose I could have corrected this in Photoshop (I did with a couple of other pages) but in the end decided to leave them unmolested. I mean, this was Gerry Embleton, after all!

Gerry Embleton's Stingray before the addition of captions.

Gerry was soon to become the Peter Cushing to my Morecambe and Wise: on several occasions I answered telephone calls from an international number (Switzerland) to find him on the phone, politely asking when he might expect to be paid. Network’s accounts department were never exactly speedy when settling invoices, but in Gerry’s case seemed to be particularly tardy. I even suggested paying him myself and getting the company to reimburse me, but fortunately it was settled withour recourse to such action.

On the editorial side, I became Colonel White – not difficult, as I already had the right colour hair. I included a few in-jokes such as references to Mars Press and a Mysteron plot to plant false information in the pages of TV21. This was, in fact, a dig at the editorial team who had overseen the slow dismantling of the comic’s format in 1969, including a Captain Scarlet storyline that did away with the Mysterons entirely. The comic was by this time in the hands of a syndicate called Martspress, so you can probably see what I did there. Our Front Page strip (a late addition to the line-up) allowed me to develop this idea somewhat.

Design wise, I created a new masthead that was in essence a combination of the ‘Spectrum era’ TV21 and the comic’s belated return to newspaper covers in 1969. For the editorial sections, I used the same fonts that had been seen in the original TV21, with particular emphasis on two weights of a Grotesque variant that fairly screamed ‘1960s TV21’ when you put them into any page layout.

Although the comic was intended as a one-off, I allowed for the (admittedly slim) possibility of a continuation, by running all but one of the strips as the opening episodes in what could have become an ongoing continuity. In fact, many of these storylines were developed through a series of covers we included in the box set as a folding postcard. I’m not sure if many people entirely understood these additional covers, as I’ve seen some of them online purporting to be from the real run of TV21. Evidently, I'd made them too realistic!

'Issue 249', one of a series of continuation covers I created as postcards for the box set.

By the first week of October 2014, I finally had all the content together and a fully artworked comic ready to be sent to the printers. I’d decided to try and print on a vintage style paper, but was given bad advice by the printers: what we ended up with was plain, uncoated paper that lent a dull, matt appearance to the colours and was a bit of a disappointment when I got to see a copy. By contrast, the proof pages had been shiny and brilliant. TV21 itself was printed on a type of paper that has now completely disappeared. It was a far cry from the ubiquitous shiny stock that is used on all modern comics and which I wished to avoid, but neither was it plain uncoated pulp stock. In retrospect, I should have simply opted for a glossy paper, and would take care to use improved stock on all our other comic projects.

The final TV21 credits read as follows: p.2 Zoony the Lazoon/ Lew Stringer; p.3 Agent 21/ Brian Williamson; pp. 4-5 Stingray/ Gerry Embleton; p.6 adverts; p.7 The Secret Service/ ‘Baretti’; pp.8-9 Thunderbirds/ Martin Baines; p.10 Supercar/ Jim Hansen & Bambos Georgiou; p.11 Joe 90/ Mike Collins; pp.12-13 Lady Penelope/ John M. Burns; pp. 14-15 Project Sword (text)/ Paul McCaffrey; pp 16-17 Captain Scarlet/ Martin Asbury; p.18 cutaway, Graham Bleathman; p.19 Fireball XL5/ Mike Collins; pp.20-21 Zero-X/ Martin Cater; p. 22 Front Page/ Mark Wheatley; pp. 23-24, editorial. All in all, it was a unique and remarkable opportunity to work alongside such a stellar line-up of comic creators, and while it was definitely a one-off, there would be further comic creations from Network in the years to come.

Having proved the concept, as it were, I had no difficulty in persuading Tim to include comics in our other Supermarionation box sets. He had, after all, seen and laughed at some of my childhood creations (the Department S comic strip that I drew aged nine had to be seen to be believed). Now we had the chance to do it properly. There was a comic each for the box sets of Captain Scarlet and Joe 90, excellently artworked by Paul McCaffrey (now a 2000AD contributor), and comics to accompany the blu ray box sets of Supercar, Fireball XL5 and Stingray. For Supercar, I returned to the ‘Beakercar’ story I’d set up in the 2014 TV21, and got a whole comic out of it in what I felt was a faithful representation of the TV series. I also contributed art to this endeavour, pencilling the faces of all the characters, with the final pages inked by Bambos Georgiou. For Fireball XL5 I tried to be innovative: I’d developed a means of creating comics from photo-montage – a far cry from traditional ‘photo comics’ as it involved a considerable effort in Photoshop to combine numerous elements into the finished frames. This technique was showcased in an online comic Lightning 5, published in David Lloyd’s Aces Weekly between 2019 and 2020 (the comic itself being a visual homage to Supermarionation). I now applied the same methods to Fireball XL5, chopping up frame grabs and recombining them to produce something that looked, at a glance, like a photonovelisation of an actual episode. I deemed it a success and repeated the technique for a sumptuous Stingray comic which had originally been earmarked for long time Anderson comic artist Steve Kyte. When he had to pull out of the project, I went for the photo-montage look again, creating what I modestly believe to be the most faithful recreation of Stingray outside the TV series itself.

Joe 90: a page from Network's comic illustrated by Paul McCaffrey

Whether fans understood what I did on those projects is something I’ve often wondered. Did they simply glance at them and dismiss them as simple photo-stories of the kind produced in various annuals over the years? Unfortunately, the box sets were produced in such limited editions that none of the comics – TV21 included – was ever seen outside of a few thousand individuals. If I got no traction, no recognition, indeed nothing back from any of them, it was hardly surprising.

What I did achieve was to add another digit to the complete run of the original TV21, which ended at issue 242. I can still remember my disappointment at what became of TV21 in September 1969, with football covers and barely any of the Gerry Anderson series left on board. Issue 243 was, in essence, me resolving my own long-standing issues with the whole later era of the comic, and I was pleased when I realised that fans were now treating it as bona fide to the extent of including it in pdf collections, while the football-focused revamp has been ignored.

There have been other Anderson comic efforts in recent years, proving that there will be interest and commercial viability in such projects for the forseeable future. At time of writing, a number of Supermarionation series are available to stream on ITVX where it is to be hoped they will be connecting with new fans as well as old.

For me, creating Gerry Anderson comics and design content was a job I dreamed about in childhood, and I consider it a privilege to have been able to make my own small contribution to the genre, not just in the form of comics, but in the often elaborate packaging that accompanied Network’s releases. Having spent a lifetime with those series, I've developed an understanding of their asethetic and a deep appreciation of the extraordinary creativity that went into them.

If TV21 No. 243 turns out to be the last hoorah of a beloved title – and it most certainly will be the last to include work from the original artists – then I'd like to think the comic went out on a positive note. It wasn't motivated by greed – we did it for the enjoyment of fans at our own cost, and never sought to capitalise on the comic by selling it outside the box set – and I think it was true to the spirit of the original. For me, it was an interesting and unique experience, squaring a circle that I'd set in motion years earlier with my own comic creations. In a school essay of many decades ago I imagined myself, at some point in the future, creating comics for a living. If nothing else, I can claim to have done it at least once...

Where it all started: my own take on TV21 issue 2, copied (using a magnifying glass) from a tiny reproduction in a 1969 edition.