Designing the Decades...

Ten Years of Blue Peter Books

'Here's some I found earlier' : Blue Peter books spanning the years 1966-1974

Nothing conveys the look and feel of a given era quite like graphic design, and I should know – having spent over a decade re-creating the graphics from vintage TV series for use on DVD sleeves. As an outspoken critic of modern design excesses, I feel that today’s designers could learn a lot (or in many cases, re-learn everything) by looking back to the examples of their predecessors. Today, in the field of childrens’ books and magazines especially, design is too often a garish mash-up of conflicting elements: typography, photography, vivid colours and fake 3d effects, with designers cramming their page layouts in a desperate effort to make them appear ‘fun’ and thereby prolong the waning attention span of their audience. White space is seldom seen, with page backgrounds more often adopting dark or vivid colours. How different from what we find on opening a vintage Blue Peter Book from the 1960s – as I did this week in prepartion for a piece on the series.

The Blue Peter Book first appeared in 1964 , at which time the series itself had been on air for some six years. The first edition was, surprisingly, not produced by the BBC, but by an independent publisher, who had licensed the title from the corporation. It sold well, and the next year BBC Enterprises, knowing a good thing when they saw it, took over publication. Never referred to as an ‘annual’ (with its implied commitment to yearly publication) the books nevertheless continued to appear in time for the Christmas market every year throughout the 1960s and 70s.

The first volume that found its way into my hands had a publication date of 1967, and was the fourth in the series. Interestingly, it was the first edition (and one of only a handful over the complete run) not to feature the faces of the presenters on the cover, with pets Petra, Patch, Jason and Joey (the parrot) in their place. This may have been a result of politics, since the series was undergoing a transition during 1967. Original presenter Christopher Trace was becoming difficult to work with, and his extra-marital affair had provided a subject for press gossip, which didn’t help. Trace was notorious for his threatened resignations, and once John Noakes (introduced early in 1966) had become an accepted part of the format, Trace’s next resignation was accepted by his bosses at the BBC. His appearances in the show became less frequent, and he left permanently in July of 1967. The fourth book would have been in preparation at this time, and its content notably omits Trace completely. Peter Purves, meanwhile, would not join the series until November ‘67, by which time the book was in the shops. So a pet-based cover was the simplest solution.

Stylish, yet restrained: interior spread from the Fourth Blue Peter Book (1967)

The interior design of the fourth book provides an object lesson in restraint and minimalism. The typography is particularly strong, vibrant and contemporary, without going overboard, with fonts echoing those in use elsewhere on television and in magazines. Page layouts are simple, but well-balanced grids, with text set in Baskerville or Grotesk, giving a choice of serif or sans. Headline fonts are all sans, with the then-contemporary Futura Display much in evidence, alongside less easily identifiable examples, most likely from the Univers family. Colours are kept to a minimum, with headlines set in black, green or red. Uniquely for a publication such as this, the designers are credited at the end of the book, albeit by their surnames only: Baker/Broom/Edwards. The same team was on board for the fifth book (published autumn 1968), although the graphics were all-new, with the slab serif Egyptienne face featuring prominently alongside Futura Extra Bold. The balance between textual matter and white space remained attractive, but somehow the fifth book lacks the finesse of its predecessor.

New year, new font: Egyptienne is the title treatment of choice for the Fifth book (1968)

Prior to 1967, the covers of the Blue Peter Books had failed to adopt a consistent approach, with the 1966 edition an orange and blue affair, with a large, sans serif title block, contrasting the red and yellow of 1965 and the yellow/blue of 1964. The fourth book took a new, bolder approach, with its title spanning the width of the cover, in electric blue Windsor, a font reflecting the trend towards Edwardiana that had crept into graphic and interior design from circa 1966. The same look prevailed for 1968, while the 1969 edition, with an all-over dark photographic background, retained the Windsor font, this time in red, with white outlining. Martin Bronkhorst was the designer on 1969’s Sixth Book, with the layout continuing the look of the preceding editions, albeit with increasing instances of photos bleeding off at the edges, where white margins had been more in evidence beforehand.

It was all change for the edition published in 1970, again with an all-over photographic cover. The Windsor font was gone (but would return), replaced by an unidentifiable sans font with a naive, almost hand-drawn quality. The designer this time was one Haydon Young, and the typography throughout is noticeably less confident, and more inconsistent than that of its predecessors. A variety of text fonts is in use – Times, Rockwell, Gill – and the all-white page backgrounds rule has been thrown out, sometimes with less than satisfactory results, as on pages 12 and 13 where some of the instructions for making a cardboard farm are barely readable against a photographic background of the finished model. The worst offence, though, is text cramming. Where 1969’s pages had large header/footer areas, their size was drastically reduced for 1970, while the average font size increased by three or four points, resulting in pages that look too text-heavy and are uninviting to the reader. This looks to me like editorial intervention. While the font sizes of earlier editions made for attractive page layouts, it may have been felt that in some cases the text was too small for young readers. And while the Seventh Book represents a step backwards from the clear, balanced layouts of earlier years, it’s still preferable to anything that modern design has to offer.

How not to do it... text cramming in the seventh and eighth books.

The Eighth Book was again designed by Haydon Young, and this time the typography was, in places, catastrophic. Page 70 is possibly the worst laid-out page in any annual or magazine of the era that I’ve seen, with over a third of it given over to an introductory paragraph set in what looks like 18 or 20-point Grotesk. Elsewhere, a feature on Velazquez is crammed into two pages, with dense Times typography that simply encourages the reader to turn over. It wasn’t all bad, and there are some attractive spreads, but it was a far cry from the exemplary work of Baker, Broom and Edwards. The cover once again featured an all-over photograph, with the title in a drab sans font, airbrushed to give a faux 3d effect.

The Ninth Book, designed by George Mayhew, was a return to form, with the cover marking the return of the Windsor title treatment – this would now become an established element of the cover designs over the following years, and looking back, it can be hard to remember that it was never used on-screen, where the title card was invariably in a plain, heavy sans-serif treatment. The Ninth Book cover returns to the white ground of four and five, albeit with a double border of bright blue and pink, which seems somewhat superfluous. Inside, the layout shows much more restraint, with thoughtful typography, better balance and use of white space, looking much more like the immediate successor to 1968’s edition. There are perhaps too many different text fonts in use, but the effect is never clashing, and there is a notable lack of any overtly contemporary influences. Unfortunately, this would not prove to be the case for much longer.

The Tenth Book, designed by one John Strange, featured a gimmick cover design that I didn’t particularly like at the time. By now there were four regular Blue Peter presenters, Lesley Judd having joined the classic Val/John/Pete axis in 1973. The Tenth cover features all four, albeit as heads and hands only, peering over a large blue square. The design is repeated inside itself, with a sequence of three more coloured squares and a small reproduction of the whole cover in the centre. It’s the old infinity effect, seen many times elsewhere, and whilst it may have seemed novel, to me it just didn’t compare with the ‘proper’ covers featuring a single, large photographic image.

The gimmickry continued inside, with a mish-mash of different title treatments, including a lot of hand-drawn efforts that now look extremely dated. The text setting was generally well balanced, with only a couple of features appearing too long for their available space. The same formula was maintained for the Eleventh Book, with John Strange once again doing the design (although his credit was now part of a general acknowledgement block). The most interesting aspect of the Eleventh Book (published in 1974) is the endpapers, which are nothing more than a copy of the Hard Day’s Night album sleeve of a decade previously...

The Eleventh Blue Peter book was the last edition I received as a Christmas present, and I’d stopped watching the series itself around the end of 1973. Possibly even more so than the programmes themselves, the books remain emblematic of the era in which they were produced, and it’s interesting to observe how they reflect wider trends in design, regrettable or otherwise. The best of them stand the test of time, and in spite of the retro look of certain fonts, still stand as textbook examples of how to lay out an illustrated book page with taste and restraint.

Next time, we’ll have a look at what went into the books themselves and how they related to the content of the TV series.

Bye-bye!

The Ones I Didn't Watch...

I’ve written a lot about the television I remember watching in the past, but I’ve just been put in mind of a couple of series neither of which I watched, but both of which I remember. In both cases, it’s not so much a case of recollecting the programmes, but a certain atmosphere with which they’ve become associated.

There was never any shortage of Western series on TV during the 1960s, from Wagon Train (before my time) to Bonanza. The genre was beginning to wane in popularity by the end of the decade, but two particular titles remained perennial favourites of the schedulers at the BBC. The Virginian, starring James Drury, had been shown by the corporation since 1964, initially on BBC2, then from the mid-60s onwards, on BBC1. The series itself, produced by America’s NBC network, was television’s third longest-running Western, amassing a total of 249 episodes over nine years, and its demise in 1971 signalled the end of the dominance of the genre. The other fixture Western at the BBC, this time on BBC2, was The High Chaparral, which had also aired on NBC in the States from 1967 to 1971. Both series continued to be repeated on the BBC as late as the year 2000, clocking up hundreds of broadcasts between them. Interestingly (or not), these were the only two big Western series that the corporation picked up in the 1960s, with titles like Bonanza, Gunsmoke and Wagon Train going to their commercial rivals, who had more money available to spend on such imports. ITV had pretty much given up on Westerns by the late 60s – it’s hard to think of any examples that were being scheduled by around 1970 – but the BBC continued to show both The Virginian and The High Chaparral in primetime slots well into the new decade.

I remember our dad watching both of them (on the rare evenings when he wasn’t out playing the drums), but I’d lost interest in Westerns at about the same age that I grew out of my cowboy outfit. There had been an offbeat entry on ITV in the early 60s, called Sugarfoot (known in its home country as Tenderfoot), which was broadcast by ABC in the Midlands and North of England on Saturday teatimes, and which I remember watching with some level of enjoyment (although I was barely of an age to be able to follow the storylines), but aside from this one example, and a few old movies that were cranked out on Sunday afternoons, I never really got into the genre.

Yet, simply by dint of their constant presence in the schedules, both The Virginian (latterly The Men From Shiloh) and The High Chaparral worked their way into my consciousness. A glance at their opening titles, courtesy of YouTube (links below) shows them to be instantly familiar, albeit in colour, where I would have been watching in black and white, and each is accompanied by a memorably evocative piece of theme music (composed, in the case of The Virginian, by the prolific Percy [Theme from a Summer Place] Faith). In fact, I always felt that the theme from The High Chaparral had plagiarised the melody from Joe Meek’s Telstar, adding a soupçon of Jerome Moross’s theme from the movie The Big Country. In the case of both these series, the opening credits were as much as I ever saw, but the face of Virginian star James Drury is instantly familiar even now, whereas the cast of The High Chaparral, glimpsed only in passing during the opening credits, are still a mystery to me.

By the early 70s, these two series had each settled into a bit of a scheduler’s rut, with Chaparral tending to occupy a slot around 8pm on Monday nights, and always on BBC2. The Virginian, meanwhile, was a staple of Friday evenings, generally to be found in the 6.40pm slot, immediately after Nationwide. The merest glance at the listings on the BBC’s genome database confirms that these slots persisted over months, if not years, the cumulative effect of which was to confer on each series certain associations.

Just hearing the music from The High Chaparral is enough to evoke the dull tedium of a Monday evening, knowing that there was nothing else to see that night on television (nothing I was allowed to stay up for, at any rate) and with the knowledge of another four days to be endured at school before the weekend rolled around again. The music from Panorama has pretty much the same effect. The Virginian, on the other hand, and still to this day, comes with a Friday feeling, welcoming the start of the weekend; and although I never sat through an episode, the music and opening credits still have that magical Pavolvian effect. A further level of association comes with The Virginian, probably spurred by my imagination conjuring up impressions from the wide, Wyoming landscape glimpsed in the titles. What it says to me is not necessarily the ‘West’, but the idea of there being a wider world out there, and ideas about what it might contain. It also speaks somehow of the lighter evenings in spring and early summer, and that glimpse of landscape might also be conjuring up the rather more parochial setting of the wide expanses of Sutton Park, a potential destination for a trip out on such evenings.

Athough I never sat and watched either of these series, in a curious way, the memory of them is clearer than my recollection of programmes that I actually did make a point of watching, certainly when those series disappeared off air in a relatively short space of time. I tend to find, though, that however much one thinks one remembers, or not, memory remains imprinted in the mind, like a recording, and even things one imagines one has forgotten can spring to mind afresh just by some associative stimulus. Repetiton is clearly a big factor, and regardless of whether one was a devotee of either The High Chaparral, The Virginian or, for that matter, Panorama, the memory of hearing that same piece of music, week after week, played out at a set time of day, with its surrounding context of obligations to school, work, or whatever is deeply imprinted, set permanently in the wet cement of the past.

See if it works for you:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjjUlljGNK0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEOGhUBgtAQ

 

Uh Huh, It was the Manfreds...

This week forty years ago, I was listening a lot to an LP I’d been given at Christmas. Of course, it wasn’t anything contemporary: I didn’t hear much in the modern pop charts that appealed to me, and was more interested in acquiring some of the music I’d listened to in the previous decade. By even the most objective analysis, the music of the 1960s had been more original, more interesting and more exciting than anything that 1977 had to offer.

Most of the music on the album in question was a decade old, and in the case of certain tracks, I don’t think I can have heard them much, if at all, since their original appearance in the charts of the late 60s. The album was called Mannerisms, and was a budget-priced collection of ‘A’ and ‘B’-sides from the second incarnation of the band Manfred Mann.

The Manfreds had first enjoyed chart success with the self-composed theme to the TV series Ready, Steady, Go (5-4-3-2-1), and followed it up with several more top ten hits, with vocalist Paul Jones fronting the band. By 1966, Jones was increasingly focusing on his acting career, and took the decision to quit, at which time ex-public schoolboy Mike D’Abo was drafted in from Harrow school alumni A Band of Angels. D’Abo was a songwriter as well as a singer (his best-known compositions being Handbags and Gladrags and Build Me Up, Buttercup), but this cut no ice with the Manfreds, whose policy was to source songs for their single releases from outside the band. Founder members Manfred Mann and Mike Hugg were first and foremost jazz-blues players, for whom the business of making pop singles was simply a means to an end. Drawing on the best work of contemporary songwriters paid off, and the band’s cover of Bob Dylan’s Just Like a Woman scored a first chart hit for the new D’Abo-fronted band lineup. Dylan would pay dividends again in 1968, when the Manfred’s' cover of The Mighty Quinn got to number one, well before most people had even heard Dylan’s version.

This is where I come in... more or less. I’d been aware of the earlier Manfred Mann from their chart singles Do Wah Diddy Diddy and Pretty Flamingo, but the first of the D’Abo era singles had escaped my attention (I seemed to have missed a lot of chart records during 1966, an absence which is partially explained by the clash on television between Thunderbirds and Top of the Pops). The Mighty Quinn, however, I knew very well, and was bought the single at around the time of its reaching the top of the charts in late February 1968 – the school half-term holiday, as I recollect. Unusually, the single came from a chemist’s shop: John Frosts in Sutton Coldfield was a large-ish dispensing chemists who also happened to have a record department – I can picture it to this day: down a few steps from the entrace, and into a small, semi-subterranean domain of picture sleeves on walls, and a few racks of LPs. Singles were displayed in a rack on the counter.

I remember feeling quite pleased at owning the record that was number one in the charts that week. The Mighty Quinn was only the second pop single I’d ever been bought, and the first (Herman’s Hermits’ I’m Into Something Good) had also made number one. The song itself was somewhat baffling lyrically, with its tale of an Eskimo, whom I pictured paddling in his kyak towards a city square where people were feeding pigeons in the trees (much later, I learned that the song’s titular character was supposedly inspired by Anthony Quinn’s portrayal of an Eskimo in the 1960 movie The Savage Innocents, hence the name...)

Something we always did whenever a single came into our house was to play the B-side. In some cases, the flips ended up getting more play than their A-sides. Mighty Quinn presented a extremely unusual recording on its reverse side, a parody along the lines of the as yet unreleased Beatles novelty You Know My Name (Look up the Number). By Request – Edwin Garvey was a Mike D’Abo composition and may well have started life as a serious ballad. But the Manfreds chose to send it up in a tongue-in cheek fashion, with one of the band doing a full-on Noel Coward impression, while the other members played in the style of a slightly inept light cabaret outfit. I’m not sure that I understood it entirely, but it was clearly not intended to be taken seriously. Nevertheless, it got played, probably a lot more than it deserved...

The Manfreds followed up Quinn’s success in the summer of 1968 with the single My Name is Jack, a song which, if anything, I liked better than its predecessor (although on this occasion I had to make do with hearing it on the radio). It came to embody the first sunny weeks of that year’s school summer holiday, and to this day the opening flute passage evokes a Pavlovian image of deck chairs in the back garden. Once again, I found myself wondering what it was all about. The singer informed us that he lived ‘in the back of the Greta Garbo Home... for Wayward Boys and Girls.’ All of which begged some form of explanation. I don’t think I found out who Greta Garbo really was until much later, and at the age of seven must have imagined that she was just a kindly philanthropic old lady. And what, I desired to know, were ‘wayward boys and girls’? Presumably the characters in the song could serve as a clue. One of them was ‘Carl over there with his funny old hair’ whom I felt I recognised from my class at school, one of whom was a boy called Carl who had notably fluffy curly hair... but wayward? Who knows how he turned out...

My Name is Jack felt like a transitional song, its presence in the charts marking, for me, the move up from infants to junior school. It had dropped out of the top 20 by early August, and somehow its disappearance from the airwaves felt like the first hint of summer coming to an end...

The Manfreds were back in the charts at the end of the year with Fox On the Run, yet another recording that now feels infused with the essence of those times... the days just after Christmas... lumps of half-melted snow lying in the gardens... the Christmas decorations coming down. Not all songs from the era have this weirdly evocative quality, but the Manfreds always managed it somehow. They did it again in May of 1969 with their swansong, Murray and Calendar’s Ragamuffin Man, which always conjurs up a memory of seeing the band miming it on The Basil Brush Show, and a rainy Saturday train journey into Birmingham in pursuit of Lego...

I can’t say that I had such a thing as a favourite band growing up. I simply heard and absorbed the music that surrounded me. I liked The Beatles, but would not own a single one of their records until 1974. I liked anything with melody and attractive production values, which is probably what drew me to Manfred Mann and Herman’s Hermits. I never cared for The Kinks, whose records seemed to give off a kind of sneering cynicism, or indeed The Rolling Stones. As for The Who, I came to them very late indeed, their chart offerings failing to make the playlist of Stewpot’s Junior Choice. As a rule, any song that I liked a lot, I had bought for me: Glenn Campbell’s Wichita Lineman, Amen Corner’s (If Paradise Is) Half as Nice, and Zager & Evans’ In The Year 2525. But I seldom liked more than one song from any given artist. So my response to the late chart career of Manfred Mann leads me to the conclusion that, at least for a couple of years, 1968-69, they were probably my favourite band. I only owned one of their singles, but I liked all the others that I heard, and that’s something that can’t be said for many other artists of the time.

The Mannerisms collection found room for a number of chart misses and B-sides, which only served to confirm my opinion of the band. Mike Hugg’s composition Up the Junction had formed the title track of the 1968 Brit-flick starring Dennis Waterman and Suzie Kendall, and discovering it ten years later it sounded revelatory and sophisticated with its compound chords (a technique which Hugg also used on the single B-side Funniest Gig). For me, it was the standout track on the LP, and a friend of mine, to whom I played it enthusiastically, agreed. We immediately began to speculate about the movie and what it must be like.

Then – literally within a week – what should turn up on late Friday night but the very thing we’d been hoping for: Up the Junction was broadcast by ATV in the Midlands on January 13, 1978. It felt almost too much of a coincidence that this ten-year-old movie, which we’d literally just heard about, should be delivered into our lap as it were. And it wasn’t the first time that I’d be on the receiving end of such a happy coincidence...

These days, Manfred Mann are somewhat overlooked. One seldom hears any of their late-60s chart hits played on the radio, aside from the ubiquitous Mighty Quinn, and they’re rarely accorded the kind of serious critical analysis that is perhaps too often applied to their contemporaries. In retrospect, the decision to concentrate on covers as opposed to original compositions seems to have worked against them, cover versions being perceived (by rock critics at least) as having less integrity than self-penned compositions. Nevertheless, the Manfreds stamped their own identity on their singles: Mighty Quinn had been a raw and rambling Dylan demo, widely circulated amongst publishers, but not generally available until its inclusion on The Basement Tapes many years later. The Manfreds completely retooled the song, with a bang-on contemporary production job that confirmed the band’s genius as interpreters of other writers’ material. An even more radical re-imagining was applied to Randy Newman’s orchestral ballad So Long, Dad, which in the hands of Mann and Hugg became a kind of pub piano singalong, in a style that was briefly popular around the fag end of 1967. Listening to it now, it sounds like a guaranteed smash hit, yet it failed to enter the UK charts at all.

If you listen to only one piece of old pop music in these first weeks of the new year, take a leaf out of my 1978 diary and revisit the Mike D’Abo era of Manfred Mann. In those few short years from 1966-69, they left us with some of the most perfectly-realised pop songs of their era. Just one word of advice – give Edwin Garvey a wide berth. Nothing good has ever come of that name...