Radio 4Extra: The End of an Era?

The BBC needs to make savings. Where better to start than by axing the popular archival radio station Radio 4Extra? Well, I could make a few suggestions… Although the channel’s content will, it is claimed, continue to be available on BBC iPlayer, the announcement this week means the end of so called ‛linear’ broadcasting, as in a scheduled service that can be received on digital radio. 

I’ve been listening to Radio 4Extra since the days it was known as BBC7. I got my first DAB radio specifically to be able to receive the channel, which was launched during the BBC’s transition from analogue to digital radio broadcasting around the turn of the century. In 2012, the station was rebranded as Radio 4Extra, losing some of its original content (a children’s schedule had been running on weekend afternoons), and making room for more recently broadcast material from Radio 4. But the mainstay of its output remained primarily archival material, and over the years the station has unearthed rare and valuable programmes that otherwise would have had no other outlet.

Radio 4Extra has always been a big part of my own personal ‛radio mix’ which at one time even extended as far as Radio One. Not any more. Nor, indeed, do I still listen to Radio 2, since the channel’s controllers started tinkering with the demographic, easing out presenters and programmes that were perceived as appealing to an older audience. During the Covid pandemic, I baled out of Radio 4 – the daily news was simply too depressing – and began listening almost exclusively to Radio 4Extra. You might say I was in denial, but why not? Who wouldn’t rather live in the sound world of the Light Programme and the Home Service, rather than the endlessly depressing downward spiral of contemporary news broadcasts? That, of course, is by no means a justification for retaining Radio 4Extra as a ‛linear’ station: but I’m sure there are many people, living on their own, who have it on in the background, as well as listening to specific programmes. Not everyone wants the mix of contemporary drama, comedy and current affairs that makes up the daily schedule on Radio 4.

Radio 4Extra is unique amongst British radio stations. Music, news and sport are more than adequately covered by other BBC national and local stations, and there is of course, a huge choice of commercial broadcasters. But nowhere else on the UK’s radio network will you find a mix of curated, archival drama, spoken word and comedy. The fact is that all such content on British radio has historically come from the BBC: commercial stations have never bothered with original drama or comedy. Where else is one to find them?

On television, it’s a different story. Whilst the BBC seems to care little for the deeper levels of its archive, there are still occasional welcome exhumations on BBC4 – like the repeats of Call My Bluff that have popped up over the past couple of years, and occasional seasons of major drama serials and plays. Older content – meaning just about anything made in black and white – has been surfacing on Talking Pictures TV, a digital TV station that knows its audience and programmes its schedules accordingly.

If Radio 4Extra is to stop broadcasting, what we need in its place is a station that will pick up those older archival shows – many of them painstakingly recovered and restored by an interest group known as the Radio Circle. I’ve written elsewhere about the online station Serenade Radio that styles itself after the old Light Programme, with a schedule comprising of easy listening and light pop material, including items of archival BBC content like Sing Something Simple and Music While You Work. Is this a potential model for a future ‛linear’ BBC archival service? Would the BBC make its radio archive available to interested parties? Another thought: why not sacrifice some of Radio 4’s broadcast hours make room for a regular archive slot? Or even the recently introduced and mostly ignored Radio 3 Unwind? Isn’t a good book or play as valid a way of ‛unwinding’ than ambient music and birdsong?

Realistically, all linear radio broadcasting will one day come to an end, replaced by online, streaming-based services. Rather than tuning in, listeners will have to pick the shows they want to hear from a menu. But this is clearly not the same thing at all as simply turning on and listening ‛at random’. In this way, I’ve discovered programmes I’d never have heard otherwise. Only a few weeks back, I went down to our local Waterstones to pick up a copy of J.L. Carr’s marvellously melancholic novel ‛A Month in the Country’, which I’d heard as a superb reading on 4Extra. I’d never heard of Carr before: he turns out to have been a fascinating, unique character, who ran his own small press for many years. But I wouldn’t know him at all if it weren’t for 4Extra. I caught the broadcast by chance, owing to my habit of leaving the radio on in the kitchen, tuned permanently to the station. This element of serendipity is what we’ll miss when the channel is reduced to an online shadow of its former self. In the same way, I recently stumbled across a broadcast of John Betjeman in conversation with the cartoonist, stage designer and architectural historian Osbert Lancaster. They were talking about conservatories. It was superbly old bufferish, recondite, and exactly the kind of thing one would never come across anywhere else.

But the real question the BBC needs to answer is why Radio 4Extra should be the first head on the radio chopping block? It’s reaching 1.4 million listeners a week, and out-performing other stations like the three utterly superfluous extra iterations of Radio One: Radio 1Xtra, Radio 1 Dance and Radio 1 Anthems. These stations, two of which don’t even figure in RAJAR’s ‛hours per head’ figures, should have been first in the firing line. Music is more than adequately represented on both the BBC and commercial stations. There are, at time of writing, two incarnations of BBC 6 Music, which itself was threatened with the axe some years ago, but won a reprieve when listeners complained. Radio 3 has only recently launched its ‛mindful’ alter ego ‛Radio 3 Unwind’, which is under-performing Radio 4 Extra by a considerable margin and clocking up zero hours per head in RAJAR’s latest listening figures. As for Radio 5, it too is available in four flavours, with no fewer than three ‛sports extra’ channels. Sports fans are well catered for elsewhere across the mainstream media: surely the BBC can let one or two of them go?

Sadly, I’m afraid that the decision to close Radio 4Extra as a broadcast service is yet another example of the BBC’s ageism. The channel’s archival content makes it a favourite with older listeners, especially those who’ve been driven away from other channels like Radio 2 and even Radio 4 in the BBC’s relentless drive to be contemporary and appeal to a younger audience. This flies in the face of statistics showing that UK radio stations see higher engagement from older listeners. We oldies may be listening to the BBC, but the BBC isn’t listening to us.

This is nothing new: the Corporation has been chasing the ‛youth’ market since the big shakeup of the mid 60s that gave us ‛wonderful’ Radio One, and ushered in an era of celebrity DJs commanding eye-watering salaries. Realistically, this kind of thing has to stop if the BBC really wants to save money. I’d be interested to know exactly how much money will be saved by downgrading Radio 4Extra to an online only service? Of all the BBC’s radio networks, it must be one of the cheapest to maintain: all the programmes are readily available, there’s next to nothing new being produced, and the only areas of expenditure will be research, restoration, rights and presenters’ salaries. I’d really like to know how these figures compare to any of the other ‛extra’ radio stations.

In justifying service closures like this, BBC executives regularly remind us that although 94% of adults use BBC services per month, less than 80% of households actually pay the annual licence fee. It is this loss of revenue that has to be made good through cuts to staff, programmes and services. But as a ‛BBC insider’ told the Guardian this week, “there is a very credible threat that there will be an increase in people choosing to opt out of the licence fee because it no longer does them a service.”

One thing is clear: the cuts announced this week are only the beginning. I confidently expect to see the demise of BBC4 within the year – the channel’s content has been pared back drastically in recent years, with no new documentaries being commissioned, and judging from the endless trails one sees on air, the channel is desperately trying to get its audience used to the idea of watching their content on iPlayer.

So what of the future? The BBC claims that some of 4Extra’s content will still be accessible through iPlayer, which is small comfort for older listeners who may not be online at all. And for those of us who can listen online, what will be available? Exactly the same programmes that are available now: Hancock, The Goon Show, Steptoe and Son and a raft of other classic comedies have been available long term on iPlayer for a good few years. I doubt we’ll see any of the classic drama serials, plays, whodunnits and vintage panel shows that currently feature in the daily programme listings unless the iPlayer offering is drastically overhauled. But at the end of the day, this kind of ‛self service’ radio is not what 4Extra listeners want, nor what the BBC’s peerless audio archive deserves.

There’s still a chance that this can all be nipped in the bud. There’s a petition online to save the station, which can be found here: https://you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/save-radio-4-extra-1

Radio Times: The Swash Caps Era

During the 1960s, we never took the Radio Times in our household. Neither, for that matter, did we bother with the TV Times. Our mum didn't like magazines as they created too much clutter. That all came to an end towards the end of the decade, and by around 1970 we were getting both titles every week. Even at the age of nine, I was quite aware that, despite their similar content – both were first and foremost listings magazines – there was a marked difference in tone between them. The TV Times was slightly more frivolous, celebrity focused, often featuring popular comedy and light entertainment series on its covers. But the Radio Times was something else. There were weeks when you'd struggle to guess what kind of magazine it was just by looking at the cover. In the following article, I'm going to look back over the Radio Times covers of the 1970s and see what, if anything, they can tell us about the BBC and the magazine itself.

Compared to the TV Times with its friendly bold sans serif masthead, the Radio Times of the early 70s looked a bit stuffy and old fashioned. In the autumn of 1969 it had undergone a major stylistic makeover, ushering in the era I will refer to as 'swash caps' after the masthead's distinctive lettering. But before delving any deeper into the 'swash caps' era, it's worth taking a moment to consider what had gone before.

The Radio Times goes back to 1923, the BBC's second year of existence. Those early editions are extremely formal in appearance, with no photos or artwork on the covers. It was, literally, the Times of broadcasting (the Times famously did not publish photographs on its covers until 1966). By the late 20s and early 30s, halftone photos were beginning to appear, alongside occasional four colour photogravure covers, reserved for special occasions like Christmas or the 'summer number'. The era of weekly colour covers still lay a long way in the future.

Right through the 1950s the magazine still looked quite formal and dull, with monochromatic covers, lifted by a single spot colour (yellow) on the title block. In 1959, the RT was given a long overdue makeover, sporting a stylish new sans font for the masthead, and spot colour printing which varied week by week. Covers were primarily photos of television personalities, interspersed with graphic designs often of a modernist, innovative slant. The new look didn't last long, and was replaced at Vol. 156, issue No. 2021 of Thursday 2 August 1962 with a less racy block serif font. The spot colours remained, but the photos were still dull monochrome, and the magazine continued to be printed on cheap newsprint. By 1967, occasional colour covers were beginning to appear, printed on coated stock, until finally, beginning on Thursday 28 September, colour covers became the norm. The Radio Times of 1967 through 69 look bright and inviting, with plenty of covers highlighting the most popular comedy, light entertainment and drama series of the day. During this era, the RT didn't look vastly different in tone from its Independent Television rival. But change was afoot.

Barlow, Dixon and Stone ushering in the 'Swash Caps' era of RT covers: 4 September 1969

Beginning at Vol.184 issue 2391, of Thursday 4 September 1969, the Radio Times got a new look – one which would endure, with variations, all the way through to April 2001. Ditching the friendly coloured block serif font, the masthead now adopted an antique, neo-Victorian manner, with the initials RT in huge black italic swash capitals, and the rest of the letters in the same font, but much smaller. The cover was laid out with the main image occupying three quarters of the space, and the masthead in a clear band above, the whole design enclosed in a black outline. To the left and right of the masthead, a cluttered mass of type drew readers' attention to key features in this week's issue.

For the first sixteen weeks, the RT's new covers were, for the most part, dry and serious in appearance. Nothing illustrates this better than the issue dated 13 November 1969, the week BBC1 began broadcasting in colour. One might have expected a bright and colourful cover packed with the stars of light entertainment, but instead, the image was of a bunch of riot police in Tokyo. Sure, there was a big cerise headline saying 'Colour comes to BBC1' but one can't help feeling that the RT was in grave danger of alienating its readership. What did it think it was? The Listener? By complete contrast, the TV Times for that week had a grinning Benny Hill on its cover, surrounded by balloons...

Which would you rather read? RT fails to rise to the occasion as colour broadcasting arrives: November 1969 

Something was not right here. Looking at the RT covers from autumn 1969, it's hard to find any that would be of interest to a collector today. Ironically, many years ago, I stumbled across a run of issues from this precise era at a junk market, priced at just pennies. Needless to say, I bought them all, but they're a disappointing lot. What had taken hold of the Radio Times? Was a new editor at the helm? A new art editor seems likely, but did either of them understand what the magazine buying public really wanted? Those 16 weeks produced some of the dullest, stuffiest RT covers seen since the 1920s. Even the Christmas cover was a failure, a dismal collage that looked like someone was doing a very bad imitation of Monty Python's Terry Gilliam. Surely 1970 couldn't be any worse?

In fact, the new year would see a vast improvement. Purely from a collector's point of view, it's one of the best vintage years for RT covers, getting off to an excellent start on New Year's Day with a cover featuring the new Doctor Who, Jon Pertwee. Of course, the RT's covers can only ever be as good as the week's programmes will allow, but luckily there was a crop of good new series to be featured over the coming weeks including Doomwatch (5 February), Not Only But Also (12 February) and Steptoe and Son (26 February), although the art editor selected a catastrophically bad image for the latter cover.

Three of the best covers from autumn and winter 1970: RT's best year for collectable editions

Autumn, with its crop of new programmes, always breathed new life into the Radio Times, and the autumn of 1970 saw what is, for me, the longest consecutive run of collectable and interesting covers in the magazine's history: Dad's Army (17 September); Softly, Softly (24 September); Roads to Freedom (1 October) and Ray Davies' drama with music The Loneliness of the Long Distance Piano Player (8 October). By contrast, the wooden spoon for worst cover of the year goes to Vol 187, issue 2428 (21 May) which featured a not particularly impressive painting of some BBC comedy stars.

'Right, here's the rough, now let's get it photographed properly.' 1970's worst cover.

1971 saw two notable covers from ex-TV21 artist Frank Bellamy, whose 'The Daleks are back' cover of 30 December must surely rank amongst the most collectable of all RTs. Browsing through this era, it's interesting to note how few artworked covers there were: the Radio Times had long enjoyed a reputation as a sort of low key patron of the commercial art community, and its pages often found room for contributions from important figures like Eric Ravilious and, latterly, Peter Brookes. But for the most part, the RT of the early 70s saw a lot of photographic covers and little or no artworked examples. That's perhaps not surprising considering the misfire of 21 May 1970. 1972 failed to produce a single artworked cover and by now, the new layout was beginning to creak more than a little.

The cover headline font size increased massively with the edition for 8 June 1971, and some weeks saw black headlines and text that were almost illegible against dark backgrounds. The cluttered text remained in the top corners, and was really beginning to detract from the overall appearance. It was finally kicked into touch during the summer of 1972, following a run of weeks where the textual clutter appeared on one side of the masthead only, leaving space for some corner banners on the opposite side promoting the BBC's 'Great Summer of Sport'. The very last RT to sport the 'two cluttered corners' look was the issue for 1 June 1972, featuring Simon Oates as the popular character John Ridge in the Doomwatch series. Finally, on 24 August, the masthead got a new, minimalist look, dropping the top panels of text, while the huge swash caps were scaled down, the leading capital R losing its stylish tail in the process.

The Radio Times had, after three years, finally arrived at a look that would endure over three decades. It still looked a bit frowsty and out of kilter with the times – compare any magazine cover of the same era with that week's RT – but it was distinctive and spoke to the slightly stuffy, holier than thou attitude that, to some extent, still prevailed at the Corporation: the last vestiges of the Lord Reith ethos (he'd died the previous year).

The large headline font (Franklin Gothic) got even bigger during 1973, a year whose notable cover stars included James Burke (1 March), Mick Jagger (5 April) and David Frost (6 December). The Goodies scored a cover with the beginning of their new series in February, but it's hard to imagine a worse image than the three of them hiding in the scoop of an excavator, rendering them almost unidentifiable.

The trend for all-photographic covers continued into 1974, while those Franklin Gothic headlines mushroomed in size. Did someone in the art department need a new pair of spectacles? Bucking the all-photos trend were the covers for 29 August (a fake identikit photo of Norman Stanley Fletcher to announce the arrival of the sitcom Porridge); 26 September (looks like Peter Brookes); 14 November (an airbrush illustration of the Earth showing the entire northern hemisphere under an ice cap – what were they thinking?); and 12 December for a cover highlighting hazards in the home, rendered in a naive 'ligne claire' manner.

How many Radio Times featured cakes as their cover artwork? Just this one... (August 1975)

1975 saw a few more artworked covers slip through, including a notable example in the style of Hokusai, for the week marking the 30th anniversary of the atom bombings of Japan. Other interesting covers included Mike Yarwood 'impersonating' the Dave Allen cover of 20 February, an artworked Goodies cover (6 February); a half-bearded Eric Idle flagging up the arrival of Rutland Weekend Television (8 May); and a homage to the famous Bamforth comic postcards promoting the second series of Porridge (16 October) – a cover which drew a disparaging response from one reader who considered it tasteless.

Morecambe and Wise – seen from behind in one of their famous dance moves – bagged the first cover of 1976, a year which saw a sharp increase in artworked covers. The best of year award goes to Spitting Image creators Fluck and Law, whose characterful models of an all American family graced the cover of the edition for 1 July, the week America celebrated its bicentennial. But there were some horrors too: the airbrushed Shirley Bassey of 28 October was surpassed in awfulness only by the cover of 9 December, promoting the annual 'Sports Personality of the Year' award. In the stakes for worst Radio Times cover of all time, this is a strong contender.

One of the worst... RT cover for 9 December 1976

Where the Radio Times had once featured plenty of lighter fare on its covers, promoting the biggest names in comedy and light entertainment, by the mid 70s it was becoming decidedly po-faced. Of the covers from 1976, 11 were sporting subjects, 17 tackled serious topics from the fields of documentary and classical music, 5 featured current drama series, and 8 focused on celebrities and media personalities. Only a solitary cover promoted a comedy series. Beginning with the final issue of the year, the masthead went from being in a separate white panel to reversed out of the cover image, bringing an end to the cover grid that had persisted since 1969.

1977 kept up the trend towards serious subjects on the covers, with 19 editions contrasting just two featuring comedy series. Drama did a lot better with 14 covers. Major cover stars this year included Faye Dunaway (13 January), Clint Eastwood (17 February), Diana Rigg (3 March) and tennis star Sue Barker (16 June). This being the year of Queen Elizabeth II's silver jubilee, her Majesty featured on two covers. Artwork or designs now accounted for 15 of the year's covers, including two Christmas editions that looked as if they hailed from fifty years earlier, a child's painting (26 May), and a dull Ralph Steadman cartoon (9 June). Worst of the year by a country mile was the cover for 7 July, featuring a cut-out of actor Jack Shepherd's face pasted onto a bust of Sir Isaac Newton. There was even a Granny Smith apple standing to one side just for good measure: another candidate for worst cover of all time.

Far from genius... 1977's worst cover... maybe even the worst RT of all time?

By 1978 it was clear that the Radio Times saw itself as anything but the Corporation's answer to the TV Times. ITV's magazine had occasionally dabbled in more serious journalism, but the tone was relentlessly popular for most of the decade, and a cover makeover in 1978 served to emphasise its aspirations as a lifestyle publication. While the TV Times was competing for the family audience, Radio Times aimed itself at the readers of the quality Sunday magazines.

The year's covers were dominated by sport (11 issues) and serious subjects (18 issues). Amongst a dwindling number of future collectables were covers promoting Dennis Potter's Pennies From Heaven (2 March), The Good Life (8 June) and James Burke's Connections (12 October). Industrial strife reduced three weeks' editions to the drab newsprint of an earlier era, one of them promoting the new series of Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em, whilst another highlighted the return of Reginald Perrin.

Back to newsprint: industrial action reduced the RT to black and white for three weeks in late 1978

1979's covers again focused heavily on highbrow subject matter, with 21 designs promoting serious factual series and a further 14 for drama. Comedies clocked up only four, and even sport was unusually under represented with just six covers across the year. Collectable covers were becoming few and far between: Fawlty Towers (15 February); a repeat run for Monty Python's Flying Circus (14 June); Alec Guinness as George Smiley in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (6 September) and Penelope Keith promoting her new sitcom To the Manor Born (27 September). Artwork featured on eleven covers including the traditional Christmas double issue, which would continue to provide a showcase for festive artistic talent for the forseeable future. Wooden spoon for worst of the year goes to the cover for 31 May, an artwork depicting a bizarre musical instrument in the shape of a treble clef.

Bad times... a spectacularly dull run of covers from 1979. And what's that bloody thing on the right?

As the 1970s came to a close, The Radio Times didn't look a great deal different from how it had started the decade. The covers were less cluttered with text, and the enlargement of the image space to fill the whole page was a distinct asethetic improvement. The modified swash caps masthead still hinted at pretensions beyond the remit of a mere listings magazine, and the covers had moved well away from populist content to feature some challenging and ambitious images and subjects, not always successfully. We need to bear in mind that, at this period in time, the Radio and TV Times were the only publications of their kind: no other publishers were permitted to print TV and radio listings, aside from those included in most national and regional daily newspapers. This meant that if the Radio Times chose to go against the flow and promote highbrow content on its covers, it would not be at detriment to its readership, who had nowhere else to go. In later years, once the Radio Times/TV Times duopoly was ended, both titles would have to compete much harder for their share of the market, and one can clearly see this shift in tone reflected in the covers.

By the end of the 1980s, the Radio Times masthead had almost acquired the status of a national institution. No matter that the italicised, serif font looked stuffy and antiquated, it had become part of the Corporation's heritage. The masthead was enlarged during 1989, and revamped again on 1 September 1994, with a new, wider, bolder version of the same font, presenting a less challenging, populist image – a clear sign that the magazine was now chasing its audience much more vigorously. By this time, the RT was being printed on glossy paper throughout, contrasting the 1970s and early 80s when only the covers and colour insert pages were on coated stock (it had a tendency to stick to the surrounding newsprint pages).

Celebrity mugshots now dominate the covers of the mid 90s, as the swash caps get a minor makeover

The 'fatter, wider' swash caps variant lasted for a little over six years. When it disappeared, it felt like the end of an era: the famous swash caps had endured in one form or another for just over thirty one years. The Radio Times for 12 April 2001 ushered in a new 'modern' masthead in an anonymous sans serif font – the dullest masthead in the publication's history. By now, the covers were dominated by huge celebrity portraits and content reflecting the more populist areas of broadcasting, although typography remained relatively restrained: Franklin Gothic had been the default font for headlines since 1969, but when the boring new masthead debuted, it was dumped in favour of Gill Sans.

End of an era: the John Cleese cover of 15 March 2001 was the last great RT of the swash caps era, which came to an end on 12 April, ushering in the short-lived 'most boring masthead ever' era...

A regrettable trend that has crept into Radio Times cover designs since the turn of the century is a tendency towards variant editions, usually promoting a cult, collectable series like Doctor Who. The variant cover is a popular approach in the world of comic publishing, enticing collectors to buy four or more copies of the same magazine. Shamefully, the Radio Times has sunk to this kind of reader exploitation on several occasions.

The 'boring' masthead was not built to last, and immediately after Christmas 2004 was ousted in favour of a bold condensed font. This lasted a surprisingly long time: twenty two years. It was only marginally less dull than its predecessor, but had the advantage of looking strikingly modern, and stood out amongst the racks of competing publications. Twenty two years isn't a bad run in Radio Times terms, but it still doesn't beat the famous swash caps and its variants. Surprisingly, 2026 has seen a slight return of the swash caps... the font is not the same, and the capital T looks decidedly off balance, with its crossbar forced left to join up with the dot in the i, but it's certainly riffing on the masthead from what must be considered as the high water mark in Radio Times cover design. If anything, the new cover looks back even further, to the ancient ancestor of the whole swash caps look. For the edition of 4 August 1933, the RT's 'summer number' was graced by two-colour green and yellow print, an artworked cover, and a one-off italicised masthead that anticipated the magazine's later appearance by nearly four decades.

Looks familiar? The 1933 ancestor of the 'swash caps' masthead design

Needless to say, in the modern era, with most magazines in terminal decline, the RT has had to play catch up with its covers, which have long since conformed to the formula adopted by the leading lifestyle magazines: big faces and lots of text. Occasionally, an artworked cover will surface – this year's Wimbledon edition being an example – but by and large, the RT cover of 2026 is a photographic affair and will almost certainly continue that way. This being the twenty-first century, there is now a free-to-access online edition – with a less ad cluttered variant available to subscribers. As a website, it is disappointingly generic and packed with trivialities that would have been shown out through the tradesmen's entrance by the editors of Lord Reith's era; and even, dare I say, by those of the 70s and 80s. For traditionalists, there is still a print edition, but at £5.50 a week it's a big ask when compared to the many budget-priced alternatives. Of course, you get what you pay for, and none of the RT's competitors are going to win any awards for aesthetics or mimimalism.

I've been perhaps a little unfair in shining a light on some of the less successful Radio Times covers of the 1970s, but if nothing else, they reflect the eclecticism and aspirations of an era and a generation that has now largely vanished; and at their best, the RT covers could be sly, witty, minimalist and even mildly subversive. As magazines continue their inexorable slide towards extinction, it's certain that we'll never again see anything to equal the classic Radio Times covers of the 'swash caps' 70s.

Classic RT covers and scanned pages can be found at the facebook group Vintage Radio Times:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/820265558632339/

A complete run of RT covers from 1923 to 2009 can be viewed at the Television and Radio Database, tvrdb.com

Rubber Soul Bounces Back

 

I’ve got a word or two to say...

And finally… Apple’s series of deluxe expanded reissues of the Beatles catalogue has arrived at what many people, myself included, consider their best album: Rubber Soul. I’m sure a lot of fans were disappointed when it didn’t appear for its sixtieth anniversary last year – a pointless reissue of the Anthology albums took its place in the release schedule – but it’s here at last. Two questions to be answered: was it worth the wait and how does it compare to others in the reissue series?

Firstly, the music. ‛Demixed’ and remixed by Giles Martin from the original master tapes, this is easily his best work to date. For me, Sgt. Pepper was marred by a mix that pushed the bass and drums much too far forward. It sounded modern rather than vintage. Revolver was better, but slightly spoiled by a lead guitar part from ‛She Said She Said’ that somehow got lost when the tracks were stripped down and rebuilt. There are no such absentees this time around. Indeed, most of the album represents a major improvement on the old stereo mix which was ‛hard panned’ with extreme separation of vocals and instruments across the left and right channels. There are notable improvements in clarity and definition, and the tone is still as bright as it was on the original 1965 mix and masters. Nothing has been given undue emphasis, although the vocals sometimes ride a little higher in the mix than they did previously. On the whole, though, the listening experience isn’t vastly different from the original, just without that weird stereo (it sounds slightly less spacious as a result). From first listening, here are my impressions for what they’re worth:

Drive My Car: Paul’s vocal seems to dominate John’s somewhat – they seemed more balanced on the original.

Norwegian Wood: Clearer, big improvement in definition, everything present and correct.

You Won’t See Me: Mal Evans’ famous one-note organ drone is very much less evident in the mix than it was originally. The note appears in the last verse and is held through to the end of the song. This time around, it’s been pushed well into the background.

Nowhere Man: The final harmonic note in the guitar solo has been lowered slightly in volume.

Think For Yourself: This is the worst cut here. Paul’s fuzz bass lines are much less prominent during the verses. They’re audible, but sit lower down in the mix, only leaping out in the intro and in the spaces between verse and chorus. It’s not catastrophic, but I’d stick to the 2009 cut for preference.

The Word: A big improvement. The track sounds punchier without the mix being discernibly different, which is exactly what’s required from these remixes. Easily the best cut on the album for me.

Michelle: Again, a noticeable improvement: everything from 1965 is still there and still sets where you’d expect to hear it in the mix. This, like ‛The Word’, is down to the improved stereo image.

What Goes On: Again, a major improvement in the stereo separation. John’s scratchy guitar part is still clearly audible but doesn’t seem to dominate the track the way it did in the 1965 stereo mix (which was easily the worst mix on the album).

Girl: Like Norwegian Wood, there’s no detectable difference here, just an overall improvement in clarity.

I’m Looking Through You: Another big improvement on account of the true stereo separation. Parts of the original mix that sounded a bit feeble (the electric guitar and organ) sound better without detriment to the mix as a whole.

In My Life: George Martin’s solo leaps out at you rather more than it used to, but in a good way.

If I Needed Someone: Not much difference, but the guitar solo between the last two verses sounds slightly less prominent to me, allowing the harmonies to come through a bit more.

Run For Your Life: Sounds exactly the same.

The obligatory sessions disc doesn’t disappoint either, although this time there’s just a single disc where we had two with Revolver. The booklet does explain that there are fewer outtakes from the Rubber Soul sessions as early takes and rehearsals were often wiped with later performances. Also, the sheer pressure of time that the Beatles were under meant that some of the backing tracks were perfected in two or three takes where previously they might have run to ten or twelve. 

The majority of the session tracks are instrumental backings, without overdubs of vocals or additional guitar parts. These reveal some fine details for anyone like me who’s interested in exactly what instruments were played on what tracks. The first version of ‛Nowhere Man’ has John playing the rhythm part on his rarely used Rickenbacker 325-12string, an instrument whose use has been debated by fans for decades. The booklet incorrectly credits him with regular electric on this track, but if you know, you know – the 325/12 has a peculiarly lightweight tone that sets it apart from George’s 12-string Rickenbacker.

One track has appeared before – the first attempt at ‛I’m Looking Through You’ had been doing the rounds on bootlegs before it finally saw a legitimate release on the Anthology 2 collection, where it was faded at the end. This time, it plays right through to the messy breakdown. Track 25, ‛Beatle Talk’ has been available online for years – this candid recording was made during the vocal overdub session for George’s song ‛Think For Yourself’, and apart from a tiny segment used on the film soundtrack of Yellow Submarine, has never been legitimately issued. Anyone familiar with the recording will spot a minor edit for language: Paul’s impromptu performance of Barry Gray’s ‛Aqua Marina’ from the TV series Stingray has been trimmed to remove a profanity. I wrote about this recording in more detail in an earlier blog.

I was slightly surprised to see that ‛Twelve Bar Original’, the bluesy instrumental recorded during the Rubber Soul sessions didn’t make the cut, but it has been available before.

Finally – almost – John’s rediscovered demo of a song called ‛Little Girl’. It’s clear from the lyrics (‛I’d have told you sweet FA’) that this was never a serious contender. Maybe he was too embarrassed to play it to Paul. There’s a very odd chord change – E flat to D – that doesn’t sound quite right, and the whole thing is slight and of only academic interest.

The sessions disc concludes with the ‛2023 mixes’ of ‛Day Tripper’ and ‛We Can Work It Out’. The latter is fine, but for me, ‛Day Tripper’ suffers from excessive compression, rendering everything as loud as everything else, as compression is wont to do.

So much for the music: what about the packaging? As with previous releases, a deluxe book is now obligatory – but comes only with the deluxe CD or vinyl editions. Compared to the book that accompanied Revolver, it’s a slight disappointment, mostly on account of the production quality. It’s still a solid, nicely bound volume, but the internal pages are printed on inferior uncoated stock, contrasting the superior paper used on previous releases. There are also a few factual errors – like misquoted lyrics – that should really have been picked up. Some of the photos look very poor as well, particularly those from the Beatles Monthly Book archive, which have appeared elsewhere in superior quality.

As before, the CDs are slotted into a gatefold sleeve that externally reproduces the original album artwork. But there are only four of them – Revolver gave us five: the new stereo mix, original mono, two discs of sessions and a further EP comprising various versions of the single tracks ‛Paperback Writer’/ ‛Rain’. If you buy Rubber Soul on vinyl (cost £199!), you get the ‛Day Tripper’/’We Can Work It Out’ single as a separate entity, but on CD the tracks are tagged onto the sessions disc, which at over 70 minutes duration is close to maximum capacity for an audio disc. My copy jammed on one track, but played through okay when reinserted.

The big takeaway here is the price. Revolver cost a shade over £100 when it came out in 2022. This time, there are fewer discs, and a book that has compromised on production quality, and the price is £125. Annoyingly, within days of release, Amazon had ‛discounted’ it to £122.51. For most fans, the 2-CD set will probably suffice, although the sessions disc offers only 16 tracks contrasting the 28 that are on the deluxe edition.

For me, this was the last essential re-release from the Beatles’ catalogue. Much of the outtake material from the earlier albums has surfaced on the four Anthology collections – certainly the tracks that are of most interest – although I’m aware of unreleased takes that have circulated online for years. Welcome though this release is, Apple needs to up its game if it’s planning to continue the series. Deluxe price point should mean deluxe content. I can’t help feeling that the label is still holding back on material that could be issued if the remit was to comprehensively catalogue every single session from every single album. That, I’m sure, will come… but will any of us be around to hear it?

Action! Thrills! Sport!

The Afterlife of TV21

TV21’s original run ended ignominiously at issue 242, cover dated September 6, 2069. The hundred years hence dateline was a conceit that had stayed with the comic since its inception in 1965, and as a new decade approached, it was beginning to look a bit, well, dated... When the paper resurfaced, revamped and now bearing more resemblance to its late sibling, Joe 90, it was set firmly in the world of 1969. It was also three weeks late in reaching the newsagents. This did not bode well...

Disappointingly for loyal readers, the first three covers of the new TV21 & Joe 90 featured football photographs, although the game didn’t figure quite so prominently inside. The new comic was short-changing all of its readers: those who bought it on account of the football covers would find little to interest them on the inner pages, whilst everyone else, myself included, couldn’t give a flying fig about football. The editorial team, however, thought it was onto a good thing: 'Action! Thrills! Sport! This paper has the lot! boasted the cover of issue number three.

A new 2-page football strip, Forward From the Back Streets was the kind of rags-to-riches soccer saga more commonly encountered in traditional boys' papers. Martin Asbury provided the artwork. Page 18 was devoted to ‘Mexico Dossier’, a black and white feature looking ahead to the following year’s hotly anticipated World Cup. Aside from these, and a half page feature on boxing, there was no other sporting content to be found apart from a dire humour strip I’ve Got a Sports Mad Dad. It was hardly TV21, but it could have been a lot worse, as the coming months were to prove...

With the page count standing at 24, no fewer than six pages in the first issue were set aside for advertising matter, including the back cover, whose space would have commanded a premium rate. No chance of the Daleks ever making a comeback! When TV21 & Joe 90 wasn’t busy trying to sell stuff to its readers, it remained a mixture of familiar comic strip content: Gerry Haylock’s Land of the Giants strip occupied a page and a half, in colour, but Frank Bellamy was now rationed to a solitary colour page for Thunderbirds. He would be gone from the comic in a matter of weeks, and the strip, now demoted to black and white, was drawn by John Cooper in an imitation of Bellamy’s style. 

Vincente Alcazar was back on Meet the Saint on pages 9 & 10 – as ever, these Simon Templar adventures bore scant resemblance to the TV series, with the hero cast more in the mould of an Indiana Jones-style adventurer. Meanwhile, Don Lawrence put in a couple of weeks’ work on the Tarzan strip, also in black and white.

Star Trek, by now the most popular feature, and running concurrently on BBC1, was to be found across the centre pages, still in the hands of Harry Lindfield who had been drawing it in Joe 90. It wasn’t quite Star Trek as we knew it (Jim), and some of Lindfield’s space hardware was based on designs from 2001 and elsewhere. The comic incarnation also habitually dressed Captain Kirk in a red shirt, always a dodgy item of apparel for anyone on board the Enterprise. Good though Lindfield's work was, I'd have been interested to see what Frank Bellamy might have made of the Star Trek strip. Around a year later, he produced a stunning colour Star Trek page for the Radio Times: a glimpse of what might have been in a 'Mirror Mirror' universe?

The whole idea of reader engagement, which had been so much a part of the TV21 ethos, went out of the window from the merger onwards. There was no letters page, no competitions, and no encouragement to readers to contribute anything whatsoever. Instead, we got a page of duff jokes, of the kind found in just about every other British comic from the Dandy downwards. The 24-page format lasted only two weeks, and at issue 3, the page count was down to 20 of which 3¼ comprised advertising matter.

Disappointing: the first twelve weeks of TV21 & Joe 90

My reaction on seeing the new comic was one of bitter disappointment. The football cover was almost enough to convince me to pack it in, and the free gift was yet another set of soccer star stickers, cheaply sourced from Panini. Was there any reason to go on? By this time, there was stiff competition on the soccer front from IPC’s new weekly Shoot! which, with its colour photo covers and wall-to-wall soccer features and stories left TV21 & Joe 90 on the touchline. 

The editors evidently realised it was pointless to compete, and beginning at issue 4, TV21 & Joe 90 began to feature whole page artworked covers – not, it has to be said, painted in a particularly inspiring manner. The new covers featured scenes from the stories inside. If they’d really wanted to sell the new comic, some colour photo covers of Star Trek might have done the trick – but photos are expensive to licence. It’s tempting to speculate how TV21 & Joe 90 might have looked with newspaper style covers and photos from its featured series. It couldn’t have looked any worse.

In January 1970, City Magazines went all out for football, launching its own all-soccer paper Striker in direct competition to Shoot! With the Mexico World Cup imminent, and England the current World Champions, interest in soccer was at an all time high, especially amongst boys of comic-reading age. 1970 would see the launch of two more football comics – Scorcher in January and Score in September. Meanwhile, the soccer features continued in TV21 & Joe 90. Even the mighty Star Trek was forced to make room for them – albeit temporarily. From issue 23, the strip was relegated from its colour centre spread, which was now devoted to football posters. Star Trek now appeared in black and white, with decidedly inferior artwork. But further change lay just around the corner...

Joe 90 has been sacked, so it's back to plain TV21. Apart from Star Trek, the contents are now utterly worthless generic adventure stories.
I neither knew nor cared what S.N.O.R.K.E.L stood for...

The first change was a significant reduction in page size, shrinking to the standard half tabloid size popularised by the Dandy and many other titles. Star Trek returned to colour and was now placed in the capable hands of Mike Noble, who made a very good job of it, red-shirted Kirk or not. His Enterprise looks rather more like the Dinky toy than the ship we saw on television, although the diecast model would not appear for another six years.

At issue 36, the Joe 90 strip came to an end. With Joe out of the picture, there was no sense in retaining his name in the title, and the comic now became simply TV21. Two weeks later, Thunderbirds bowed out, and the comic that had once been the heart of the Gerry Anderson universe became just another generic boys' adventure paper. Issue 39 saw a minor makeover, with the page count increased to 24 – not that there was anything in the comic to justify the extra pages. 'Three great new stories' promised the cover: but they were the kind of stories that could be found in just about any other boys' comic of the era. 

Only the retention of Star Trek provided any justification for the comic still being known as TV21 (and pedants might have pointed out that Star Trek was set in the 23rd century!). At issue 42, the strip was promoted to the front cover, with a further two colour pages inside, where it would remain until the bitter end. Mike Noble continued to draw the strip until issue 57, then Ron Turner filled in for a couple of weeks in his customary mannered style, before ex-Dan Dare artist Harold Johns took over. I absolutely hated Johns’ artwork, and the departure of Mike Noble proved the last straw for me. After three years of loyal readership, I was done with TV21, jumping ship at issue 63 (dated 5 December 1970) which was featured in Lew Stringer’s ‘Blimey’ blog back in 2012: https://lewstringer.blogspot.com/2012/12/this-week-in-1970-tv21.html The comic itself had less than a year left to live, running until issue 105, dated 25 September 1971.

Two weeks later, TV21, or what passed for it, was absorbed into IPC’s Valiant, then in its ninth year. Valiant was exactly the kind of boys’ comic that I hated, with its gung-ho adventure strips and larger than life characters. During its declining months, TV21 had come more and more to resemble the likes of Valiant, so the merger was perhaps inevitable. 

Something more than just TV21 passed with the comic’s demise. Its reader engagement harked back to the glory years of Eagle, and the ‘agents’ page’ of letters and reports, covering everything from Mysteron incursions to pictures of puppies, gave the comic a sense of community that its revamps signally lacked. As a TV21 reader, you felt a sense of belonging, whether it was to the USS Agents’ network or as a Spectrum ‘Shade’. When Colonel White fulminated in print about Shades ‘not pulling their weight’ you felt genuinely told off! And TV21’s readers often sent in inspiring ideas, including a couple of home-made comics which encouraged me to have a go at making some of my own.

Other comics, of course, had their letters pages, and no girls’ magazine was complete without them; but for boys, the end of TV21 left something of a gap which even the well-meaning Countdown and TV Action never quite filled. For a while, at its height, it really did feel like the centre of the Gerry Anderson universe, but with the end of the Supermarionation shows and the transition to live action, the Century 21 empire went to dust, and nobody seemed interested in keeping the comic end of the operation going.

Forty three years on from the demise of TV21, I was given the chance to ‘set the record straight’ and, as it were, get my own back on everyone who’d contributed to the comic’s downfall. As part of Network DVD’s ‘Filmed in Supermarionation’ box set, we decided to do a whole new issue of TV21, even engaging a few of the original artists to work on it. I decided to approach it as if the old comic had never ended, and dubbed it ‘Universe Edition 243’. Joe 90 now came on board, along with The Secret Service, making the one-off edition something of a hybrid of TV21 and Countdown. It has since been included in some of the ‘complete collection’ pdfs one sees for sale online, and is now considered as ‘canon’ to the extent of being name checked on the original comic’s Wikipedia entry, along with myself as editor – clocking up my one and only appearance in the online encyclopaedia!

Looking back, I can see how the decline and fall of TV21 was a key part of my own developing interest in nostalgia. At the age of just eight years old, I could see with startling clarity how the best years of my weekly comic already lay in the past. With TV21 gone and no new Supermarionation series to look forward to, I began to look back to those we’d lost, and spent a large part of the summer of 1970 fairly obsessing over Fireball XL5. Someone upstairs must have been paying attention, because the programme returned for a repeat run in the autumn, providing a dangerous example for a nine-year-old boy: wish for something hard enough and you can actually make it happen! Even Joe 90 couldn’t manage that…