Summer of '74

 

Fifty years ago this week, I was nearing the end of my first year in grammar school. The weather was warm, with a few thundery breakdowns, and exams were in progress. 

On television, Jon Pertwee, only recently departed from the Tardis, found a new role as presenter of the celebrity sleuth series Whodunnit – taking over from a miscast Edward Woodward, and featuring on the cover of this week’s TVTimes. Elsewhere, World Cup coverage loomed large, although England had failed to qualify for the tournament. This was all academic to me, as I took no interest in football then as now and my diary makes no reference to the event. What it does mention, and what you won’t find in any online listing, was an unexpected broadcast of the film Daleks Invasion Earth 2150 AD, on Thursday 27 June.

Here, my diary is at odds with the Radio Times listings, as reproduced on BBC Genome, which has has Top of the Pops scheduled that evening at 19.35 directly after a Wimbledon/World Cup report at 18.15. Clearly, this did not happen. So what did happen? The Met Office Monthly Weather Report for June 1974 offers a clue, with sudden downpours and flash flooding mentioned on that specific date in south-eastern coastal resorts, and this thundery weather most likely impacted the day’s activities at Wimbledon. TOTP, on the other hand, was absent on account of strike action, which took the show off the air for seven weeks that summer. Gary Glitter’s ‘Always Yours’ was at number one in the charts, and it’s been suggested that the summer blackout signalled a death knell for the Glam Rock acts that had dominated the scene for the past two years (this was to be Glitter’s last number one hit). As for the rest of the Glam Rock crowd, bands like Slade and The Sweet were being edged out in the wake of a minor fifties revival spearheaded by the likes of Showaddywaddy and Rubettes. 

One of the most interesting records in that week’s chart, and one which, for me, instantly evokes the sultry mood of that half-century-old summer, was Cockney Rebel’s ‘Judy Teen’, which reached its highest position in the chart of 16-22 June. I wasn’t sure I liked the song back then. It was a curious confection, not so much glam rock as cabaret, and the band’s theatricality pointed the way towards the likes of Queen, who had recently arrived on the scene. Whatever it was, it sounded like nothing else, which probably explains why it’s lodged so immovably in my memory while other chart hits of the same era are far less evocative.

I spent much of the summer of 1974 reading and acquiring the many James Bond novels. I’d started back in May with our dad’s mid-60s copy of Thunderball, then on Saturday 22 June, having just finished Alastair Maclean’s Ice Station Zebra, I embarked on Live and Let Die, which I’d picked up second hand in a market or junk shop. I stocked up on further titles the following week, picking up brand new copies of Colonel Sun, Goldfinger and On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. The Pan imprints of this era sported what I came to refer to as ‘junk’ covers, each one featuring an assemblage of items related to the text: in the case of Goldfinger, these included a golf club, a camera, a frothing tankard of beer, a cocktail, some Swiss cheese and a bottle of nail varnish (the ‘heap of junk’ was a design strategy I would use myself many years later when creating sleeves for DVDs). It took me exactly two weeks to finish Live and Let Die, while Colonel Sun was dispatched in a single day.

As I’ve mentioned already, television was quite disappointing that week, with my diary recording only Sunday’s episode of Doctor at Sea, Monday’s Blue Peter, the Dalek movie on Thursday, and Friday’s 10.30pm ‘Appointment With Fear’, Dracula. I neglected to mention which version this was, but as various Hammer offerings turned up a few weeks later, I imagine it would have been the 1957 version. As the summer wore on, television highlights that made it into my diary pages included repeats of Star Trek, and episodes of Stingray shown on summer holiday mornings. The Goodies 'Big Bunny' episode got a repeat on Thursday 18 July (it remains unrepeated to this day), and Top of the Pops finally returned on Thursday 8 August. The Flintstones was a Friday teatime staple on ITV, and I'd picked up on Moody and Pegg during our holiday, which I continued to follow on Monday evenings. Friday late nights brought further Appointments with Fear including Dracula Has Risen From the Grave (Friday 12 July), Dracula, Prince of Darkness (Friday 9 August) and Bride of Frankenstein (Friday 16 August). And on the subject of Frankenstein, Blakey out of On the Buses had spun off into his own sitcom, Don't Drink the Water, which was being shown on Saturday evenings.

By 1974, aged 13, I’d more or less finished with comics. My brother, two years younger, was still being bought The Beano, and we would both acquire some American comic books based on Hanna Barbera characters whilst on holiday in Llandudno (for some reason, these imports only seemed to be available at seaside resorts). But if my reading days were coming to a close, it seemed as if a new era might be dawning. That summer, I’d been drawing copies of a comic based on a character in our class at school. He looked – and acted – like Peter Tork out of the Monkees, and was a natural to star in his own comic strip. The resulting comic creation was passed around our class while we were supposed to be doing exam revision and, inevitably, came to the attention of the teacher who was supervising us that day. He was a bit of a character himself – he later fell foul of the authorities in the USSR by attempting to sell pairs of jeans whilst on holiday – and having confiscated the comic, proceeded to read it himself, chuckling over the contents, which included depictions of various members of staff. He kept it for a few days and, inevitably, showed it around the staffroom, leaving me with a reputation which was entirely out of kilter with my perceived personality. Luckily, no one took offence. In fact, those who featured were secretly flattered, and they were always portrayed in positions of authority over our bumbling hero. The comic, 'Hodgibits' (below) was named for its star character, one Alan Hodgetts, who kept all but one of the copies I produced. The unfinished number 5 remains in my possession.

Three weeks into the long summer vacation, I started on a more serious comic enterprise, creating the first edition of my own take on TV21. It had the same newspaper-style cover, and featured the same contents as the original, with strips based on Supercar, Fireball XL5, Stingray and The Daleks. I started work on Friday 8 August, and immediately set it aside for our family holiday the following week. By Friday 6 September – the second day of the autumn term – I had finished number three. I went on drawing this comic in my spare time, right through the autumn and on into 1975. Alongside it, I was drawing a Fireball XL5 Annual, begun the previous year, and numerous other items, all of them based on Gerry Anderson creations. The TV21 knock-off was christened Scoop! inspired by a reproduction of an early cover that I’d seen in an annual. It eventually ran to around 18 issues, with later examples adding realism in the form of images clipped out of actual copies of TV21 – I thought nothing at this time of mutilating old comics. When I showed the copies at a school hobbies fair in the summer of 1975, they got a lot of interest, and an enterprising parent who ran a local printing company gave me his business card – presumably hoping to pick up some business. This was seen as a great ‘coup’ and seemed to hint at bigger and better things to come; but I knew I couldn’t get my comics printed, as they were filled with other people’s copyright material. Curiously, I seemed unable to come up with original characters of my own.

In the end, it took forty years for my TV21 endeavours to bear fruit, in the form of my creating, editing and writing a 2014 revisitation of the title – unauthorised and unofficial, but included in the contents of a DVD box set, and featuring contributions from veteran artists Gerry Embleton, Martin Asbury and John M. Burns. This one-off edition has now come to be regarded as part of the TV21 canon by collectors, and has found its way onto CD collections. Fifty years ago, I doubt if I’d have believed it, but equally, I couldn’t have forseen how those old TV series would endure into the distant future of the 21st century. 

A Cloak for a Rainy Day

 

We weren’t allowed out in the rain at junior school. On wet days, we were kept inside during breaks and lunchtimes. Most classrooms had a stash of comics kept inside a cupboard, donated by pupils, and on days of heavy rain, these would be doled out: I can well remember sitting in the assembly hall with piles of comics lying around on the tiled floor. This was a good way of discovering titles you hadn’t already seen, or delving through back numbers you’d missed out on. One particular classroom contained a pile of TV21s from the mid-60s, dating from a time before I’d been a regular reader. It was rare to find sequential copies, so if you were trying to follow a particular strip, you got it piecemeal. Another comic I discovered on those rainy days was one with which I was mostly unfamiliar.

Smash! and Pow! was the result of a merger between two of Odhams’ near legendary ‘power comics’. I’d actually been bought the first edition of Pow! back in January 1967, in order to own a free gift Spider Man gun, but never became a regular reader. A year later, the title absorbed the humour comic Wham!, launched in 1964 as an attempt to out-Beano the Beano with a raft of characters from Bash Street kids creator Leo Baxendale. The merged title didn’t see out the year, and in September 1968 was merged into Smash! at which point the Wham! title vanished and the dual title was rechristened Smash! and Pow!

There is an interesting socio-economic background behind the merger of Odhams’ five ‘power comics’ that is too long to relate here, but can be found on Wikipedia*. In short, the comics’ reprints of strips licensed from Marvel in the USA (and paid for in dollars) became too expensive to maintain, following the sterling crisis of 1967-8. Comic sales were in steep decline already, a process driven by the rise of television, and the ‘power’ titles were expensive at around 7d each: more than double the cost of D.C. Thompson’s Dandy and Beano. By the end of the 60s, Smash! was the last man standing, having absorbed Wham!, Pow!, Fantastic and Terrific, and would itself disappear into Valiant in 1971.

The copies I discovered during our rained-off playtimes dated from the few months in 1968 when Smash! and Pow! had been running together. The first edition I flicked through contained an intriguing strip, drawn in an eccentric manner that set it apart from its surroundings. The two-page story depicted the adventures of an odd-looking character who had no facial features aside from eyes and mouth, and wore a black trilby hat and cloak, the latter garment providing him with his name: The Cloak. The strip’s blend of bizarre adventure and quirky humour appealed to me in a way that the conventional superhero strips never did, and I was instantly hooked. I began to look forward to rainy lunchtimes and break times in order to catch up on further adventures of The Cloak and his pals. Aside from the basics, I remember next to nothing of the strip today, but it became a favourite at the time.

I would guess this to have been around 1969 or 1970. It was certainly later than March ‘69, for reasons which will become apparent in a moment. On those days when we were kept in the school hall, I would make a bee-line for any piles of Smash! and Pow! that happened to be lying around. I didn’t realise it, but I was destined for disappointment in my pursuit of The Cloak.

The character had originated in issue 18 of Pow! (20.05.67), surviving the mergers with Wham! and Smash! and by the beginning of 1969 was still a feature of Smash! – whose masthead had now dropped all reference to the Cloak’s source comic. But 1969 had begun with the collapse of Odhams Press, and its comics imprints were now the property of IPC. Change was afoot, and in mid-March, Smash! was relaunched, declaring itself ‘Britain’s biggest boys’ paper’, and adopting a new, action-adventure format that saw all the old humour strips dropped. The Cloak, with a foot in both camps and a highly individualistic look, had no place in the new Smash! and was done away with. With a touch of irony, his final appearance came in the issue cover dated one day after my eighth birthday.

Some time later, utterly oblivious to these developments, I was working my way through the old Cloak strips in the school’s stash of Smash! and Pow! I decided I wanted more of my new favourite comic strip, and one Saturday afternoon accompanied my mum to the newsagent just down the road from our grandparents’ house where we would every week pick up a copy of the Birmingham Evening Mail for our grandad. I can still see that shop interior and its sloping counter shelved with confectionery. I checked the comics on display: no sign of Smash! and Pow! We asked the newsagent. He may even have looked in his order book. But it was all in vain. There was certainly a comic called Smash! on sale in the shop, but it was nothing like the ones I’d been reading at school. Thus ended my pursuit of The Cloak.

Many years later, courtesy of the internet, I looked into the history of The Cloak and was intrigued to discover that, like me, he hailed from Birmingham – specifically, the studio of comic artist Mike Higgs, whose Moonbird strip I used to follow in the Evening Mail. I’d had no idea that my lost comic favourite had such local connections. Maybe this had been part of his appeal? Or was it just the quirky art and the character’s novel appearance? The Cloak was gone but not entirely forgotten: the character made a brief reappearance alongside an interview with his creator in issue 13 of the Comic journal Crikey, and is claimed to have been amongst the characters included in a six-issue series Albion (2005) intended as a revival for various IPC-owned properties. There have been no strip collections, and the only way I’ll get to see him again is in old copies of Pow! and Smash! of which, at time of writing, I own precicely none.

The big question here is, would I still find The Cloak entertaining today, more than fifty years later? Or is that even relevant? Higgs’ quirky strip wasn’t aimed at 63-year-old men, and it’s enough that I found it appealing at the age of eight or nine. Looking at the few pages available online, I’m surprised at how crude the art appears, with its childlike qualities. But that was part of its charm. In some respects, it reminds me of the work of Tove Janssen, whose Moomin books (see my last post) would soon become another object of fascination for my nine-year-old self.

My thwarted pursuit of The Cloak serves as a reminder of how ephemeral comic characters can be. The true icons of comics – Desperate Dan, Dennis the Menace et al – endure over decades while others come and go, sometimes in a matter of weeks or months. The Cloak didn’t do so badly, clocking up two years of adventures, and it was just my bad luck to discover him mere weeks after he’d ridden off into the sunset. 

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Comics