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…

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.