Christmas at the Radio TImes

 

Christmas wouldn't be Christmas without the Radio Times. At least that's what this year's advertising campaign tells us. Well, I beg to differ. With the double issue now weighing in at a budget-busting five quid, I've decided to do without it, breaking a tradition that goes back almost as far as this gallery of covers. To mark this unauspicious and Scrooge-like decision, I've found this run of festive RT covers which I present here for your seasonal entertainment, complete with a sometimes caustic commentary...

The double issue was already an established tradition when I had sight of my first example, second from left on the top line, way back in 1970. I'm rather glad we didn't get it in 1969 as the cover is pretty awful and not specially festive either. The collage looks like someone was trying to re-create a Victorian postcard, or possibly Monty Python. Either way, I think we can agree it was a dud. This was the first year of the RT's classic swash caps masthead, which seems to have been influenced by the fad for Edwardiana in the late 1960s. It certainly wasn't typical of the era, and I have to confess that I never really liked it. One got used to it over time, but would have preferred something more like the RT mastheads of the 1960s. I'm still amazed at how long it lasted.

1970's festive spread felt far more in keeping with Christmas. I can't quite make out who all the dinner guests are, but I think Morecambe and Wise might be among them. The Two Ronnies nabbed the cover for 1971, which was the first year of their enduring TV comedy partnership. As if to ensure fair play, Morecambe and Wise got the gig in 1972, and all four were present for 1973's line-up. I don't care for that 1972 cover, though. Who says that circuses equal Christmas? There's not a bit of snow, holly or even a bauble in evidence. Frank Spencer made the cover in 1974, but the design was austere to say the least. That's the 1970s for you...

1975 saw a return to illustrated covers – back in the 20s and 30s, there had been some fine artworks gracing the Christmas numbers of RT, and the mid-70s would keep up this tradition. 1975's cover could easily have come from several decades earlier, and was a fine festive composition, albeit with rather low-key colour values. 1976's stained glass effort depicting Good King Wenceslas has the look of a Royal Mail Christmas stamp issue, while 1977's design, again in muted colours, pulled off a neat visual trick. Just when readers were getting acclimatised to artworked covers, 1978 was a throwback to earlier in the decade, with the year's biggest Christmas star – Mike Yarwood – getting pride of place. His Christmas Day show was now one of the big draws on BBC1, and would continue until 1981 when he moved to ITV. Artwork covers were back for 1979 although once again the colour values look decidedly muted when set against more recent examples. 1980's cover was even worse in this respect. The flat colour just looks drab, and the children look more bored than excited. Couldn't the artist have added Santa and his reindeer in the sky? As it is, they appear to be looking out at a the glow from a distant nuclear detonation. But it was 1980 after all, and the Third World War was just around the corner. Or so we imagined...

Artwork covers would rule the roost for the next four years, with 1981 again looking like a Christmas stamp contender: a nice, restrained festive image, happily ignoring all the season's visual clichés. 1982 was probably a step too far in that direction. Yes, we get the 'I Saw Three Ships' motif, assuming that was the artist's intent, but a galleon, even in festive trappings doesn't exactly scream out 'It's Christmaas' in a Noddy Holder stylee... 1983 was back to postage stamp land, with a design incorporating the twelve days of Christmas. The kind of thing you might see sold as a Christmas card in a National Trust shop. 1984's pariedolia cover is just scary. Who is that face meant to be? Santa, the Green Man or the spirit of Christmas past? Either way, I hate it. Back then, I'm not sure I even saw the face when viewed at full size. But in all honesty, I was less interested in what the Radio Times chose to put on the cover than in the programme listings. Photographs were back for the next two years, suggesting that the Christmas cover images were decided on the basis of which programme had scored the highest ratings the year before. The Only Fools cover could have been from a decade earlier, but the saturated orange background overwhelms the characters and isn't exactly festive. The EastEnders cover is just boring. Who wanted to look at the Albert Square crowd for a fortnight over the festive season? Having them on the TV was bad enough. The cover designer seems to have realised that the photograph simply wasn't Christmassy enough, and has added a festive border, the only nice touch on what is arguably the dullest cover here.

1987 was another Victoriana throwback, a cloying sickly design and one of my least favourites. Festive yes, but not in a good way. 1988's panto artwork was fine, and the lack of distracting text admirable. The kind of cover you didn't mind having on your festive coffee table. 1989's choirboy cover was a rare example of RT drawing attention to the true meaning of Christmas and was a welcome change from Del Boy, EastEnders et al. It just didn't make for a very interesting cover. 1990, by contrast was as cloyingly traditional as it gets. Nice artwork, but horrible image. Santa looks decidedly like his famous Coca-Cola incarnation. For the first time ever, the cover depicts what the Christmas RT was all about – watching the telly. And if Santa hadn't already eaten all the pies, he was certainly about to. I wonder who won the seventy grand? 1991's cover set the tone for almost all subsequent Christmas RTs. A lot of text there, and bigging up the fact that you could now get all channel listings in a single publication. The artwork was traditional to a fault, and one of the most unimaginative Christmas covers RT had served up to date. It's also self-congratulatory in a most un-Reithian fashion. Who cared if RT was magazine of the year? And who knew Santa needed specs? 1992's snowman wasn't much better, but at least the amount of text had been reduced. This would be the first year of the cover flagging up the staggering amount of movies available over the festive season – more than 500. But there was worse to come...

If there has to be a wooden spoon for the least popular Christmas RT cover of all time, 1993's effort wins it by a mile. Mick Brownfield's artwork played on the song 'All I Want for Christmas', but despite being nicely executed, it wasn't what RT readers wanted on the cover of their double issue. I detect the heavy hand of editorial influence here. Next year's cover played safe by revisiting a classic illustration from the 1930s. One notable change this year is the modification of the 'classic' swash caps masthead, which would endure for only six more years. The movie count is now up to 700. That's more than any video recorder could cope with.

1995's cover was just horrible. Yes, I know, it was Christmas, and Santa Claus is all part of the festive iconic mix, but it's hard to imagine a more yucky rendition of him. Movies now seem to be the magazine's raison d'etre, judging from the clapperboard motif. And what's that I spy? Snow-lined lettering... a publisher's cliché that RT had admirably resisted until now. It hadn't thawed by the time of 1996's snowman – acceptable but lacking in imagination – while 1997's stylised Santa at least had the virtue of minimal text. Where would it have gone, anyway? In his beard? No logo snow this year, either, but it was back in 1998, by which time the the movie count had doubled from its original 1992 quota. I don't care much for this cover, either. Santa riding his reindeer like a cowboy across a snow-covered prairie? Nah.

Those films just kept on coming... 1750 of them in 2001, 2000 the following year. Artwork continued to dominate the covers. Naive in 99 (hated it), un-festive Harry Potter in 2000 (hated it again), contrived in 2001, and as many festive trappings as you could imagine over the next three years. Was there a rule in the art department that the Christmas covers had to feature a blue background? Taken together like this, their paucity of imagination is quite striking. And we've also seen the last of the swash caps RT logo that had dominated the cover since 1969. 2001's sans font was just boring, but it was probably easier for snow to settle on sans serifs. This boring look dominated the next four years.

The sans title block evidently wasn't popular, and was gone by 2005's Tardis snowglobe cover, replaced with a heavy, condensed font. It still wasn't much to look at, but it made for a bolder cover design. The Dr. Who imagery reflected the show's much anticipated return to the screen that year. In 2006 you even got a 'free Doctor Who CD' whatever that might have been. And it was actually inside, rather than a mail-away offer. I have no recollection of seeing this, so must conclude that 2006 was a year in which I chose to go without the festive RT. At £1.99, the price was rather more than we'd been paying back in the 1980s, but seems like a bargain compared to the five quid they want for 2023's edition. Santa's snow angel of 2007 reflects a trend that must have gone viral around this time – we certainly didn't do it in the 1960s or 70s – and it was back to photographs with Wallace and Gromit in 2008. A welcome change from cheesy paintings of Santa, but don't outstay your welcome, guys. 2009 saw a return visit for that Coca-Cola Santa, and the first in a regrettable trend of offering alternative covers. If this wasn't taking advantage of collectors, I don't know what was...

Originality was nowhere to be seen in 2010 when Wallace and Gromit again nabbed the Christmas cover: the only characters since Morecambe and Wise and the Two Ronnies to make it onto the cover twice. 2011's alternate covers looked like charity Christmas cards. At least the blue background was gone, but one wonders what was the point. At least we were spared sickly Santas. It's hard to argue with the next two years' Raymond Briggs covers, but I've never been a fan of Judith Kerr's art, and felt her 2014 cover was playing too much to the younger members of the gallery. One regrettable trend to emerge from this run of covers is the self congratulatory puff 'The Legendary Double Issue.' Traditional, I'll grant you, but magazine covers have never been the stuff of legends. Get a grip, editior!

If you couldn't have Wallace and Gromit again, then the next best thing was Sean the Sheep... and is it just me, or did Santa look suspiciously like Shane McGowan? 2016's cover reverted to twee family friendly art, while 2017 looks like it may have been the work of Raymond Briggs. 2018 certainly was. Readers who had held onto their 2012 copies might have been tempted to spot the difference. I'll tell you the answer: 2012's cover was promoting that year's new arrival, The Snowman and the Snowdog, while 2018's image hails from the original. 2019's reindeer cover rings no (sleigh) bells with me, but that's not to say I didn't buy it: more likely it's down to visual fatigue. After so many years of Christmas RT covers, they all become a blur. 2020's Santa was so generic you could be forgiven for not noticing it at all... which brings us almost up to date.

2021 set a corpulent Briggsian Santa against a backdrop of chimneys, and that traditional dark blue sky. By now, the amount of snow on the logo had reached excessive proportions. It's about time someone swept it all off. 2022 meanwhile, was another throwback cover. Surely that's 2011 again? It was certainly hard to tell them apart. Fortunately, you didn't have to, unless you were a time traveller. This year we have Mog, star of the by now obligatory heart-warming Christmas cartoon. Is there room on the broom for any more? Evidently yes. Merry Christmas from your resident designer Scrooge.

Larger copies of these scans, along with the covers spanning the years 1936-1968 can be found here:

https://ukchristmastv.weebly.com/christmas-radio-times-covers-1936-1968.html

Decades of Christmas Past: 1993

Christmas 1993 saw some changes in my personal circumstances compared with a decade earlier. For one thing, I was no longer going out to work: I’d become freelance in 1991, so aside from work commitments, I was a free agent – albeit one with limited resources. I kept a partial diary this year, mostly as a place to record out-of-pocket expenses that could be claimed back on my tax return, and the Christmas period saw a full run of entries beginning on Monday 20th December and continuing on into January.

Monday 20th December brought what everyone wants for Christmas – snow. I'd spent the afternoon visiting a friend, and drove home into a virtual blizzard. Despite the worsening conditions, I went out later to meet up with some other friends at a rural pub: surely not a great idea. The gritters had been caught out, and even the dual carriageway A38 was like driving through mashed potato. At home later, I watched Newman and Baddiel’s Christmas in Pieces. Now, there’s a comedy double act that time has forgotten. I think this 30-year-old relic must now qualify as a ghost of Christmas past; or to put it in the idiom of the show’s two infantile history professors: “You see an old television programme that nobody remembers apart from really old people? That’s you, that is.”

The snow endured overnight, thanks to sub zero temperatures, and the following morning I took some Christmas card-type photos around the Cathedral in Lichfield, where I was now living. The odds on a White Christmas must have upped considerably, but we were to be disappointed: the following day brought a thaw and heavy rain. Bah, humbug…

One festive tradition that has endured down the years is the Christmas Double Issue of the Radio and TV Times. As the above image shows, the RT now included complete programme listings across all available channels, meaning that one no longer had to buy the TV Times as well. The cover artwork was by Mick Brownfield, whose work monopolised the festive RT covers during the early 90s. I didn't care for this year's offering, and I seem to recollect seeing a few complaining letters about it in the new year. You couldn't argue with Brownfield's technique, but the toothless kid was an ugly image to have staring up at you from the coffee table over the festive season. I folded the front cover inside out so as to avoid looking at it. Brownfield had provided the covers for 1991 and 1992, but 1993 was his last year on the job, and I bet that gappy-toothed kid had something to do with it.

Wednesday the 22nd gives us a couple more clues to the prevailing televisual climate. At 6pm, the BBC2 offered us a Star Trek premiere in the form of the previously unbroadcast Plato’s Stepchildren. Best described as interesting but awful. Later in the evening, my diary records that I watched the final episode of Stark, a three-part serial produced in collaboration between the BBC and the Australian ABC network, and based on Ben Elton’s novel of 1989. I remember the novel generating a fair amount of media interest on its release. Comedian writes novel? Whatever next? Step forward Stephen Fry and… just about everybody else. As to the TV adaptation of Stark, if it wasn't for my diary entry, I’d have assumed I never saw it. Less than nothing of it remains in my recollection. Which is probably for the best. Having said which, I suspect Elon Musk may still be hoping to turn the novel’s premise – super rich bastards abandon eco-disaster Earth in spaceships – into a reality.

That same evening (December 22nd), on video, I watched Monday night’s episode of Prime Suspect, now in its third series. But again, like Newman and Baddiel, this award-winning show seems to be sliding slowly into obscurity. Netflix made it available to stream in 2013, but that’s a decade ago, as was the blu-ray release from now-defunct Acorn Media. It was certainly one of the most talked about TV series of its decade, and made Helen Mirren a household name if she wasn’t one already.

Thursday 23rd December saw the UNCLE movie The Karate Killers get an airing on BBC2. I’d probably already got this taped, so didn’t bother with it. BBC1 offered us David Attenborough’s Life in the Freezer, a compelling 6-part profile of Antarctia. And you can still watch it, as the whole series has been made available on iPlayer.

My diary reports that I also watched the rom-sitcom Goodnight Sweetheart, in which Nicholas Lyndhurst cheated on his present day girlfriend by wandering back in time to the Second World War. Wikipedia describes this as a ‘science fiction’ sitcom, but that makes it sound like Red Dwarf. There was no sci-fi on show here, just a rather pedestrian form of time travel (he merely strolls down a certain street). This week’s was the final episode of its first series. I didn't follow it into the future, but I’m sure it’s probably playing on some satellite channel even as we speak.

Christmas Eve started with a Just William reading on Radio 4. In the afternoon, I watched the classic film Genevieve for possibly the first time. It would not be the last. The evening’s entertainment all came courtesy of VHS tape, on which format I revisited the old Christmas editions of Get Some In! and The Likely Lads. The latter was my prized recording from Tuesday 23 December 1980 of what was only the second screening of this Christmas comedy classic. These days, it can no longer be seen in its original form as Bob’s line ‘I can even take Rolf Harris’ (in reference to Christmas televisual tat) has been excised from all future broadcasts.

Over on ITV, meanwhile, Melvyn Bragg might shudder today at the recollection that The South Bank Show presented a special programme about... Cliff Richard.

That was it for Christmas Eve on the box. Christmas Day on BBC1 offered the resistable Back to the Future III for the afternoon’s entertainment (we didn’t bother), and the by now obligatory Only Fools and Horses at 18.05: ‘the worst ever’ according to my diary. This year’s piece of festive ‘fun’ saw Del put through the emotional wringer when his wife Racquel walked out on him. If that wasn’t enough, hard on its heels came EastEnders which could always be relied on to serve up a thick slice of seasonal misery. Birds of a Feather (8pm) may have done better, but as I seldom watched the series, I neither knew nor cared. The evening’s big film was Ghost, but I’d already seen that at the cinema. My diary records that I spent much of the day at our parents’ house reading one of my brother’s Christmas presents – The Kenneth Williams Diaries, which I’d given him myself (cunning, eh?) Boxing Day  on BBC1 included Keeping Up Appearances and One Foot in the Grave, which are almost the yin and yang of 1990s suburban sitcom. Did BBC2 do any better? Well, yes, as a matter of fact: Christmas Day brought us another repeat of The Treasure of Abbot Thomas, now getting its third outing. And this time I taped it.

Boxing Day was not, technically speaking Boxing Day this year, falling as it did on a Sunday. In years past, such as 1976, when December 26th fell on a Sunday, it was known as Christmas Sunday, and 'Boxing Day' became the Bank Holiday Monday, the 27th. My 1976 diary confirms this, but by 1993, the diary insists that Boxing Day was December 26th, with the 27th listed as 'Christmas Holiday'. I always think it's a pity when these old traditions fall out of use.

Despite Monday being a Bank Holiday, some of the shops were open – another sign of the times. From our local Woolworths, I bought a VHS tape of Gerry Anderson's The Secret Service at the reduced price of £5.99, for which you got a whopping four episodes. VHS tapes had also been amongst my Christmas presents, including the Dr. Who serial Terror of the Autons, which I was already making my way through. The evening's TV on BBC1 included shows that I either never watched (Lovejoy) or had fallen out of love with (Last of the Summer Wine). Fortunately, over on BBC2, we were offered a night of programmes curated by comedy flavours of the month Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer. I sat through most, if not all of this, taping selected items including a rare Dad's Army sketch from 1972's Christmas Night With the Stars. The big draw for me was Mike Leigh's Nuts In May, which I'd never seen before.

Snow fell again overnight, with my diary recording that there was 'quite a covering' the next morning. This was inconvenient, as I'd arranged to test drive a brand new Vauxhall Corsa that day, and had to postpone until the 29th. My current vehicle, a Rover Metro ('they've rebadged it, you fool' – Alan Partridge) was utterly unreliable, having a tendency to run slow and/or stop altogether in driving rain. The designers had included two pointless vents on the bonnet, which seemed to serve no purpose other than to allow rain into the engine compartment. It was only a few years old, but it had to go, and indeed it did. The snow didn't last either – the diary records that it was gone by evening.

And with that final thaw of 1993, we reach the end of this seasonal look back across the decades. I won't be visiting 2003, its having being a festive season that I'd prefer not to remember; and 2013 is just, well, too recent innit? Whatever decade you choose to inhabit, have a very merry Christmas and a happy new year. 1964 is just around the corner – for me, at any rate.

Decades of Christmas Past: 1983

 

Strange as it is to recount, I have less recollection of Christmas 1983 than I do of the festivities ten years earlier. Not having kept a diary that year, I have no idea what gifts I gave or received, though by this time, LPs were almost guaranteed for Christmas, and annuals had been replaced by gift books of varying quality, none of which has left any lasting impression.

One thing I can say definitively about this festive season was that it was my first as an employee: I’d joined the staff of a small Birmingham-based advertising agency back in May, and in the week before Christmas we all decamped to a corner pub diagonally opposite the Hippodrome Theatre. The pub retained its Victorian interior and was decorated with photos, playbills and sheet music reflecting its long history as a watering hole for thesps and music hall entertainers like Dan Leno. Our traditional Christmas dinner was served in a rear function room of Dickensian aspect, the smell of boiled sprouts and turkey wafting through to the saloon bar while we had our pre-dinner drinks. The jukebox was playing Paul Young’s Love of the Common People, which was currently riding high in the charts. The windows were all steamed up from the cooking. This is the clearest memory I have of that forty-year-old Christmas, and I have to look elsewhere to get a better idea of what else might have been going on.

The pop charts offer a few clues, but nothing significant. Christmas singles were, of course, unavoidable by 1983, with the most enduring of this year’s crop proving to be the Pretenders’ 2000 Miles. I’d heard a novelty single on the radio one afternoon at work, which Steve Wright suggested might be the work of XTC. I didn’t believe it myself – surely they wouldn’t stoop to such banal festive tat as Thanks for Christmas? But Wrighty was right: under the pseudonym The Three Wise Men, the Swindon trio had released a Christmas single replete with trumpets, twelve-string guitars and sleighbells. Despite getting Radio One airplay, it failled enter the Top 100 singles chart (as a meaasure of its lack of success, the theme from Terrahawks sold more copies). I bought a copy of XTC’s effort out of loyalty to the band, and got over my initial antipathy towards it.

Elsewhere in the Top 100 of Christmas week, Elton John’s dreary Cold as Christmas had crawled up to an unimpressive number 33 while Slade’s Merry Xmas Everyone was out on its third release, ten years on from its original success. Slade’s activities weren’t confined to reissues, however, and their current release My Oh My was aimed squarely at the New Year’s Eve crowd with its folksy singalong melody. The top spot that year had been annexed by acapella vocal group The Flying Pickets, whose arrangement of Yazoo’s Only You had nothing whatsoever to do with Christmas: this didn’t stop them from appearing on the Christmas Top of the Pops dressed as snowmen. I hated it as much then as I do today. Also appearing in the ‘Christmas single that isn’t Christmassy’ category was Paul McCartney, whose Pipes of Peace included Indian tablas but not a single sleighbell. Only the video made clear its festive aspirations, with Macca recreating the famous Christmas truce between the front line troops of 1914. By this time, my musical tastes were drifting away from the Top 20, and in the whole top 100 of Christmas week, there are only a handful of records I own – and two of those were reissues.

I was also drifting away from the television set, so I don’t have any particular fond memories of that year’s festive line-up. Christmas Eve on BBC1 included a repeat of the Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em special of 1978, followed by a seasonal edition of Pop Quiz. The evening’s main event was the premiere of the movie Flash Gordon, a mere three years on from its theatrical release. Flash (ah-ah) was bookended by Little and Large and Val Doonican. Later in the evening came an edition of Bergerac (snore) and a Christmas special of The Good Old Days, a show I always took great care to avoid seeing. In fact, judging by the schedule, I’m sure I must have been out that evening. I didn’t see Flash Gordon until nearly twenty years later.

BBC2 offered a more interesting line-up, including an adaptation of Laurie Lee’s Cider With Rosie and a couple of Cary Grant movies. But none of it rings any bells.

Christmas Day television no longer included the once obligatory visit to a children’s ward, but children featured prominently in the morning schedule, offering ‘songs, pictures and thoughts about the Nativity’ at 9.50. Not a broken leg or later-to-be-disgraced celebrity presenter in sight. But not so fast… because the dread antipodean bearded one whose name we dare not utter managed to worm his way into the listings, with an animated adventure, The Little Convict, featuring his character Jake the Peg.

Christmas Top of the Pops occupied its time-honoured post-prandial slot of 2pm, leading viewers nicely up to the Queen’s speech. The rest of the afternoon was given over to Blanketty Blank and the 1950 film of Treasure Island, which despite its 33-year-old vintage was at least in colour. Following the news at 5.25pm, up popped another Ghost of Christmas Past in the shape of Jim’ll Fix It, whose contents included ‘how to crack Christmas walnuts.’ I’m saying nothing.

The evening’s big hitters came courtesy of The Two Ronnies, All Creatures Great and Small and the inevitable Only Fools and Horses – which in scheduling terms was surely The Mrs. Brown’s Boys of its day. Except that it was funny. I’m sure I sat through all that lot. In the immortal words of Robert Scarborough Ferris, ‘Christmas night, full of food, you just want to sit back in an armchair and watch the box.’ Unusually, the Christmas edition of The Likely Lads does not appear to have been dusted off this year, although The Good Life’s Silly But it’s Fun got a lunchtime outing on Boxing Day. I most likely recorded this. It was followed by the feature film Bridge on the River Kwai, perfect scheduling for a Boxing Day afternoon. Pass the nuts…

Boxing Day’s festive nightmare came courtesy of Keith Harris and (the) Orville, who hosted their Christmas party at 4.35pm. I declined the invitation. And, oh dear me, it just got worse after that. Who, honestly, wanted to see the Circus World Championships on this or any other day? Only the participants, I’ll wager. I bloody hate circuses (sorry, I seem to be turning into Alexei Sayle...)

Then… having seen off that sawdust-ridden offering, we got... Paul Daniels (good magician, but whose brand of schtick I liked not a lot)… Kenny Everett (never got him at all… the endless manic carrying on. Next, please…) Oh God, Rocky. As in Sly Stallone, rather than the chocolate biscuit or Raccoon. I may even have watched a bit of this, though I promise never to do so again.

Over on BBC2, the evening line-up included A Life in the Theatre: Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies (thanks, but no thanks) and the ballet of La Scala presenting Romeo and Juliet (cue old Man Steptoe grimacing face). These were the days when BBC2 was still determinedly BBC2. It was left to the graveyard slot to bring out the best two items of the day, and wouldn’t you know it, they clashed. Over on BBC1, we got the first ever repeat of 1974’s Ghost Story for Christmas, The Treasure of Abbot Thomas, while BBC2 offered us The Ipcress File. You could, of course, record one whilst watching the other, but you couldn’t record both. My VHS copy of Abbot Thomas dates to a decade later, so if either offering made it onto tape, it was Ipcress.

So much for popular culture, but what of the climate? Did it snow? This was, after all, the 1980s, and only two years on from a notably wintry December where snow lay crisp and even for most of Christmas week, although the failure of a single flake to land on the Met Office roof during December 25^th meant it failed to meet the criteria for an official White Christmas (as recognised by bookmakers). Christmas 1981 certainly had lying snow where I lived in the Midlands, but 1983 didn’t quite measure up, with the Met Office monthly report summarising conditions as ‘mostly mild and unsettled’, the monthly maximum temperature having been recorded at Colwyn Bay on the 27^th, at a balmy 16.5 degrees. And you thought global warming was invented by Greta Thunberg… Snow did actually fall, albeit too early for Christmas, by which time the milder weather had set in. Moderate to heavy accumulations were recorded on the 11^th and 12^th, mostly over higher ground from Wales and the Midlands northwards. I can’t remember whether we got any at home in Birmingham, but I usually photographed any notable snowfalls and have nothing to show for this particular year.

So this was Christmas… and what did we do? Sorry, I can’t remember. Maybe I’ll do better in another ten years’ time…

Decades of Christmas Past: 1973

 

State of the nation circa Christmas 1973? This TV Times cover says it all...

Last time, I pushed the boundaries of memory and attempted to rediscover Christmas of 60 years ago. Memories were foggy if not non existent. But jump forward another decade and it's a different matter.

Autumn and winter of 1973 had been a period of crisis, both at home in Britain and on the global stage. A new Arab/Israeli conflict had created the so called 'oil shock' that saw the price of petrol and deisel spiralling upwards. Here in Britain, garages ran dry and there was even talk of rationing. Parallel with these developments, industrial action in the energy sector led to the notorious three-day week, power cuts and, in the coming February, the downfall of Edward Heath's Conservative government. Sid and Babs were doing their best to get festive on the cover of the TV Times, but it was hard for many people to anticipate having a merry Christmas with so much doom and gloom in the news. Enter Noddy Holder and Slade, with a seasonal singalong to lift the mood of the nation.

The preceding paragraph is, in a nutshell, Christmas 1973 as seen by today's self-appointed cultural commentators like Dominic Sandbrook (who wasn't even born at the time). It's a popular conception. But is it a misconception? I can remember enough of that winter to paint a slightly more upbeat portrait – as glimpsed from where I was standing, in middle class Midland suburbia. Power cuts never troubled us – for reasons I don't entirely understand, our street would escape being blacked out whilst the estate beyond our back garden was regularly plunged into darkness. A neighbour offered the explanation that our supply was on the same grid that served the local hospital (although it was about two miles away). I'm not saying we got off entirely, but we certainly used a lot fewer candles than other families nearby.

As festivities went, we were in a better position financially than had been the case for a couple of years, with our dad now back in regular employment running a distribution warehouse for an electrical manufacturer. My big present this year was an amplifier for my electric guitar. This would have set our dad back something in the region of £70. So I reckon I was doing all right.

On the domestic scene, our kitchen had been upgraded earlier in the year. The Hygeina units would remain in place for nearly 50 years. It wasn't the greatest ever kitchen makeover: the original 1950s tiles, in a dreary shade of creamy yellow, were left in place. But it was better than what we'd had before. In the lounge, we had a recently acquired Fidelity hi-fi system on which to play our records, and probably new wallpaper – our mum tended to paper at least one room every year. She was working too, in the canteen of a local school. Between them, our mum and dad had never had it so good. So the popular myth of the early 70s equating to penury is just that: a myth.

There was only one front on which we still lagged behind in the luxury goods arena: our television set. Colour broadcasts had been available across all three TV channels since November 1969, but we were still watching in monochrome. Our first colour set would arrive in time for Christmas the following year, but in 1973 we were stuck with black and white. On Christmas Day itself, however, we were watching in colour, on account of a minor family spat. Our household tended to decamp to our grandparents’ house for Christmas Day, and had done so every year since 1967. This didn’t sit well with other branches of the family, and I have in 1973 our dad’s sister more or less demanded to host Christmas Day round at their place. We had dinner at home – I can clearly recall watching the Christmas Top of the Pops in our front room – but went round to the relatives’ for the evening where we got to see Von Ryan’s Express on their colour television, whilst eating their nuts, Quality Street and crystallised fruit...

Von Ryan's Express was a mere eight years old, so still qualified as a Christmas night blockbuster. But what of the rest of the schedule? Last time, I had a brief trawl through the Christmas Day listings of 60 years ago, and little had changed by the time we reached 1973, where the ITV/ BBC1 schedule reads like a check-list of time-honoured traditions to be ticked off: circuses? You had a choice of two: Chipperfield’s on ITV at 1pm, and Billy Smart’s on BBC immediately after the Queen. Nicely scheduled so you could watch both if you were so inclined. We weren’t. Elsewhere in that half-a-century old line-up, we find Abbott and Costello (again!) on ITV at 11.30am, and, of course, a pantomime, Robin Hood, on BBC1 at 4.20pm. If you didn’t fancy that, you could switch over to ITV for… another panto.

The BBC’s Christmas Night With the Stars had come to an end the previous year, but ITV gamely kept up the tradition with their All Star Comedy Carnival, introduced by Jimmy Tarbuck. This offering still exists (and was released as a Network DVD a few years back). The presentation is cringe-making, but some decent sitcoms and shows were included, amongst them Dr. in Charge, Sez Les and Man About the House. Its 6.30pm slot meant that it clashed with Bruce Forsyth’s Generation Game and Mike Yarwood’s Christmas Show over on BBC1. No contest, really. BBC1’s dominance of the evening schedule was further assured by a classic Morecambe and Wise Show at 7.35. Further into the evening, viewers who didn't fancy a ride on Von Ryan's Express could join The Odd Couple (1968) on BBC1. Late evening was devoted to classical music on both channels, with BBC1 rounding off the schedule with another of their M.R. James adaptations, Lost Hearts.

Of course, by 1973 viewers now had a mind-boggling three channels to choose from, so what of BBC2’s festive fare? Play School opened the batting at 11am, following which much of the day’s schedule was given over to feature films: White Christmas (1954) at 11.35, Far From the Madding Crowd (1967) at 3.15pm, and Quatermass and the Pit (1967) at 10.30. In amongst these offerings, we find Buster Keaton revisiting his classic The General in The Railrodder at 5.55pm; a Parisian Puppet Theatre at 6.20, and even the venerable What’s My Line.

The biggest deal on television for me this Christmas was to be found on the morning of Boxing Day, in the form of the Beatles’ first feature film A Hard Day’s Night. This was in fact the third time it had been shown on the BBC, the first broadcast coming at Christmas 1970, a mere six years after the film’s release. I’d missed out on this and its subsequent repeat, but it was a case of third time lucky. I didn’t exactly need converting to the cause of The Beatles: I knew them well enough in the 1960s, and had already seen the TV premiere of Help! on its Boxing Day broadcast in 1972. But with the focus on the glam rock bands in the weekly pop charts, the fabs had fallen off my radar somewhat. 1973’s broadcast of A Hard Day’s Night would prove to be the turning point. Slade may have been at number one in the charts, but that Boxing Day broadcast of A Hard Day’s Night more or less cured me of glam rock at a stroke. Bands didn’t have to look ridiculous. The Beatles of 1964 were sharply dressed and looked cool. If was looking for role models, I’d just found them.

Until this point, we’d had no Beatle records in our household, but immediately after Christmas, my brother used a record token to buy a copy of the Hard Day’s Night album. The same post-Christmas shopping trip landed me a Beatles song music book spanning the years 1962-65. This was immediately turned to good effect in learning the songs off the Hard Day’s Night album. With my newly arrived amplifier, plus the 1960s Ludwig kit that our dad had handed down to my brother, it should come as no surprise to learn that within a matter of days, many of the fabs’ songs were being bashed out by us in the back bedroom. It sounds like the beginning of many a pop music career, but events were to pan out quite differently.

There is one other musical aspect of Christmas 1973 that has stayed with me ever since. That autumn I’d started at grammar school, and within a few weeks had been conscripted into the choir. Practise sessions took place on Monday lunchtimes, and from late September onwards, we began preparing for that year’s carol concert. Most of the programme consisted of the usual standards, but there was one song that caught my ear with its radical modality. ‘Wassail!’ (not to be confused with the traditional ‘Wassail Carol’) was almost brand new, having been published as recently as 1966. It was written by Welsh composer William Mathias, a former child prodigy who had been composing since the age of five. As soon as our music teacher, ‘Doc’ Terry began to block it out on the piano, I realised this was something a bit different. After a rousing choral introduction, the piano began to pick out an intriguing six-note phrase in the Lydian mode. Lydian mode has a flattened fifth, which lends it a slightly sour but interesting quality, the kind of musical trick one occasionally hears in pop songs. As a song for a school choir to learn, it was a challenge, and we devoted more time to it than anything else on the programme. We would go from those choir practises down to the games field (Monday afternoons meant rugby), with that song ringing in our ears – well, mine at any rate. Its modal melody became part of the zeitgeist of that first Michaelmas term at the grammar school. Came Christmas, we gave the concert. And I never heard the song again. Yet it stuck in my mind.

Someone, surely, must have made a recording of it? I’d neglected to note the name of the composer from the score, so I had nowhere to start looking. Nearly two decades later, I came across the sheet music in the local library and his identity was finally known to me. I began to search through collections of choral works for Christmas – plenty of choirs had recorded the familiar Wassail Carol but none had performed William Mathias’ radical modern composition. I even found album collections of Mathias’ choral works, but as ‘Wassail’ was a short, standalone piece of around two minutes’ duration, it had been overlooked. Every Christmas, I would scour the Radio Three listings in case anyone was planning to give a rendition. I was determined to hear it again.

In the end, it took me nearly thirty years to track down a recording of that carol. It had been included in a collection from the choir of Kings College, Cambridge. The original release was out of print, but it could be bought as a download from Amazon. Today, it can even be found on YouTube and Spotify. And if my tale has intrigued you, it can be heard here: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KSDI6oc9wo

From modernist choral music to glam rock via The Beatles is quite a musical journey: and it all took place in December 1973.

Decades of Christmas Past: 1963

 

Over the next few posts, I’m going to be revisiting festivities from decades past. Beginning sixty years ago...

Do I remember Christmas 1963? Not with any degree of clarity. Aside from fragmentary glimpses, my memories of childhood don’t begin until around 1964. What I do know with reasonable certainty is that my big present of Christmas 1963 was a Triumph Herald pedal car, made by Tri-ang. It was unusual for toy manufacturers to make pedal cars of actual production models, so the fact that they’d chosen to make a child-size version of the selfsame model driven by our dad was felicitous to say the least. I can be seen pedalling it around the back garden in a cine film taken the following summer, which is how I can date the toy’s arrival to Christmas ‘63. Our dad always told the story of how, shortly before Christmas and aged just two and a half, I casually asked one day why there was a Triumph Herald on top of my parents’ wardrobe. I’d been in their bedroom for some reason and, glancing upward, had seen the end of the cardboard carton – curiously, and most likely on account of our dad’s recollection, I can still just about picture that moment. Had I actually read the name Triumph Herald? More likely, there would have been a line drawing of the toy on the side of the box. Either way, I’d caught out Santa – but it didn’t stop me from believing in him.

That Triumph pedal car, as seen in the summer of 1964

The ‘real’ father Christmas was to be found not at the North Pole, but in Lewis’s department store in Birmingham. His grotto contained a posting box for letters to Santa: what more proof did one require? 1963 was very likely the first year in which we made our pilgrimage to Lewis’, to find ourselves in a queue winding up the stairwell to the 5^th or 6^th floor where the grotto was located. Lewis’s Santa was always more convincing than others. Maybe the beard was real? He certainly had the voice off to a tee – think of James Hayter’s voice-over in the classic ‘Mr. Kipling’ cake commercials and you’ve got it. He sounded as if his cheeks were stuffed with cotton wool, which they very likely were. The grotto was always attractively done out with festive tableaux, of which I can remember next to nothing: these scenic distractions provided something to stare at while we each waited for our audience with Father Christmas. Aside from Santa himself, Lewis’s – in line with other Selfridges’ stores – employed a seasonal ‘minder’ to preside over the grotto and ensure good behaviour on the part of the young visitors. His name was ‘Uncle Holly’, and he was done up in hunting green and a white curly wig and sideburns, giving him the appearance of a kind of festive John Bull, although as a child I thought he looked like Hughie Green. Uncle Holly handed out badges to well-behaved children, who automatically became members of the ‘Uncle Holly Circle’.

Having whispered in Santa’s ear what they wanted for Christmas, each child was allowed a pick from his bran tubs – one for boys, one for girls. The presents were usually a simple boxed game, or plastic toy. Once, memorably, I was given a girl’s present by Santa. This was one of the ‘imposter’ Santas one found in other stores, in this case the long-vanished Co-Op department store in Lichfield. Opening my gift, I found it to be a small plastic kewpie-style doll sitting in a pink bathtub. I can still see it as clear as day: the toy came in a thin cardboard container, with a cellophane window. Our dad found this a source of great hilarity, and the incident of the ‘dolly in the bath’ was often referred to in later years.

Aside from the pedal Trumph Herald, I’m not sure what other presents arrived at Christmas 1963. Our dad, who earned a modest income from his clerical job at GEC, supplemented his earnings by playing drums in dance bands several nights a week – activities which he referred to as ‘earning pennies for toys.’A sizeable chunk of this supplementary income went on providing Christmas presents for my brother and myself, and his generosity knew no bounds. There were certainly plenty of other toys under the tree on that Christmas Day of sixty years ago, but the only items I can identify for certain were a pair of that year’s annuals, some of the first I ever owned.

Fireball XL5 Annual was a gift from my grandparents, who would go on to buy me all four editions as a kind of Christmas ritual. This particular volume was certainly well-loved. Within a year or so, its board covers had ‘done a Fireball Junior’ and become detached from the main body of the book, along with the last twelve pages. It remained in this state for years, until I decided to draw the missing pages myself, and stick them back in with sellotape. Today, one could find a copy in seconds on ebay. That annual became as important to me as the TV series itself, if not more so. Fireball was scarcely off the screen during 1963 and 64, but it was only on once a week, while the annual could be enjoyed at any time – including in the bath, which probably took care of those covers!

The other annual I received that year fared much better than Fireball, and was clearly less of a favourite. Indeed, it survives intact to this day, with only some minor damage to the spine to show for its age. Coincidentally or not, the book came from the same publisher as the Fireball annual, W.M. Collins and son, and was an example of their ‘Children’s Annual’. Printed on heavy pulp boards, in the same line and spot colour technique employed in the Fireball volume, this was a collection of mostly text stories, varying between realistic adventure and fairytale whimsy, the kind of book intended to be read aloud (which probably accounts for how it survived in such good condition). All the contributors to this volume were credited in the frontispiece, a rarity in children’s annuals, but none of the names is familiar. Illustrations were in a variety of styles, some imitative of the likes of Arthur Rackham, whilst others had a more contemporary feel. I found some of the drawings a bit unpleasant, and would refrain from looking at them. My personal favourite story, and one which I asked for time and again was called ‘Lost in the Snow’, a heart-warming tale of a little girl who gets lost in a snowstorm on ‘the downs’ while taking lunch to her father, the farmer. The story is credited to E.M. Langford, whilst the line and tone illustrations – in a kind of early 60s knitting pattern style – came from one H.C. Gaffron. The name is unfamiliar, but Google reveals him to have been Horace Gaffron, a reasonably prolific, though obscure illustrator active in the children’s book field at this time.

As to the actual activities of Christmas Day 1963, I’m sure they must have been in line with what we did on subsequent years. Our grandparents would have come for Christmas dinner and tea, and no doubt the television would have been turned on at some point. I was aware of television from a very young age, but a glance at the programme schedules for Christmas 1963 rings no bells. ITV’s programmes began at 10.35 with The Christmas Tree, a party involving Pussy Cat Willum and friends. Christmas Morning Service was followed by the story of the nativity and a half-hour film looking at some of the people who have to work on Christmas Day. Following the news at 1pm, a pre-Crossroads Noele Gordon was the hostess of Christmas Box, an hour-long entertainment. Cliff Richard and the Shadows were top of the bill at 2pm with Christmas Swingtime, which led viewers nicely into the Queen’s message to the commonwealth, at its traditional time of 3pm. The rest of the afternoon was devoted to a movie, The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936). By teatime, a near normal weekday schedule had resumed, with Desmond Morris presenting Zoo Time at 4.50, followed by an episode of William Tell. At 5.45 came a festive edition of the 1960s equivalent of Give Us a Clue – Don’t Say a Word – followed by another news summary at 6.10. A ten-minute address from the Archbishop of Canterbury was followed by Carols, Coffee and Crackers, described as a ‘light-hearted carol sing-song… from the Youth Club of Yardley Parish Church, Birmingham’. Clearly, this one was for Midland viewers only. Regular weekday programmes resumed at 7pm with the quiz Take a Letter, followed at 7.30 by Coronation Street (this being a Wednesday). 8pm brought Christmas Startime, a variety showcase featuring the likes of Bruce Forsyth, David Nixon, Bernard Braden and Barbara Kelly, to say nothing of Mr. Acker Bilk. The news at 8.55 was followed by a reimagining of Charles Dickens’ Pickwick Papers, starring Arthur Lowe. The decidedly un-festive University Challenge followed at 10.40, then at 11.10, a compilation of regional entertainment filled the forty-odd minutes left until the Epilogue and Closedown.

Over on BBC Television, the day’s programmes began in Welsh, before the Queen’s Christmas Message (curiously in sound only) at 9.30. The rest of the day’s programmes included an obligatory visit to a children’s hospital ward, in the company of Frankie Howerd. Tittered they not, I have no doubt. The afternoon was taken up by an hour-long profile of the still living Walt Disney, and a visit to Billy Smart’s Circus. BBC’s film choice wasn’t quite as venerable as ITV’s – Abbott and Costello Meet Captain Kidd was a mere ten years old. Sooty and Sweep invited viewers to their Christmas Party at 5.15, then the evening news was followed by a charity appeal by the Mills family – John, Mary, Juliet, Hayley and Jonathan. It being Christmas Day, viewers weren’t going to escape without a panto, which arrived in the shape of Dick Whittington, starring Terry Scott, Hugh Lloyd and Reg Varney. At 7.15, we had a festive edition of Z Cars, followed by the traditional Christmas Night With the Stars compilation. Curiously, the contents included a segment of Juke Box Jury, and even a visit to Dock Green. Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush followed at 9.25, then after a five-minute news summary, a programme of classical music rounded off the day.

Did I see any of these entertainments? I’m sure the television would have been turned on by the evening, if not in time for the Queen’s speech, but I was probably too engrossed with new toys to pay any attention.

A popular misconception – primarily held by people too young to know better – is that Christmases of the past were often snowy. So did we have snow for Christmas 1963? The Met Office Monthly report summarises the situation: ‘On the evening of the 24^th a depression to the west of Ireland deepened rapidly as it moved north, and associated fronts brought rain to most districts that night and for much of Christmas Day.’

As Greg Lake would put it in his hit single of twelve years later, ‘it just kept on raining.’

Annuals Revisited – End of an Era

A glance in any bookstore around Christmas time will reveal that Annuals continue to be a festive tradition, with brightly-coloured tomes reflecting the pop cultural obsessions of today’s young generation. Of the titles we had back in the 70s, only a handful remain – Dandy and Beano will both celebrate their centenaries in around fifteen years, and both annuals remain in print even if only one of them is still an actual comic. Rupert is still going, and still in the same yellow check trousers, but there’s not much else out there that a comics or TV fan of the 70s would recognise. Guinness World Records still appears year on year – we got our one and only copy back in 1972 – whilst Ripley’s Believe it Or Not continues to log barely believable facts and figures in a series that Wikipedia reckons started in 2005. Now, I hate to disagree, but I have a copy cover-dated 1974, which was given to my brother at Christmas fifty years ago. It’s a World Distributors effort, compiled from reprints of the American Believe It or Not comic book. Other offerings for 2024 include Pokemon (still popular after all this time?), Peppa Pig, Thomas the Tank Engine, Minecraft (*sigh*) and a bunch of other kids’ TV tie-ins (presumably) that I’ve never heard of.

A design car crash: some of the garishly-coloured covers of this year's annuals.

In an era when children’s entertainment is dominated by social media, I find it rather reassuring (© 1977 Ned Sherrin) to see such publications piled up in Smiths, even if many of them look like they were put together by a team of colour blind AI chimpanzees...

A modern Beano book with its glossy four colour interior is a very different animal from the more austere versions I remember from the 1970s, and I’m not sure that’s necessarily a good thing (although I can’t see today’s kids going a bundle on the old two-colour print jobs). In common with most modern publications, today’s annuals are garish in appearance, with covers that are cluttered, over-coloured and over-designed. The golden turkey for worst offender this year must go to the Match of the Day Annual, whose cover is the worst piece of design I have ever seen on a professional publication. It literally looks as if the designer has dropped all the photo cut-outs and typographic elements he needs into a page template and then just left them where they landed. To think of someone getting paid to do hack work like this while I remain unemployed is galling to say the least: not that I’d go a bundle on designing any kind of football publication. Even the once reliable Rupert is a car crash of colour with its cheap computer rendering. Compared to the subtly toned, hand-painted covers that once graced the Rupert books, this is almost a travesty. Clearly, budget is king and no one will pay for ‘real world’ artwork any more. I wonder if any comic artist still owns a box of paints? Still, if it sells, it sells, so who am I to argue. What would today's kids make of the annuals I had as a child? Not much, I'll wager.

For me, it is now more than twenty years since I last bought an annual – 2002 saw both Captain Scarlet and Thunderbirds back in print from Carlton, tied in to their recent revival on BBC television. Design-wise, they didn’t have a lot going for them: generic ‘high tech’ Photoshop covers, and fonts that just screamed ‘early 21^st century’. The only reason I bought them was for the photo-strips they contained, adapted from TV episodes. In an era before frame grabs were easily obtainable, this was a good opportunity to study the characters and hardware. Feature items borrowed material from the 1960s annuals to provide biographies of the characters. At sixty A4 pages each, they were somewhat lightweight compared to the annuals of the 60s, but they were in colour throughout and I’m sure the youngsters of 2001 were more than happy with them. One thing decidedly lacking from these publications is nostalgic value: ignoring the dated Photoshop work and typography, they look barely any different from this year’s crop and could sit alongside them in any bookshop without raising an eyebrow. You couldn’t say that of 1963’s Fireball XL5 Annual, which looks properly of its time.

At the time, these were my first annual purchases in around twenty years. Back in 1983 or 84, I went out and bought myself the first Terrahawks Annual, a World Distributors effort that ticked all the publisher’s usual boxes: heavy on splurgily-painted text stories and artworked from the cheapest possible sources. I no longer own this copy (I detest Terrahawks), but online images reveal the artwork from this and its second incarnation to have been either drearily naive or undisciplined and garish. The programme clearly got the treatment it deserved. This was the very last World Distrubutors annual that I owned. The company would be defunct within a decade, spelling the end of a publishing phenomenon that went all the way back to the early 1950s.

Rather better were the efforts of Howard & Wyndham whose Brown Watson imprint was responsible for a late flowering of TV crime tie-in annuals during the late 70s. Beginning in 1977 with The Sweeney and The New Avengers, the annuals ran for only a year or two. The company’s history is hard to make out: Howard & Wyndham was a theatre-owning and management company that later owned shares in Independent Television, which might explain the publishing tie-ins. However, the company closed eight years before the first of these annuals appeared in bookshops. Brown Watson, meanwhile, continues as a children’s book imprint, based in Leicester, but with a history going back to only 1980.

1977’s first Sweeney Annual was arguably the best of these publications, featuring some terrific comic strip art from Brian Lewis – his style was instantly familiar to me from the work he’d done on the Countdown comic – alongside a few photo-illustrated text stories and features. It wouldn’t surprise me if the designer had worked on Look-in or even the Blue Peter books, as the page layouts are strong and reminiscent of those titles. The second year’s effort saw the standards slip somewhat, with fewer photographs and, for my money, inferior artwork. Brian Lewis was otherwise occupied illustrating that year’s Van Der Valk Annual, turning in some excellent colour pages.

The two New Avengers Annuals followed a similar format, with the second including two very recognisable David Lloyd strips, adapted from TV episodes. One thing that all of these Brown Watson titles had in their favour was fidelity to the on-screen graphic look of the various series, and the covers were all very well done, within the limitations of contemporary print technology.

1978 really was my last year of having annuals bought for me at Christmas, and alongside these creditable publications we find, sadly, the very worst of all the examples I’ve considered in the course of these articles. Return of the Saint Annual, hailing from Knutsford-based publishing house Stafford Pemberton, arrived in the same year as the series itself. The look of this all-colour publication was reminiscent of the Century 21 storybooks of a decade earlier. The only artist I can identify is Malcolm Stokes, who had worked on City Magazines’ annuals and Countdown comic. He was definitely not responsible for the comic strips, which were scrappily drawn and amateurishly lettered. Photographs were in short supply, and rendered quite badly: the colour printing wasn’t helped by the use of inferior paper that soaked up the ink and made for a dull appearance. I remember being very disappointed with this annual when I got it. Okay, it scored points for using the correct TV title sequence logo, but the cover was a design exercise in how not to do it. It's a shame to go out on a low note, but as we've seen, the golden age of annuals was well and truly over. By now, classics like the Rupert books of the 1930s were being faithfully reprinted using techniques and materials that captured the essence of such vintage items. But no one was seriously going to do that for a modern title aimed at a modern audience.

One wonders how long annuals will continue as an end of year tradition. They may be barely recognisable from the thoughfully-crafted publications of my youth, but at least they're still there: and in a world where online is increasingly the name of the game, that should be some small cause for celebration. Just don't get me that Match of the Day annual for Christmas, okay?

Annuals Revisited – The 1970s

 

And thus to the 1970s, a decade in which TV spin-offs from World Distributors enjoyed a near monopoly over the festive annual market. D.C. Thompson continued to keep the Dundee flag flying with its regular publications, of which we received the Beano, Dandy, Beezer and Topper at various times over the next few years. Both my brother and myself had outgrown nursery papers like Teddy Bear and Pippin, and the yearly crop of annuals began to feature more grown-up fare. By 1975 I was no longer content to wait until Christmas and would make sure of getting a copy of something like the Space:1999 Annual as soon as it appeared. In this case, my friend’s mum ordered a couple of copies from a catalogue for us.

1970

UFO Annual – Polystyle, publishers of TV Comic certainly hit the ground running with this sumptuously illustrated book that reached the shelves in time for Christmas, a mere three months after UFO had made its TV debut. The absence of comic strips in any annual is always a clear indication of a short lead time, and the reliance on photos illustrating text stories and features meant that this would have been a comparatively easy item to produce. For me, the exclusive use of photos gave this annual an edge over the typical World Distributors efforts, which relied far too heavily on artwork that often looked rushed. The UFO Annual was clearly designed by someone who’d studied the series and its iconography: the Eurostile font employed on the main titles is used throughout. Purists might bemoan the absence of comic strips, but for me, their absence adds quality – there being no rubbishy artwork to spoil the clean page layouts. Of all the Gerry Anderson tie-in annuals, UFO is up there with the best of them.

The Beano Book/ The Beezer Book – Strange as it may sound, these were the first of the classic D.C. Thompson annuals to arrive in our house, and they owed their appearance to a summer holiday ferry trip to the Republic of Ireland when my brother and myself had been bought copies of the Beano and Beezer to keep us entertained on the voyage. Of incidental interest is the fact that the copies for sale on the ferry were several weeks out of synch with what you’d have found in any newsagent. After the holiday, we started getting both comics on a regular basis, so the year’s annuals seemed like a safe bet. I still think Colonel Blink is the single funniest creation ever to emerge from D.C. Thompson, but it’s probably not okay any more to use myopia as a source of humour. Oddly, we see a distinct difference in production values between these two sibling annuals – The Beezer had a lower page count, but was printed in colour throughout (likewise the Topper), whilst the Beano book was longer, but printed in black line with a variety of spot colours, a format also adopted by the Dandy.

TV21 Annual – After the bumper crop of TV21 spin-off annuals that had taken pride of place over the last three years, 1970 saw the wheels come off the operation. TV21 had been thoughtlessly amalgamated with Joe 90 the previous year, losing most of the remaining Gerry Anderson strips in the process. Unbelievably, Tarzan and The Saint, both of them renegades from TV Tornado following its merger into TV21, were still on the roster for this year’s annual. But the golden turkey here was Land of the Giants, a survivor from the Joe 90 comic, whose author had clearly seen the series but never read a single piece of promotional literature, for he insisted on referring to the little people’s spaceship as the ‘Spendthrift’ (it was really the ‘Spindrift’). A clear case of Chinese whispers, I think. If one had to sum up this annual in a single word, I think ‘rubbish’ would suffice.

Thunderbirds Annual – A curiosity, this. For, despite the title, the contents look very much like what we might have expected from this year’s TV21 Annual – or perhaps last year's.The featured series was to be found in just four stories and features, whilst the remaineder of the contents comprised titles from the 1969 TV21 weekly – Department S, Captain Scarlet, Secret Agent 21 and Zero-X – plus Joe 90. It certainly did not reflect the state of TV21 circa 1970. Pages were printed in the customary ‘cheap colour overlay’ process familiar from the last few years’ annuals from City Magazines, alongside red and green duotones. Artwork was of the very cheapest: functional journeyman stuff with neither the commitment nor flair of the genre’s greatest exponents.

TV Comic Annual – The last edition to find its way into our house had arrived at Christmas 1965, but 1970 would be the first of several years in which either myself or my brother was given this annual at Christmas. Of the 1966 strip line-up, TV Terrors and Mighty Moth were still present and correct, alongside Dr. Who and Popeye, although the rest of the contents had been updated to keep in line with what was currently popular on the box. To say that the two Dr. Who strips were not quite like the TV series is something of an understatement: both the Doctor and the Brigadier were present, but beyond that, continuity went out of the window. One strip saw the Doctor experimenting with levitation and thus capturing a fleeing spy whilst the other saw him using his trusty recorder (shurely shome mishtake? - Ed) to communicate with some dolphins.

Star Trek – I would continue to receive these Star Trek Annuals as a Christmas tradition right the way through to 1975, and they have all survived in mint condition. I was and still am a fan of the original series, but I never thought much of its comic strip incarnations, and publishers World Distributors relied on US comic book content for their Star Trek annuals for as long as the title remained in publication. As a footnote, I didn’t mind TV21’s take on the series: by 1970, Mike Noble’s strip was the only decent thing left in the comic, although he clearly did not possess a colour television set as he insisted on depicting Captain Kirk in a red shirt...

1971

Look-in Annual/ Countdown Annual – 1971 wasn’t a bad year for comic launches, with the two best offerings arriving hot on each others’ heels early in the year. The early start meant there was ample time to have an annual ready in time for the Christmas market, and both Look-In and Countdown weighed in with a couple of quite respectable efforts. Of the two, Look-In felt somewhat superior, with a classic laminated board cover, although the pages were falling out from day one. Countdown found room for artwork from comic contributors John M Burns, John Cooper and Jon Davis – although I have to confess I have never liked the work of the latter pair. Former Dan Dare assistant Don Harley turned in a fine if rather routine take on Thunderbirds, distinguished by some excellent likenesses of the characters. The strip, Terror at Toreba featured a kind of giant roast chicken from space crash landing on a Pacific island. Elsewhere, the annual followed the comic’s format with features about space travel and UFOs, the latter including some highly dubious photographs...

Barrier Reef Annual – Yet another World Distributors TV tie-in, and one that you can’t give away today on ebay. Try finding anyone who remembers the series! I watched it and had this annual bought for me this Christmas, but I doubt I’ve ever given it more than a cursory glance. The series never had much of an impact, and one wonders why World even bothered with an annual, unless the title came as part of a BBC licensing package deal. I’d have preferred an Ace of Wands annual myself, but sadly no such publication ever appeared. Incidentally, I can still hum the ‘feem toon’ from Barrier Reef, if anyone’s interested? Thought not...

Laurel and Hardy Bumper Book – Arriving before Christmas and hailing, if memory serves, from what must have been my last ever trip to Santa’s grotto, this gift book follows the World Distributors model of reproducing material from comic books. A couple of photo articles, one of them illustrated with a picture of Morecambe and Wise, belied the book’s British origins – although like a good many such efforts, it was printed overseas. The characters are not quite the Laurel and Hardy of the Hal Roach films, but a ‘reimagining’ by cartoon producer Larry Harmon, based on his TV films. Having said that, I couldn’t really tell the difference aged ten, and enjoyed reading this book in the run-up to Christmas, several of the stories having a festive or autumnal flavour.

Tom & Jerry Annual – I’m not sure how many of these were produced, but we got given a couple of examples this year and next. Like Laurel and Hardy, these were definitely not the Tom & Jerry of the original cinema cartoons, as both of them spoke (it would have been hard for them not to do so in the comic strip format), although their appearance was unaltered. The artwork, reproduced from American comic books, was slick and excellent.

TV Comic Annual – Another excellent effort from Polystyle, maintaining the production format familiar from our old 1966 example, blending full colour strips (of which there seemed more this year) alongside red or green duotone. Popeye remained a perennial favourite, as did Mighty Moth and TV Terrors, but this year saw new original characters in the form of Nelly and her Telly (she daydreamed herself into the programmes she was watching) and Texas Ted, a stetson-hatted braggart who came across like a charmless Desperate Dan. Tom and Jerry were the cover stars during this era and are featured prominently, alongside Roadrunner, Pink Panther and Bugs Bunny. Other licensed TV material included Animal Magic, Basil Brush, Dad’s Army (nicely drawn by TV Comic regular Bill Titcombe), Skippy, Titch and Quackers, Whacko! and, somewhat surprisingly, The Avengers. Dr. Who had by this time been regenerated into the new Countdown comic which was perhaps for the best...

Also weighing in this year were annuals from The Beano and The Dandy, alongside the Beezer and Topper.

1972

The Persuaders Annual – If I’d had the task of designing this annual, I doubt I’d have done any different, as the cover follows the same rules I applied when designing the DVD releases of the series, using the same colour palette and, critically the same font as the TV title sequence. A slim volume, like others from the Polystyle stable, this was nevertheless a decent effort, with artwork of a quality comparable to that seen in the Countdown and TV Action comics, and a few decent colour photographs. The strips were provided by Frank Langford, a regular on the Countdown comic, and Martin Asbury, whose energetic style fairly leaps off the page.

Countdown Annual – By the end of 1972, Countdown had long since been revamped into TV Action, but this year's annual – subtitle notwithstanding – still reflected the comic's original line-up of strips and features, with The Persuaders! included albeit only as a text story. The artwork was still noticeably superior to anything seen in the TV21 series of annuals, with extensive four colour printing and a decent array of photographs.

Dr. Who Annual – I’d only picked up on Doctor Who with the beginning of the Jon Pertwee era, since which time there had been only one annual published, in 1970. Why World Distributors missed a year is unknown, but they returned to the fray with this example, boasting a nice colour photographic cover. Inside, artwork ruled the roost, not all of it of a particularly inspiring quality. Nevertheless, I was happy to have it, and would continue to receive the Dr. Who annuals every Christmas until the end of the Pertwee era. During the 70s, I also managed to obtain copies of the two annuals hailing from the William Hartnell era (published in 1965 and 66), and one of the three Patrick Troughton editions, featuring a Cyberman cover painting. These latter must have had considerably smaller print runs than the Hartnells, as they never turned up in the second hand shops and jumble sales from which such old items were usually acquired.

TV Comic Annual – Hard to tell this one apart from the previous year’s edition, with most of the same content still present and correct. Catweazle replaced The Avengers, but otherwise it was the mixture as before.

The Aeronauts Annual – This French TV series had been shown during childen’s viewing hours by BBC1 – although in its home country it was a prime-time mid evening series aimed at adults. Quite what the BBC was thinking was anybody’s guess. The series being based on a comic strip, this was an easy assignment for World Distributors, who simply commissioned a painted cover (nicely depicting the TV series actors), pairing it with a couple of the French comic adventures, translated by Charles Pemberton. Given that the series was based on the comic rather than the other way round, the characters in the strips bore scant resemblance to the TV actors; although the artwork was excellent, especially in its depictions of the various fighter jets.

Knockout Annual – The Knockout title, which had been around in my Dad’s day, was revived with all-new content by IPC in the spring of 1971, which didn’t allow for the publication of an annual that year. The comic was quickly revamped, shifting Bash Street knock-offs The Super Seven from the cover to the inside pages, with a gimmick strip The Full House taking their place. Both are present here, although The Full House (a cutaway with panels showing the events in different rooms of the titular dwelling) didn’t translate well to the narrower page format. All the regulars were present, including Fuss Pot (probably the title’s most successful creation), Joker, The Toffs and the Toughs and Pete’s Pockets. Two strips featuring The Group, appear to have been reprinted from another IPC title, but I’ve no idea of their origin.

Once again, the Beano, Dandy and possibly Beezer annuals found their way into Santa’s sack this year, along with another Tom & Jerry and The Flintstones.

1973

Dr Who – ‘...your 2003 Christmas present is likely to be something like a miniature pocket computer.’ So spoke 1973’s Dr. Who Annual in a feature entitled ‘A Space Age Christmas’ imagining the festivities of thirty years hence. The same article warned young readers that ‘if pollution and the effects of the population explosion go on … there will probably be very few trees left in the world’ (lest anyone was still in any doubt that environmental awareness existed before the Thunberg generation.) Elsewhere, this year’s annual was the expected mix of text stories, perfunctorily illustrated with what look like designer’s roughs. Better artwork was on show in the two strip stories (one of them in full colour), courtesy of one Steve Livesey.

Dad’s Army – It might surprise you to know that no fewer than five Dad’s Army annuals were produced by World Distributors, published every year from 1972 to 1976. This edition was the only one I ever owned, and looks to be typical. The contents were analogous to those of the Dr. Who annuals, heavy on the text stories, with two comic strips and a mix of features, in this case focusing on wartime and military history. The artwork in this edition was a shade better than this year’s Dr. Who, and the artists are all familiar from other World Distributors titles. A nicely designed colour photographic cover added value – subsequent editions would feature artworked covers.

Top of the Pops – The weekly pop show was about to celebrate its tenth anniversary, which probably accounts for the appearance of this debut publication, the first of many: a TOTP annual was still appearing as late as 1991, although the original run (from, you’ve guessed it, World Distributors) ran out of steam in 1984. Edited by Ken Irwin, this first edition began with a brief overview of the programme’s history – not too much, mind, we don’t want to alienate the teenyboppers of 1973! The teenies were well catered for with the rest of the content, spotlighting current hit artists including Gilbert O’Sullivan, the Jacksons and of course, Slade. Three of the programme’s most popular presenters – including a certain Mr. Savile – each got to pen a short autobiographical piece; and there was, of course, a short feature focusing on the inevitable Pan’s People. Much of the content was in black and white, with a few colour portraits thrown in to justify the 75p price point (standard across all World Distributors titles this year). The preponderance of monochrome pages seems ironic in light of the fact that most of 1973’s TOTP shows that survive exist only as black and white kinescopes!

The Goodies Annual – The Cricklewood trio were well established as TV comedy favourites by 1973, and must have looked like a cert to shift a few thousand annuals when World Distributors signed them up for this one-off publication. Monty Python had already published their first tie-in ‘Big Red Book’, aimed squarely at a mature audience, and alongside such sophistication, The Goodies Annual seems to justify John Cleese’s taunt ‘kids’ programme’ at the end of 1973’s festive special, The Goodies and the Beanstalk. World Distributors knew a winning formula when they saw it: essentially, this is just another Dr. Who Annual with the Goodies taking the place of the Timelord. Comic strips took up more of the content than usual, alongside a couple of text stories, games and a number of photo features, one illustrating the trio in the recording studio (more than a year before The Funky Gibbon), whilst the other looked at the show’s innovative special effects. Some cartoon contributions from Graeme Garden added a kind of Cricklewood Royal Warrant to the whole endeavour, but the Goodies themselves were left decidedly underwhelmed by their first venture into print. Their dissatisfaction with the end product spurred them on to do something better themselves, and next year saw publication of The Goodies File, which played the Pythons at their own game to excellent effect.

Dan Dare Annual – I have to confess to knowing next to nothing about Dan Dare at this point in time. The space ace had first appeared more than a decade before I was born, and by the time I was of an age to appreciate his adventures, they had all but come to an end. This welcome volume reprinted two stories from the classic Frank Hampson era – 1951’s The Red Moon Mystery and 1959’s Safari in Space. As an illustration of Hampson’s progress on the strip, the compilers couldn’t have done a better job. Red Moon was brilliantly realised and a cracking adventure that feels like the template for every environmental disaster movie ever filmed; but Safari looked simply stunning. I’d never seen better artwork on the pages of a comic and surely never will. Hampson’s studio system was by this time running like a well-oiled machine, although the wheels were about to come off, and this would be the last of Dan’s adventures that he saw through to the end. Part way into the continuation story, Terra Nova, Frank left the strip under something of a cloud and would never return. I knew none of this back in 1973, and was able to appreciate the annual for what it was – namely, some of the greatest comic strip artwork ever produced. Up to now, my comic heroes had been the stalwarts of TV21 – Noble, Bellamy, Embleton – but Frank Hampson kicked them all into touch.

Dennis the Menace – For many years the star of his own spin-off annual, Dennis’s solo outings were not strictly annuals given that they appeared every two years. A somewhat slimmer volume than the accompanying Beano book, it shared the same spot colour artwork, in this case red (or orange) and black, the better to depict Dennis’s iconic striped jersey. This was the second Dennis annual we got to see, and almost immediately I spotted something a bit odd about some of the comic strips: Dennis looked different. He was thin and spindly-legged, contrasting his squat, bulky early 70s appearance. I wondered whether these strips might be reprints from an earlier era, which indeed proved to be the case. Despite having been well read, this example survives in absolutely mint condition, which must surely be a testament to D.C. Thompson’s robust production values.

With 1973 done and dusted, we've reached the end of what I personally consider to have been the golden age of annuals, but there would be plenty more to come during the 70s, with World Distributors continuing to license any TV property that looked like it could shift a few thousand copies. In the third and final part of this feature, I'll look at some of the last few annuals that ever made it into my hands, and reflect on the slow decline in content and quality that has brought us to where we are today.