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…

Football! Football! Football!

 

The Long, Slow Death of TV21

It was September 1968. TV21 was well into its fourth year, and looking less and less like the imaginative, ‘twenty first century comic’ it had started out as back in January 1965. No one could have suspected it at the time, but the title had exactly a year to live, and it was during that autumn that the first signs of decline began to appear. Loyal readers soon noticed, and wrote in to complain. Others, however, demanded change – and it was the push for change that helped to speed the comic’s demise.

Until September 1968, TV21 had always avoided sport. This was, after all, a comic rooted in the future worlds of Gerry Anderson, and sport was never mentioned in his TV series: puppets could hardly be expected to play football or tennis. It seemed a safe bet that readers of TV21 were more interested in rockets, robots, spaceships and other futuristic adventures than the prospect of watching 22 grown men kicking a leather ball from end to end of a field. In defence of this portrayal, may I offer up exhibit A: myself.

In January 1967, British comics creator Mick Anglo had launched TV Tornado, a cheaply produced publication that sought to capitalise on the wave of interest in contemporary television adventure series like Batman and The Man From UNCLE. Compared to TV21, TV Tornado was rubbish: the artwork was inferior, the paper was inferior, and it was bulked out with text stories, which required a lot less artwork than comic strips and were accordingly much cheaper to produce.

By late 1968, TV Tornado was on its last legs, and it was decided to merge its smoking remains with the still comparatively successful TV21. In reality, all this amounted to was drafting TV Tornado stories The Saint and Tarzan into TV21. Batman and The Man From UNCLE found homes elsewhere. This happened at issue 190 of TV21, when the long-running (but lately misdirected) Stingray strip ended to free up two black and white pages.

Two weeks later, the operation was complete, and TV21 now had the unwelcome name of TV Tornado grafted into its new masthead (above). It didn’t deserve to be there, yet it would endure until the very last edition of TV21’s original run. But the most worrying thing about issue 192 of TV21 was the free gift included inside: a set of five colour pictures from Panini’s recently launched ‘Wonderful World of Soccer Stars’ set of collectable cards. Football had never been mentioned in TV21 before, football players’ portaits had never appeared in its pages. What was going on? With zero interest in football, I was puzzled but not, as yet, unduly worried. Perhaps I should have been. The soccer star stickers were passed on to my younger brother who went on to collect the whole set: but soccer star portaits were a long way from the ‘Spectraprints’ – portraits of the characters and hardware from Captain Scarlet – that had formed TV21’s last free gifts, six months earlier. The writing was on the wall.

At issue 194 (above), I began to have reservations – this week’s Captain Scarlet story had a football theme, as the Mysterons threatened the life of a Middle Eastern potentate who also happened to be an international soccer star. ‘What’s with all this football’ I might well have asked myself. It was the beginning of a slow drip, drip of sporting content into a comic where it simply didn’t belong. Football in TV21 made as much sense as running a Thunderbirds strip in a footie mag like Striker. Different audiences. They just didn’t mix. But the editorial staff carried on regardless… Issue 197 of October 25 1968 included ‘Spectrum’s Sports Challenge’, a series of sporting questions placed next to an advert for Subbuteo table football. Coincidence? I think not. Admittedly, the feature only occupied a quarter of a page, but that was more than enough…

At this point in time, TV21’s readers were known as ‘Shades’, junior agents of Spectrum, who instead of writing to the editor sent in their reports to Colonel White, whoever he was (probably Alan Fennell). A ‘Shades of Opinion’ column had been initiated earlier in the year, encouraging readers to get their rocks off on any subject that they felt strongly about (today, they’d all be whingeing on social media – I dare say some of them still are…) In Issue 205 (December 21 1968), ‘Shade’ Nicholas Honnor complained to Colonel White of the ‘decreasing value’ of TV21, pointing to the arrival of Spectrum and the merger with TV Tornado as key factors contributing to the comic’s decline. Colonel White who, in private would probably have told young Master Honnor to fuck off, gave his stock reply, asking other Shades what they thought…

Just a week later, there was a football quiz – readers had to identify the real ball in a photo where three more had been stripped in. It wasn’t much, but nevertheless represented another step in the wrong direction, gradually softening up the readership for much more sport and football content to come.

Perhaps as a sop to readers like Nicholas Honnor, and beginning at issue 208 (January 11 1969), a series of thumbnails of vintage covers began appearing in the new ‘Contact 21’ agents’ page. Small black and white images of the first six weeks of TV21 were printed, and although they were very small, you could still read the text, if you used a magnifying glass. I was inspired by the sight of these old covers, and created ‘facsimiles’ of numbers one and two in biro and crayon. It would be a long time before I got to own copies of the originals.

The following week, 50 Mettoy footballs were offered as prizes in a competition. Had the publishers been doing some research into their audience? Football stories featured in most of the popular boys’ papers of the era: Hotspur, Tiger, Victor, Lion and Rover all included soccer strips and stories. But none of them could print full colour photos on their covers. As yet, there was no comic or magazine whose content was given over entirely to football, but this would soon change: Shoot! launched in August 1969, would have been in preparation during the months that TV21 spent introducing football content into its pages.

The first part of the editors’ cunning plan involved a reversion to the newspaper-style covers of the comic’s first three years. Some weeks before the revamp, Roger Spear of Coventry had written in requesting more sport in TV21 and asking for a picture of Bobby Charlton in action. Colonel White was happy to oblige and, as ever, asked other Shades what they thought of the idea. It is, of course, quite possible that Roger Spear’s letter was genuine and just happened to suit the comic’s potential new direction. Equally likely is that the letter was written by the editorial staff as a primer to gauge readers’ reactions to the prospect of sporting content in TV21. In the same edition, David Sowter of Sheffield wrote to say he ‘liked TV21 how it used to be […] when it contained news stories on the front cover.’ Colonel White’s reply promised ‘a number of surprises in store’ with edition 217: ‘one of them concerns the cover.’

Colonel White was a week too early with his promise, as TV21’s next revamp in fact came with issue 218, when the cover reverted to a look very similar to its original appearance. The preceding two weeks had seen ‘transitional’ covers with the existing masthead and photo stories, but with 218 the makeover was complete: a brand new masthead reflected the animated Century 21 graphic seen at the beginning of recent series including Captain Scarlet and Joe 90. Annoyingly, TV Tornado still got a credit.

Two of the 'transitional' covers that presaged the return to full newspaper style layouts at issue 218

Back in issue 216, however, readers had been given a foretaste of things to come, with a whole page photo feature, ‘Soccermania’ devoted to the sport. Colonel White wrote: ‘Following Roger Spear’s letter in TV21 issue 213, many hundreds of Shades and Agents have written to headquarters asking me to include a sports page in TV21. Out of the many letters, football was easily the most liked sport…’

Readers like me were probably thinking ‘thanks for nothing, Roger Spear’. Assuming he even existed. And what about those hundreds of letters? Did TV21 really attract such a volume of correspondence? Whatever the truth may have been, the editorial team were determined to feature football in their magazine, and one way of doing so was to revert to photo-style newspaper covers, providing the opportunity for soccer action photos in colour, which no other comic could provide. For the moment, however, there would be no further football features, and readers would be given a few weeks to get used to the new format before the next round of changes. Issue 218 also saw the debut of a strip based on ITC’s latest adventure series Department S. Its inclusion felt like a nod towards the kind of content favoured by TV Tornado, providing some small justification for retaining the Tornado credit on the masthead. 

Issue 218 made a credible attempt to revive the classic 'newspaper of the future' covers.

The comic’s content continued to be a subject of debate on the letters page: Robin Peeters of Maidstone wanted to see a weekly space pin-up (I presume he meant NASA hardware, rather than Barbarella); but on the same page, Alan Kittles of Aylesbury suggested that there should be a football story in TV21 ‘as most comics have one’. Coincidentally (or, more likely, not), that’s exactly what the editorial team was planning…

Finally, at issue 224, the inevitable happened. ‘TV21 Goes Football’ cried the headline on page 9, previewing a new feature, ‘Football United’, which would debut the following week. Just to keep loyal readers on side, a box-out in the bottom corner reassuringly pointed out that ‘all the regular features’ would remain. Issue 225 was, depending on your point of view, a landmark or a nail in the TV21 coffin: the first ever football cover. Others followed hard on its heels. 227 featured a huge colour photo of Manchester United’s star striker George Best, while issue 229 profiled league champions Leeds United. TV21 had trumped the upstart Shoot! three months before it was due to launch, becoming the first ever British comic to feature colour football photos on its covers.

How to alienate your readers: TV21 goes football, May 1969

Not everyone was happy with the comic’s new direction. ‘TV21 is unique in that it contains no sport!’ complained Brian Milnes of Stockport in issue 229. ‘A 21st Century magazine it is and a 21st Century magazine it should stay! Keep out all sport.’ Meantime, Michael Maguire of Wishaw in the West Midlands suggested a compromise in the form of ‘a modern approach to sport’ such as the WASPs playing the World Navy at underwater events. In reply, Colonel White spoke unconvincingly of the ‘many thousands’ of readers who had written in suggesting the comic incude ‘a modern football story based in the 21st century.’ He went on to claim, even less convincingly, that ‘readers are almost one hundred per cent agreed that Football United is one of the best features in TV21.’ If that was a true reflection of editorial policy and opinion, it’s easy to see why the comic’s days were numbered. And if readers really were that keen on football, they’d be sure to jump ship when Shoot! launched just a few weeks later. It all smacked rather of desperation…

The promised ‘football story based in the 21^st century’ began in issue 231 with the 2-page black and white strip ‘Super League’, illustrated by Malcolm Stokes. To make room for it, the Saint strip had come to an end the week before: but Simon Templar would have the last laugh…

The football covers were too much for some readers, and in issue 232 Nigel Smith of Brighton wrote in complaining about the George Best photo. ‘I think that TV21 is going a little too far with sport,’ he opined. It certainly seemed perverse that, during the summer of the first manned lunar landing, TV21 should become obsessed with such a down-to-earth subject as football. Where were the photo features about the forthcoming Apollo mission? A new space feature, ‘Saturn Probe’ had debuted some weeks earlier, and was very much in the manner of the old TV21, but it was entirely fictional. Joining it, in issue 219, was ‘Space Info’, a weekly look at developments in the real-life space race, and issue 235 (July 19) did manage to find room for a page feature, ‘Moon Man’, focused on Neil Armstrong who would, that same week, become the first human being to set foot on the moon. It’s a shame they couldn’t have run to a colour cover in commemoration of this historic event, but that week’s edition featured a piece of space hardware from Joe 90 and news of a ‘sudden blast off from Glenn Field’. TV21 was in grave danger of losing the plot…

It’s quite depressing to go through the last few weeks of the original TV21. By this time, responsibility for editorial content had passed into the hands of Marts Press, and the comic was being bulked out with generic factual features like ‘Nature’s Flying Machines’, an illustrated half page item about bats that could easily have come from the pages of Eagle or Look and Learn. By issue 237, with ‘Football United’ occupying two pages, four of the comic’s twenty pages were now soccer-related. That same week saw a new wildlife feature, ‘From the Notebooks of Wilson of the Wild’ that again had an ‘off the shelf’ look about it.

The end in sight: issue 238, the last of the newspaper covers and a football cover to boot...

TV21’s nadir came not at the bitter end, but four weeks earlier. ‘Football! Football! Football!' chanted the cover headline of issue 238. Ironically, it was to be the last of the proper newspaper covers – they’d lasted just twenty issues. The week’s contents weren’t any better – generic features that could have come from any boys’ magazine sat alongside the last vestiges of Century 21 content – Thunderbirds, Zero X and Captain Scarlet who this week waved goodbye to the Mysterons. What was TV21 trying to be? A football comic, a futuristic adventure or a run of the mill boys’ paper? In trying to appease too many factions of its readership, the comic had lost its way. It was high time for a revamp.

Issue 238 was also the very last to feature readers’ letters, one of which, from Paul Monaghan of Northwich, asked for information on ‘the neglected artists in TV21’. Not before time. Monaghan correctly identified Frank Bellamy, but ‘Agent 21’ had to put a name to Mike Noble. Was this a valedictory gesture towards two of the comic’s longest-serving and most popular contributors?

The newspaper covers that had been so trumpeted by Colonel White a few months ago now disappeared, replaced by full page colour photos from issue 239 (August 16) which had the Apollo cover that should really have appeared back in July. The sudden change in style of the covers most likely resulted from the departure of a key member of staff – art editor Jim Watson had been drawing Captain Scarlet until the previous week. He was now replaced by John Cooper.

The very last of the original run of TV21 made a final and feeble attempt at a newspaper style cover, but the layout was unimaginative, and the headline font completely wrong. It’s worth taking a moment to consider the contents of this ‘historic’ last edition:

On pages 2-3, Secret Agent 21 – resurrected earlier in the year, and still drawn by Rab Hamiton, making him one of the longest serving TV21 artists. Captain Scarlet occupied pages 4-5, drawn scrappily by John Cooper. Page 6 was the regular ‘Space Info’ feature, with The Munsters opposite, drawn (and signed!) by Peter Ford. Incredible as it sounds, The Munsters had proved to be one of TV21’s most enduring comic strips, appearing every week since its introduction at issue 52. Page 8 was a regular advertising strip ‘Clark’s Commandos’ promoting a range of boys’ footwear, and on page 9 there was a speculative science feature about space stations. Frank Bellamy’s enduring Thunderbirds strip occupied pages 8 and 9 – his work still up to his usual standard of excellence. Department S came to the end of its comic strip incarnation on page 12, whilst the following page comprised a half-page advertisement and a promotional splash for what was coming ‘next week’…

The futuristic soccer strip Super League wrapped up on pages 14-15, while pages 16-17 were given over to a colour photo feature on the Thunderbird craft that looked like it belonged back in the comic’s mid 60s heyday. (This item replaced the Zero X strip which had ended a week too early.) ‘Wilson of the Wild’ was on page 18, while page 19 contained a half page advert for annuals above the regular ‘Corgi Model Club News’, the only feature to have appeared consistently throughout the entire run of TV21. On the back cover was a colour ad for Letraset ‘Action Transfers’ illustrated by Frank Bellamy, who had clearly seen the writing on the wall, and would shortly transfer his talents elsewhere.

Page 13 – unlucky for some – had given readers an idea of what was to happen next week. TV21 was to be merged with its sibling paper Joe 90, which was actually attracting more readers, probably drawn in by the Star Trek and Land of the Giants strips. Despite its title, TV21 & Joe 90 was more of a continuation of Joe 90 than TV21, and contained only a handful of strips from TV21 – Thunderbirds, The Saint and Tarzan, of which the latter pair were really TV Tornado fodder. To add insult to injury, the following week brought no sign of the new comic – I can well remember asking for it in the newsagents and being told that it hadn’t come in. When it finally did hit the newstands two weeks later, the original date had been blacked out and replaced by an overprinted date of 27 September. Goodness knows how many readers had been lost in the process.

This was all bad enough, but worse was to follow. Within a year TV21 would have become unrecognisable, and its title almost totally irrelevant...

Thank you, and goodnight. TV21 closes for business, September 1969. Corgi Model Club News was the last man standing from the comic's original 1965 line-up.

VHS is Fifty

Part Two: ‘I’ve Got the Knobs on My Side’.

By the time our household acquired its first video recorder, I already owned a couple of VHS tapes, onto which a fellow enthusiast had copied rare recordings of Thunderbirds episodes. The quality was somewhat lacking, the tapes having been copied from three-year-old recordings on the U-Matic format, but that hardly mattered: for the first time ever, I had taken control of the television set. 

The very first off-air recording I made myself was an episode of Steptoe and Son, shown on Friday 14 November on BBC2. Divided We Stand was classic Steptoe – it’s the episode where Harold divides up the Steptoe residence into ‘two self contained apartments’. Who can forget the moment where the pair argue over the television set? Harold: ‘I have the law of contract on my side’. Albert: ‘I’ve got the knobs on my side’. Having taped the episode at 9pm, I played it again two hours later for the benefit of my brother, who had been out earlier. Nobody used the expression back then, but we’d just experienced the phenomenon of ‘time shifting’. Like Albert Steptoe, we now, metaphorically, had ‘the knobs on our side’.

What I most looked forward to with VHS was being able to record vintage series from the 1960s, most notably anything from the ITC stable and all the Gerry Anderson titles. Unfortunately, ITV’s repeat rights to the ITC shows had come to an end, and would not be renewed for another four years. Gerry Anderson’s puppet adventures weren’t subject to the same restrictions, but none of them was currently being repeated. Now that I had the means to capture them on tape, there weren’t any of those old shows out there to record…

It was, therefore, bitterly ironic that, on Saturday 15 November, a mere three days after I’d taken delivery of the VHS machine, our local ITV station chose to show an episode of Stingray – unscheduled! The episode had been pulled off the shelf at ATV in Birmingham as a partial replacement for that morning’s edition of Tiswas, which had been affected by industrial action. But in the end, VHS came to the rescue, as I learned from a fellow collector that a mutual friend had managed to record the unscheduled episode.

Press ad for the Ferguson Videostar and portable camcorder, circa 1979

One thing I was determined not to do was to record every episode of every series I watched; although I decided it was fair enough to retain odd examples of individual series. On Sunday 16 November, I taped that night’s episode of Shoestring as it went out (the recording still exists), and a month later, at the request of a friend, I set the timer to record the Christmas episode, accidentally recording most of the BBC’s Christmas 1980 trailer at the same time. Such serendipitous recordings are now of greater value than the programmes themselves: YouTube is full of vintage ‘continuity’ caught on old video tapes.

I was soon amassing VHS tapes at a prodigious rate, filling them with Laurel and Hardy shorts (being shown regularly on BBC2), odd episodes of Bilko, and any random repeats of vintage sitcoms that happened to turn up. Finally, in late summer of 1981, came a repeat run of Thunderbirds, which began broadcasting in the Midlands area on Sunday 30 August at 1.00pm. This was the first of a run of Gerry Anderson repeats that would extend over the next few years, affording the opportunity for fans with VCRs to finally own their own copies of the series.

In the summer of 1982, as an alternative to the ongoing World Cup coverage, ITV dusted off a handful of classic old series, including several from the ITC stable, affording my first ever opportunity to commit episodes to tape. On Saturday 26 June, The Persuaders! episode Greensleeves was shown in a prime time slot of 7.10pm. Sunday saw the first ever colour episode of The Saint, The Queen’s Ransom; then finally, on Friday 2 July, at 11.55pm came The Prisoner, represented by the atypical episode The Girl Who Was Death. The episodes were all shown with their original 1960s end of part captions. Alongside all these, viewers were also treated (if that’s the right word) to episodes of venerable sitcoms including On the Buses, Doctor in Charge and Oh No, It’s Selwyn Froggitt.

By now, my collection of VHS tapes had reached one hundred and was still climbing, meaning that I’d spent close on a thousand pounds on tapes in the space of two years (equivalent to over £4,000 at 2026 prices). Still more repeats were on the way, which would put a severe dent in my wallet over the coming years. In 1983, the Prisoner Appreciation Society Six of One was finally rewarded with a repeat run of all seventeen episodes on Channel 4, the first time the series had been nationally networked in the UK. 

The following year, ITV began a repeat run of The Champions, broadcasting the episodes at lunchtimes, which is where the VHS machine really came into its own. Further ITC repeats followed, with The Baron, Randall & Hopkirk (Deceased) and Man in a Suitcase occupying the same timeslot over the coming years. Keeping copies of all these was costing me a lot in VHS tapes, not to mention storage space. In addition to these titles, I was also recording Star Trek (making its final appearance in the ‘BBC edits’ that had been in use since 1969) and The Avengers, which had been broadcasting on Channel 4 since its launch in November 1982. The dearth of vintage programming had turned into a deluge.

One might well ask why I kept all those recordings when surely it was enough to simply watch an episode and tape over it with next week’s? That was, of course, the logical thing to do, but I was by no means certain that any of those old programmes would be broadcast again. My earlier resolve to retain just 'representative episodes' went out of the window. As a collector, it was nice to have one’s own copies of such series available to watch again at any time, so I hung onto them. Only when DVD began to render those old copies obsolete did I begin, slowly, to discard the tapes, a process which sped up considerably when I realised that many of them were beginning to succumb to mould, after being stored in unsuitable environments. As it turned out, none of those old ITC recordings would prove to be of anything more than academic interest in the future.

The reign of VHS lasted just over a quarter of a century, and the format’s death knell was sounded by the arrival, in the late 90s, of DVD. Initially, one could not record on the new discs, so VHS was granted a temporary stay of execution. Betamax, meanwhile, had found its niche in professional video and audio studios, and with the capability of storing digital recordings, would stay around for a lot longer. As audiences grew accustomed to new formats, including mp4 files and the ability to watch material online, the market for VHS dwindled. A few manufacturers, including Panasonic, offered VCR/DVD combos which were an ideal way of archiving material from the older format onto the new – although the baffling range of different recordable discs was hard to navigate, and many such recordings have proved to be unreadable on later machines.

Japan’s Funai, selling its equipment under the Sanyo brand, was the last company to offer VHS playback capability, and finally ceased production of its machines in 2016, by which time the tapes themselves had become quite hard to find. At time of writing there is said to be a VHS revival under way, but it’s very much a niche market and is highly unlikely to gain the kind of popularity that the revived vinyl record format has enjoyed.

What is the legacy of VHS? Perhaps its most important achievement was in opening up a new market in home entertainment. Before the days of home video, if you wanted to watch a feature film at home, you had to own 16mm or 8mm film equipment, and the choice of titles was very limited. VHS showed content owners that there was a proven domestic market for movies and even vintage TV series like Doctor Who both as rental and ‘sell-through’ releases, so that by the time DVD arrived on the scene, there was a huge audience ready to make the upgrade. The early days of sell-through and rental VHS were an unregulated 'wild west', with no obligation on the industry to certify releases, meaning that even the most graphic content was on sale to anybody. The mass media hysteria that was whipped up regarding so called 'video nasties' ushered in the era of BBFC certification, adding a costly new level to the production process as every release had to be viewed and granted a certificate in the same way as any theatrical film release. No matter if the series you wanted to release was some harmless kids' cartoon – you still needed a BBFC certificate, and still do.

Another legacy from the VCR era is piracy. Today, the place to find illegal, unlicensed copies of television series and films is the internet, with YouTube users as the prime candidates for bootlegging. Back in the 1980s, one could get hold of pretty well everything from the latest Star Wars epic right down to obscure 1950s TV series that were still being shown on the other side of the world. Many of today's YouTube uploads have their origin in off-air video recordings – gifts to posterity courtesy of VHS and Betamax.

VHS and its rival formats may have gone the way of 8mm film, but during its era it was meat and drink to a generation of collectors, many of whom, like myself, had probably never dreamed that such a thing could ever exist. It paved the way for a whole industry exploiting content from film and television studios, and pointed towards a future where such material would be widely available and as easily accessible as turning on one's TV or computer.

VHS is Fifty

Part One: 'Yes, we've got a video!'

Charlie Endell was well ahead of the curve. ‘Film cassettes!’ he proudly announced in a 1972 episode of the LWT series Budgie, ‘what in future years you will bung on television sets. The coming thing… the cinema of the future’. Endell, ever the entrepreneur, had done a deal with his American counterpart to supply pornographic material on ‘film cassettes’ for rental through his Soho sex boutique. Presumably he was talking about video cassettes. But how could he have known about them back in 1972? And what, exactly, were the ‘film cassettes’ he’d been promised?

That Budgie episode marks the very first reference to home video in any British TV series. Writers Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall would likely have been aware of the launch, in 1971, of the U-Matic video cassette system, marketed by Sony, Panasonic and JVC and originally aimed at the domestic market. Of course, they may have been thinking of something else entirely – there was already a system known as EVR which recorded video signals onto an 8.75mm physical film format, and was announced to the world by CBS back in 1967. There were even plans to release vintage movies from Twentieth Century Fox and other libraries, including, intriguingly, the BBC. As we know, nothing came of these endeavours, and by the early 70s the big Japanese manufacturers were pushing ahead with magnetic tape-based systems. As a semi-professional format, U-Matic wasn't really suited for home use, but competing systems using smaller cassettes were already in development by the early 70s.

Sony were first off the starting grid with their Betamax format, which launched in Japan on May 10 1975, and arrived in the USA later the same year. Aware of what was happening, Japan’s Ministry of International Trade and Industry made early efforts to force the industry to agree on a standardised format for the coming wave of domestic video recorders. Sony attempted to steal a march on its rivals by persuading MITI to accept Betamax as the preferred format, but JVC, who were developing their own ‘Video Home System’ convinced other manufacturers to adopt their format, thereby denying Sony the chance to monopolise the market. Matsushita (known in most territories as Panasonic) came on board, and others followed.

VHS finally arrived on the Japanese market in September 1976, and would make its debut here in Britain two years later. The so-called ‘format war’ had been declared, but from the outset VHS had major advantages against Sony’s competing system. Betamax tapes originally allowed for only an hour’s worth of recording. Advocates of the system claimed it gave improved picture quality compared to VHS, on account of its faster recording speed of 1.5 inches per second, as against 1.31 ips for VHS. But the marginally slower speed of VHS, coupled with a larger format cassette capable of holding more tape, allowed for up to two hours of recording time. This was soon expanded to three and four hours, and by 1980 VHS had won 60% of the American market. Sony's L750 tape soon offered three-hour recording capability for the Betamax format, but there was no stopping VHS and the rival system slowly disappeared from the domestic market – although the format would endure as the professional Betacam system until 2016.

Now you can watch all your favourite TV shows... but not necessarily in the right order...

For anyone with an interest in film and television, old or new, the arrival of domestic video recording was a watershed moment. Home video recorders had, in fact, been around since the mid 60s, when an early open reel machine was offered as a prize in the TV Times. But the capabilities of those early machines were limited as to duration and quality. Surviving examples from the archive of Ray Galton and Alan Simpson (who taped episodes of Steptoe & Son which were later wiped by the BBC) reveal their shortcomings.

By the mid 70s, the technology was much improved, and the new, cassette-based systems took over from the old reel-to-reel technology. The first VCR I ever saw in operation was one of Sony’s U-Matic machines, which our grammar school owned (and, for the most part, kept a closely guarded secret). The player was big and quite cumbersome, the cassettes enormous, and capable of only an hour's recording time. But by the time I got to see it, in 1979, the first VHS and Betamax machines had already gone on sale here in Britain.

Now that domestic video recording technology had arrived, how was it to be known? The television industry had always abbreviated videotape to 'VT'. Now, the new breed of cassette-based recording systems were known generically as 'VCRs' – short for 'Video Cassette Recorder' which was a bit of a mouthful. In practise, most people simply used the word 'video' to refer to both the hardware and the recording media. Anyone asking 'shall we rent a video tonight' was referring to the tape rather than the machine. 'Oh, have we got a video?' asked Rik in an episode of The Young Ones, referring to their newly acquired VCR. 'Yes!' bawled Vivian, 'we've got a video!' Hadn't we all?

The first person I knew who owned a video recorder was (of course), Tim Beddows, who, at the age of just 16, was already a committed collector of vintage film and television: not that there was much material available to collect back then. He was too young to rent the machine himself, but somehow convinced his dad or an older brother that their household would be the better for owning one.

Tim had considered the two emerging formats and decided – correctly, as it turned out – that VHS was the way to go. A year or so later, Philips brought out their V2000 format, which offered increased runtime and the ability to record on both sides of the tape, like a conventional cassette, but despite these advantages, VHS was already too well established in the consumer market, and V2000 vanished from the scene. With Betamax sales in decline, VHS was soon the last man standing.

The first VHS recording I ever saw was a commercial. Quite famous in its day, it was an ad for Dunlop products, voiced by Richard Briers, with the tagline ‘you’d be surprised how much you’d miss Dunlop’. Tim was quite pleased at having nabbed this ad on his first evening as a VHS user. It had prefaced a broadcast of the satirical comedy film The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer, which he had also recorded, in full. Even though it had only been on the night before, we sat and watched the whole film again – for the sheer novelty value of being able to do so.

I was impressed at this new piece of technology, but wasn’t quite so quick to take advantage of it myself. It was another year before I managed to convince my mum and dad that, if they’d take care of the paperwork, I personally would pay the monthly rental on a VHS machine. We already rented our TV set from Radio Rentals, so adding a video recorder to the package was simple enough. The monthly fee was something like £10 or £15 which I shamefully paid out of my student grant. No loans in those days! By comparison, the full retail price of a VHS machine in 1980 was £495, while a typical Betamax machine was £545 (equivalent to around £2,000-£2,500 in 2026).

The tapes weren’t cheap either. One payed an average of £10-£12 for a three hour E180 cassette. In time the prices came down, but for the first couple of years, one considered oneself lucky to find them for as little as £7.99. Pre-recorded tapes sold for eye-watering prices: £75 or more for a single feature film. This over-pricing probably helped to drive the rental market which within a few years would become huge. In 1982, I paid £25 for a pre-recorded tape of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and considered it a bargain!

The video recorder arrived on Wednesday 11 November 1980. It was a Ferguson branded ‘Videostar’ model, with the familiar top-loading tape mechanism and so-called ‘piano key’ controls. It felt rugged and solidly put together. There was a corded remote control available, but I preferred to use the controls on the machine itself, holding it on ‘pause’ while I waited for a programme to begin (I didn’t want to record any of the between shows continuity or, heaven forbid, commercials).

Curiously, my diary mentions that, on Monday 8 December, less than a month after taking delivery of the VCR, the machine was replaced. What was wrong with it? I’m at a loss to remember. In all probability I had mistaken tape faults (white line dropouts were common) for something the matter with the hardware. Renting meant that it was simple to upgrade the units, but I always preferred that original Videostar with its huge, clunky controls. Within a year, it had been superceded by a new model with electronic, push-button controls which somehow felt less reassuring in operation. The video age had arrived in our house – yes, we'd got a video! Now, what were we to do with it?

In part two, I’ll look at some of the material I recorded and consider the ultimate fate of VHS.