Giles Bonanza!

Thursday 28 October 1976: my diary entry says it all: ‛Giles bonanza.’ I’d even drawn in the name Giles in the way it appeared on the front of the famous cartoon annuals, which I’d been collecting for the past twelve months...

When I first discovered the work of Daily Express cartoonist Ronald 'Carl' Giles, it didn’t occur to me to seek out vintage editions of his annual collections, and for a couple of years, I simply went out and bought each new album as it was issued, usually around mid autumn. I was always eager to see what this year’s cover would be, and whether it qualified as a ‛classic’. Then, in November 1975, I came across a small pile of older editions in a secondhand bookshop. One of them was older than me – the ‛yachts’ cover, spanning the years 1959-60, and uniquely the only edition ever to have the Giles name printed in black. Along with this came two other old editions: 1962-3 (Grandma teaching a parrot to swear) and 1964-5 (kids laying mines in a boating lake). They were priced at maybe 10 or 15p each. 

I soon got to know the famous Giles family quite well, although some of their names remained a mystery for years to come. Grandma was the most famous of them all, based on Giles himself, to whom she bore a striking resemblance. The delinquent OAP was depicted boozing, gambling, generally misbehaving, sometimes put upon by the kids but always giving as good as she got, if not worse. She became a lightning rod for whatever scandal or outrageous fad was currently making the headlines: ‛If Grandma’s bought one of those new mini dresses, I’m leaving home,’ mutters young Ernie in a cartoon from 1966.

This example also illustrates perfectly one of the appeals of those vintage Giles annuals: each one was like an almanac for the year in question. Whatever was making the news, be it serious or trivial, whomever the current crop of celebrities and politicians might be, Giles and his eponymous family mirrored it all. As I began to collect the annuals, I started to piece together a whole social history of postwar Britain. I’d never heard of Christine Keeler or the Profumo scandal until I turned the pages of Giles 1962-63. To this day, much of my knowledge of 50s Britain – a decade I never experienced – is drawn from what I gleaned from old Giles annuals. The 1958-9 edition included a cartoon at a railway bookstall where two bobbysocked girls are asking for a copy of ‛Terry Dene’s army memoirs’. This would have been hilarious at the time, but was lost on me until many years later when I heard the story of Dene, a Brit rocker whose call-up for national service was brutally satirised in the press, leading to his discharge just two months later. The same edition also included many cartoons depicting the famously long, hot summer of 1959 – a meteorological event which preceded my birth by some eighteen months.

Moving into the mid 60s, some of Giles’ topical cartoons referred back to events of which I’d been dimly aware as a six or seven-year-old: the Arab-Israeli conflict of 1967; Ian Smith and Rhodesia; yachtsman Sir Alec Rose's single handed round the world voyage, and many others. Sometimes, Giles would comment on the lighter, ephemeral items in the news, such as a report from January 1966 of a gentleman who’d been causing traffic jams whilst walking his dog from the comfort of his very slowly moving car. Others are lost in the mists of time. I’m still not sure whether a cartoon about a flying bike that could hover one inch above the ground was based on a genuine news report, a figment of Giles’ fervid imagination or both.

The Giles universe, despite resembling our own world, obeyed its own set of physical laws. Animals could talk. Stinker, the mop-headed mute schoolboy, was able to create tiny duplicates of himself in the school science lab (reflecting the then current media interest in ‛test tube babies’). Items of clothing, most notably socks, retained the shape of their wearer after removal. Grandma’s snores were so loud as to interfere with the working of the Jodrell Bank radio telescope. The moon was populated by TV antenna-headed aliens. Father Christmas was a ruffian who traded fisticuffs with the local vicar after their vehicles collided. Sputniks were wont to drop without warning into suburban gardens. And pylons, which Giles loathed, bestrode the landscape in insane profusion, their supports sometimes going right through the roofs of houses. Whatever was going on in our world, be it a stand-off between East and West, soccer violence or Bay City Roller mania, it all happened in Giles-world with even greater intensity and insanity.

One aspect of the Giles family that always intrigued me was their inability to remain in one place for longer than a single day. Their domestic surroundings were never depicted the same way twice. They’d be living in a particular house on Wednesday, but by the time of their next appearance, say on Sunday, the whole setting was altered, to suit whatever was happening in that day’s cartoon. This, of course, helped to add interest: seeing the same living room, the same kitchen and the same garden time after time would have become tedious, and Giles was anything but. He could easily have devised a ‛room set’ for the family, but chose instead to vary their circumstances according to the needs of a specific gag situation. If only real life could work like that…

After a year or so, I started to look at the real world in Giles terms: I’d turn a corner and be confronted by a steep street dwindling away into perspective and know immediately that the view was 'very Giles'. There are certain arrangements of trees and buildings that instantly suggest Giles. He lived in East Anglia, and the landscape is recognisable in some of his cartoons (Norwich is especially Giles-like) but he was equally at home depicting city landscapes and back-to-back urban squalor. The backgrounds often dwarf the characters. Huge, featureless high walls always make me think of Giles: there are a couple of examples close to where I live, one of which, on a very steep hill, looks for all the world like the setting for some imaginary annual cover. All it needs is the addition of his famous signature logo and Grandma... (scroll down to see it).

The 1976 ‛bonanza’ was the result of a half-term holiday visit to our favourite secondhand bookshop, owned by Royden Smith, in Burntwood Staffordshire. We’d been going there on occasional weekends since the summer, the shop being open on Sundays, which in 1976 was a remarkable thing indeed. The day’s haul comprised no fewer than six Giles annuals, two of them replacements for more battered copies; and the oldest of them meant that my Giles collection now reached back to 1957. Comparing the covers of those older annuals with the latest editions, I began to notice subtle differences in the printing quality. The further back one went, the more muted the colours became, and the printing itself had an almost watercolour look about it. One saw strange shades of pale blue, pink and yellow that seemed to emphasise the annuals’ antique 1950s qualities. Inside, the printing remained the same, but Giles’ drawings were more detailed in some of the older annuals, indicating that his cartoons had taken up greater space on the page. 

I was so enthused by Giles that I even prevailed upon my parents to start taking the Daily Express, in which his cartoons appeared several times a week. By this time, the Express had reduced its pages to tabloid size, and one can see the corresponding reduction in detail in Giles’ drawings. After a year or so of collecting, I came to realise that there had been a high water mark in his career, lasting from the early 50s to the mid 60s. The later cartoons were still very good, but were often less elaborate, and featured fewer of his extraordinary perspective effects.

Although it was still relatively easy to turn up old Giles annuals at secondhand shops and jumble sales in the mid 70s, it was usually the more recent editions one came across. The 1967-8 edition (Twenty-Second Series), whose cover shows the family on safari in a Land Rover, became almost ubiquitous, and I can only assume that the quantity printed for that year outstripped all others by a long way. But some were next to impossible to obtain. The mid-50s editions, then all of twenty years old, had mostly disappeared, and the 1957-8 edition I picked up in October 1976 would be the oldest in my collection for a very long time. My all-time favourite cover, from 1956-7, was especially hard to find. I first saw it as a jigsaw puzzle, but the annual itself eluded me for years.

The 1956-7 Giles annual became a jigsaw puzzle in the mid 70s. Comparing this with the original cover, one can clearly see how the 'Giles' logo has been painted out on an overlay. The colours had also faded quite noticeably.

Once the supply from jumble sales and junk shops had run dry, I turned to serious book collectors’ fairs, from where I picked up occasional early editions like the sixth and seventh series. By this time (the 1990s), one might pay anything from £10 to £25 for examples from the early 1950s. Series five was the hardest of all to obtain, and to this day I’ve never owned an original copy. Many of that year’s print run were, apparently, destroyed in a factory fire. Luckily, in later years, Pedigree books began to issue facsimile reprints on a yearly basis, which finally enabled me to complete my collection back to the very first edition.

The advent of eBay, and other online sources, really drove down the prices of old Giles annuals. Looking online today, I can see someone selling a copy of the far-too-easy-to-find Twenty Second series, priced at £33.98. Some hope. Copies can be had for as little as £3.95. Of course, the rare, older editions are still hard to come by, but haven’t gone up much in value in the past couple of decades. Series five, the rarest of the lot, is listed online for £80, which the same price I saw on a copy more than twenty five years ago. The first series goes for around the same figure.

You might think that the days of walking into a secondhand bookshop or antique centre and finding a pile of rare old Giles annuals are long gone… but perhaps not quite. Back in around 2012, while strolling around a vast antiques centre in Sheffield, I chanced upon a heap of Giles annuals, evidently from a house clearance, which included the 1957-8 edition and others from the same era – priced well below their market value, and all in near mint condition. Needless to say, I bought the lot.

The Giles annual is still published every year, or should one say reprinted, as the bulk of the content is comprised of cartoons that appeared way back in the original annuals. There were always ‛orphaned’ cartoons from each year, that were omitted from the collections, but these have now largely been accounted for across the reprint editions. Amazingly, there are still ‛new’ covers on some years’ editions – colour illustrations that were rejected for older editions, or produced for other purposes such as the RNLI. It’s only lack of space that prevents me from continuing to buy them: my personal collection peters out around 2007, and includes many, many duplicate editions.

For the record, the most expensive Giles annual I could find for sale online is a rare hardback (yes, hardback!) edition of the seventh series, produced as a trade presentation item. Yours for a mere £297. I’d like to know what Grandma would think about that...

Bearwood Hill Road, Burton On Trent – that huge wall and trees have always suggested a Giles annual cover... and so, with a little help from Photoshop...
award yourself a bonus point if you know which annual the logo was scanned from (and no, it's not the obvious one).

10cc and I

 

In the 1970s, my relationship with pop music was simple: I watched Top of the Pops most weeks (unless it clashed with something like Space:1999), and on Sunday teatimes, we listened to the Top Forty rundown. If a record got into the charts that I liked, I could be sure to catch it on one of these two programmes. I seldom felt the need to own copies of anything, and between 1970 and 74, I had only a handful of singles bought for me, one of which was Benny Hill’s ‘Ernie, the Fastest Milkman in the West’. I had no interest at all in albums, and didn’t begin to explore the format until early 1974, when I got my first contemporary pop LP – Band on the Run. (Curiously, I chose to own it on cassette, having been warned by a school friend that the vinyl LP was prone to jump). I certainly had the intention to own more: albums, particularly those by progressive rock bands, were regarded as more serious than singles, and some of the sixth form classrooms at the grammar school I attended had their walls plastered with posters of artists I’d never heard of.

My 1975 diary includes a memo page where I made a list of LPs I was planning on getting during that year. Only one of them is crossed off the list: With the Beatles. The others were all rock and prog, but I was kidding myself if I thought I’d ever really get into bands like ELP or Cream. Chart pop music was my thing, and it was a rarity for any of the so called ‘serious’ rock artists to make forays into the ‘hit parade’.

There was one band, however, who seemed to have a foot in both camps, and whose music managed to be both serious and commercial. Their albums were well regarded by critics, and their singles regularly got into the charts. During the 1970s, they were pretty well the only contemporary group whose LPs I sought out. That band was 10cc.

I’d been a fan of 10cc since their first single ‘Donna’, back in the autumn of 1972, and had kept up with their chart career ever since. When ‘Rubber Bullets’ got to number one, I even had the sheet music bought for me – but not the record itself. I didn’t, in fact, own any of 10cc’s music on vinyl until the late summer of 1974 when the single ‘Silly Love’ was released. At Christmas, it was joined by their first two LPs.

By this time, I already knew that there was no such thing as a ‘typical’ 10cc single. ‘Donna’, a doo-wop pastiche, was quite unlike ‘Rubber Bullets’ which itself was utterly unlike ‘The Dean and I’. This stylistic diversity had grown out of the band’s earlier recording activities, crafting so-called ‘bubblegum’ pop singles as part of a contract won by Graham Gouldman. The band members had all been active on the pop scene since the mid 60s, with Gouldman penning chart successes for The Yardbirds, The Hollies and Herman’s Hermits, while Eric Stewart had been promoted to lead singer of the Mindbenders following the departure of Wayne Fontana. Before 10cc, Godley, Creme and Stewart had scored a surprise international hit with 'Neanderthal Man', a song that evolved from a studio drum test and was released under the dubious name of Hotlegs. The band went on to release a solitary album, some of whose tracks had previously been recorded by Godley and Creme under the even more dubious name of Frabjoy and Runcible Spoon, a Simon & Garfunkel-styled duo that never amounted to anything. It was the sheer amount and diversity of musical endeavour that had gone before them that set 10cc apart from their contemporaries.

Unlike most bands, who might run to a single songwriter or possibly a duo, 10cc was made up of four equally talented writers, who, moreover, could work in any of the possible permutations: thus, on their albums, one would find credits to Godley/ Creme, Creme/Stewart, Stewart/Gouldman, and occasional collaborations between all four members. Few other bands could work like this. Whilst Godley and Creme drew on their art school backgrounds to create challenging, occasionally experimental material, Stewart and Gouldman operated within a more commercially accessible pop sensibility. Bringing the two sides together resulted in singles like ‘Rubber Bullets’ (Creme/Gouldman/Godley) and ‘Silly Love’ (Creme/Stewart). On top of their experimentalism, Godley and Creme leaned towards broadway show tunes, as can be heard in tracks like ‘The Dean and I’, and, from their solo career, ‘Wedding Bells’. Few bands have ever brought together such diversity of talent and influences.

It was this tension between art school weirdness and solid pop song craft that made 10cc one of the most interesting bands of the 1970s. I liked melodic pop well enough, even more so when it veered off into unexpected territory, and whilst 10cc’s lyrics were a shade too sophisticated for me to understand aged around 11 or 12, I could certainly appreciate their music.

Back in 1972, I was ready to accept a single like ‘Donna’ at face value, not realising the band had is collective tongue firmly in cheek, and I was far too young to notice the sly double entendre in the opening line: ‘Oh Donna, you make me stand up'. Neither, for that matter, did the BBC. The single was helped on its way by a resurgence of interest in 50s music – Elton John’s ‘Crocodile Rock’ was in the charts at the same time – but when they tried another doo-wop single, ‘Johnny Don’t Do It’, they missed the charts. ‘Donna’ was like the proverbial joke that can only be told once, and henceforth, no two 10cc singles would sound quite the same – at least until the departure of Godley and Creme.

‘Rubber Bullets’ was hardly a typical 1970s pop record. Thematically, the band were looking back to the era of Elvis and ‘Jailhouse Rock’, but stylistically it was out there on its own, driven along by a curious bubbling rhythm that Kevin Godley had conjured from a primitive beat box. There was another ‘naughty’ lyric too, and this time Auntie Beeb spotted it – the couplet ‘we’ve all got balls and brains/ but some’s got balls and chains’ was excised for airplay. Quite astonishingly, ‘Rubber Bullets’ made it to number one in the charts – albeit for just one week. I’d discovered a new favourite band, even though I didn’t as yet own any of their records – just one piece of sheet music.

Sheet Music, of course, was where 10cc were going with their next album (and that title was yet another example of the band’s propensity for undergraduate humour… try saying it in a Spanish accent). It was with Sheet Music that I finally caved in and bought a 10cc record, the single ‘Silly Love’, released in August '74: but back in February, I thought the band had lost its collective marbles when I heard ‘The Worst Band in the World’ on Tony Blackburn’s morning show. To have chosen this, arguably the most unorthodox recording the band ever made, as the debut single of a new LP seemed wilfully perverse. ‘The Wall Street Shuffle’ was easier for pop fans to digest, and made number 10 in the UK singles chart in midsummer. ‘Silly Love’, a satire on pop songwriting, was just a shade too clever for its own good with its ‘clichés and toupées and threepées’, and stalled just outside the top twenty.

On the album lurked still more exotic and unusual items – ‘Hotel’, an eccentric calypso with vaguely racist leanings; ‘Clockwork Creep’, a song told from the perspective of a bomb in the hold of an airliner; and ‘Somewhere in Hollywood’, a paen to the golden age of the movies. None of these were songs that could be readily absorbed on first listening – you needed several plays, not to mention the lyric sheet and a degree in cultural studies to unpick all the references.

As the Beatles had done with the sleeve of Sergeant Pepper, so 10cc did in their lyrics. Lurking in their songs you’ll find Norman Mailer, Jean Harlow, Greta Garbo, Lassie, Minnie Mouse, the Pope, Joe Palooka (a boxing champ from an American comic strip), Jack Kerouac (his novel, D’harma Bums is mentioned in ‘The Worst Band in the World’), Howard Hughes, Paul Getty, Rudolph Valentino and the Rothschild dynasty. These boys had certainly done some ‘reading around’. Of course, I didn’t get most of these references back then, but it was all grist to the mill. 

Sheet Music was, and still is, an extremely odd album, but I enjoyed its eccentricities even if I didn’t always know what the band were going on about (‘The Sacro-Iliac’ made a dance craze out of a pain in the back). In 1975, they followed it up with The Original Soundtrack, which included the future number one hit ‘I’m Not in Love’; a song whose genesis tells us a lot about the working methods within the band. When first presented by writers Stewart and Gouldman, in the manner of a jazzy bossa-nova, Kevin Godley refused to record it unless the band agreed to approach it in a new and original manner. His instinct proved to be correct, and the reimagined song, with its textural washes of multi-layered vocal parts, provided the band with their biggest hit.

In January 1976, 10cc released their fourth studio album, How Dare You, hard on the heels of the single ‘Art for Art’s Sake’. Stylistically, the single harked back to ‘The Wall Street Shuffle’ (in a Melody Maker interview, Gouldman referred to it as ‘the inevitable money song’) as well as recycling sections of the looped vocals from ‘I’m Not in Love’, all of which took the band to number five in the UK.

The album saw a return to the wayward eclecticism of Sheet Music, and its first side included some of the strangest waxings in the band’s career, songs that would surely prove unpalatable to all but the most dedicated fans. ‘I Wanna Rule the World’ included a manic Hitlerian speech (Creme?) and a kiddie-chorus warning the world to prepare itself for an army of ‘terrible tiny tots’ ‘sinking their milk teeth into your thighs’. Structurally, it abandoned all the conventions of songwriting: a typical pop song might comprise at most three sections, verse, chorus, middle eight. 'I Wanna Rule the World' has six: and other 10cc songs could have as many as eight...

Most of 10cc’s albums came with sleeve notes which included full instrumental breakdowns for each track, hence it was possible to deduce that some of the slippery sounds in ‘I’m Mandy Fly Me’ were a zither (recorded in reverse), but I was in the dark when the credits included the likes of ‘Dobro’ (which I later learned is a resonator guitar) and ‘gizmo’, which I took for an in-joke but was actually an invention of Godley and Creme.

Of all the sounds and textures that made it onto 10cc’s records, the ‘gizmo’ or ‘gizmotron’ was the strangest of the lot. The device, about the size of a cigarette packet, was screwed onto the bridge of an electric guitar and consisted of six small rollers (like those in a tape recorder), which rubbed the strings and created a continual hum, giving an organ or string-section effect. Godley and Creme attempted to market the device, and in their quest to promote it on record, ended up splitting the band. How Dare You would be the last work from the original line-up, and whilst 10cc continued with Stewart and Gouldman, producing albums including Deceptive Bends and Bloody Tourists, for me, the journey was over. The post Godley-Creme singles were fine pieces of work, but I never bought any more of their albums, and when I did get to hear them on various friends’ turntables, I could tell there was something missing. Godley and Creme had brought an edginess to the band which Stewart and Gouldman could never quite recapture, an unpredictability that, for a while, became their musical calling card.

Freed from the band, Godley and Creme embarked on the sprawling concept album Consequences, whose lavish triple LP box set format was commercial suicide, priced way beyond the means of the average pop music buyer. I certainly couldn't afford it. A friend of mine and reader of this blog managed to get a copy from the local music library that had been left in the sun and warped: ironic, really, considering the album's theme of malevolent meteorology... Consequences yielded one splendid single, 'Five O'Clock in the Morning' which again harked back to the duo's love of Broadway show tunes. In time, it was whittled down to a single album, omitting the spoken word sections and focusing on the more easily digested musical items.

With their subsequent releases, Godley and Creme strayed further and further away from the ‘weird but commercial’ realm of the original 10cc. Albums L and Freeze Frame still contained recognisable songs, but were far too smart for their own good. At times, the duo’s delight in experimentation could go a little too far for my liking: ‘I Pity Inanimate Objects’ warped the vocal melody through a harmoniser (a studio device used to bring singers and instruments into pitch), coaxing some bizarre melismas from it a couple of decades before Cher’s vocal on ‘Life After Love’ was given the same treatment. If nothing else, they were way ahead of their time… Fortunately, they calmed down somewhat, and 1981’s ‘Ismism’ saw a return to the filmic narratives and pop/pastiche mindset of mid-period 10cc, a formula which continued on ‘Birds of Prey’, but with less commercial success.

By this time, Godley and Creme had diversified into the lucrative arena of the pop video, and as commissions from the likes of The Police, Duran Duran and Frankie Goes to Hollywood ate into their time, so the songs began to dwindle. The last big hit for the duo, 'Cry' owed much of its success to the innovative face-morphing video they created to promote it, and their final LP release was 1988’s Goodbye Blue Sky. Many of their albums were unavailable on CD for a long time, but various reissues have taken care of that. Fans should also check out the 2022 release Frabjous Days which brings together all the early recordings produced under the banner of Frabjoy and Runcible Spoon, and hints at the greatness that was to come.

10cc were, in many ways, an ideal band for me: musically adventurous, literate, and disinclined to take themselves too seriously. They ventured into musical territories where other bands simply weren't allowed – having their own studio gave them the freedom to experiment without running up huge record company bills, and their working methods anticipated the move towards private studios and home recording. They could out-perform and out-think pretty well all of their contemporaries. In fact, the only things they lacked were an image and a charismatic front man, none of which made any difference to me. 10cc were a band for listening to, not looking at. Even today, I'm not sure if their unique qualities are sufficiently appreciated, and aside from a BBC4 documentary and a 1970s paperback, there's been precious little time devoted to critical appraisals of their work. I don't even know if the band members themselves realise how important they were...

Radio 4Extra: The End of an Era?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Radio Times: The Swash Caps Era

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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