Action! Thrills! Sport!

The Afterlife of TV21

TV21’s original run ended ignominiously at issue 242, cover dated September 6, 2069. The hundred years hence dateline was a conceit that had stayed with the comic since its inception in 1965, and as a new decade approached, it was beginning to look a bit, well, dated... When the paper resurfaced, revamped and now bearing more resemblance to its late sibling, Joe 90, it was set firmly in the world of 1969. It was also three weeks late in reaching the newsagents. This did not bode well...

Disappointingly for loyal readers, the first three covers of the new TV21 & Joe 90 featured football photographs, although the game didn’t figure quite so prominently inside. The new comic was short-changing all of its readers: those who bought it on account of the football covers would find little to interest them on the inner pages, whilst everyone else, myself included, couldn’t give a flying fig about football. The editorial team, however, thought it was onto a good thing: 'Action! Thrills! Sport! This paper has the lot! boasted the cover of issue number three.

A new 2-page football strip, Forward From the Back Streets was the kind of rags-to-riches soccer saga more commonly encountered in traditional boys' papers. Martin Asbury provided the artwork. Page 18 was devoted to ‘Mexico Dossier’, a black and white feature looking ahead to the following year’s hotly anticipated World Cup. Aside from these, and a half page feature on boxing, there was no other sporting content to be found apart from a dire humour strip I’ve Got a Sports Mad Dad. It was hardly TV21, but it could have been a lot worse, as the coming months were to prove...

With the page count standing at 24, no fewer than six pages in the first issue were set aside for advertising matter, including the back cover, whose space would have commanded a premium rate. No chance of the Daleks ever making a comeback! When TV21 & Joe 90 wasn’t busy trying to sell stuff to its readers, it remained a mixture of familiar comic strip content: Gerry Haylock’s Land of the Giants strip occupied a page and a half, in colour, but Frank Bellamy was now rationed to a solitary colour page for Thunderbirds. He would be gone from the comic in a matter of weeks, and the strip, now demoted to black and white, was drawn by John Cooper in an imitation of Bellamy’s style. 

Vincente Alcazar was back on Meet the Saint on pages 9 & 10 – as ever, these Simon Templar adventures bore scant resemblance to the TV series, with the hero cast more in the mould of an Indiana Jones-style adventurer. Meanwhile, Don Lawrence put in a couple of weeks’ work on the Tarzan strip, also in black and white.

Star Trek, by now the most popular feature, and running concurrently on BBC1, was to be found across the centre pages, still in the hands of Harry Lindfield who had been drawing it in Joe 90. It wasn’t quite Star Trek as we knew it (Jim), and some of Lindfield’s space hardware was based on designs from 2001 and elsewhere. The comic incarnation also habitually dressed Captain Kirk in a red shirt, always a dodgy item of apparel for anyone on board the Enterprise. Good though Lindfield's work was, I'd have been interested to see what Frank Bellamy might have made of the Star Trek strip. Around a year later, he produced a stunning colour Star Trek page for the Radio Times: a glimpse of what might have been in a 'Mirror Mirror' universe?

The whole idea of reader engagement, which had been so much a part of the TV21 ethos, went out of the window from the merger onwards. There was no letters page, no competitions, and no encouragement to readers to contribute anything whatsoever. Instead, we got a page of duff jokes, of the kind found in just about every other British comic from the Dandy downwards. The 24-page format lasted only two weeks, and at issue 3, the page count was down to 20 of which 3¼ comprised advertising matter.

Disappointing: the first twelve weeks of TV21 & Joe 90

My reaction on seeing the new comic was one of bitter disappointment. The football cover was almost enough to convince me to pack it in, and the free gift was yet another set of soccer star stickers, cheaply sourced from Panini. Was there any reason to go on? By this time, there was stiff competition on the soccer front from IPC’s new weekly Shoot! which, with its colour photo covers and wall-to-wall soccer features and stories left TV21 & Joe 90 on the touchline. 

The editors evidently realised it was pointless to compete, and beginning at issue 4, TV21 & Joe 90 began to feature whole page artworked covers – not, it has to be said, painted in a particularly inspiring manner. The new covers featured scenes from the stories inside. If they’d really wanted to sell the new comic, some colour photo covers of Star Trek might have done the trick – but photos are expensive to licence. It’s tempting to speculate how TV21 & Joe 90 might have looked with newspaper style covers and photos from its featured series. It couldn’t have looked any worse.

In January 1970, City Magazines went all out for football, launching its own all-soccer paper Striker in direct competition to Shoot! With the Mexico World Cup imminent, and England the current World Champions, interest in soccer was at an all time high, especially amongst boys of comic-reading age. 1970 would see the launch of two more football comics – Scorcher in January and Score in September. Meanwhile, the soccer features continued in TV21 & Joe 90. Even the mighty Star Trek was forced to make room for them – albeit temporarily. From issue 23, the strip was relegated from its colour centre spread, which was now devoted to football posters. Star Trek now appeared in black and white, with decidedly inferior artwork. But further change lay just around the corner...

Joe 90 has been sacked, so it's back to plain TV21. Apart from Star Trek, the contents are now utterly worthless generic adventure stories.
I neither knew nor cared what S.N.O.R.K.E.L stood for...

The first change was a significant reduction in page size, shrinking to the standard half tabloid size popularised by the Dandy and many other titles. Star Trek returned to colour and was now placed in the capable hands of Mike Noble, who made a very good job of it, red-shirted Kirk or not. His Enterprise looks rather more like the Dinky toy than the ship we saw on television, although the diecast model would not appear for another six years.

At issue 36, the Joe 90 strip came to an end. With Joe out of the picture, there was no sense in retaining his name in the title, and the comic now became simply TV21. Two weeks later, Thunderbirds bowed out, and the comic that had once been the heart of the Gerry Anderson universe became just another generic boys' adventure paper. Issue 39 saw a minor makeover, with the page count increased to 24 – not that there was anything in the comic to justify the extra pages. 'Three great new stories' promised the cover: but they were the kind of stories that could be found in just about any other boys' comic of the era. 

Only the retention of Star Trek provided any justification for the comic still being known as TV21 (and pedants might have pointed out that Star Trek was set in the 23rd century!). At issue 42, the strip was promoted to the front cover, with a further two colour pages inside, where it would remain until the bitter end. Mike Noble continued to draw the strip until issue 57, then Ron Turner filled in for a couple of weeks in his customary mannered style, before ex-Dan Dare artist Harold Johns took over. I absolutely hated Johns’ artwork, and the departure of Mike Noble proved the last straw for me. After three years of loyal readership, I was done with TV21, jumping ship at issue 63 (dated 5 December 1970) which was featured in Lew Stringer’s ‘Blimey’ blog back in 2012: https://lewstringer.blogspot.com/2012/12/this-week-in-1970-tv21.html The comic itself had less than a year left to live, running until issue 105, dated 25 September 1971.

Two weeks later, TV21, or what passed for it, was absorbed into IPC’s Valiant, then in its ninth year. Valiant was exactly the kind of boys’ comic that I hated, with its gung-ho adventure strips and larger than life characters. During its declining months, TV21 had come more and more to resemble the likes of Valiant, so the merger was perhaps inevitable. 

Something more than just TV21 passed with the comic’s demise. Its reader engagement harked back to the glory years of Eagle, and the ‘agents’ page’ of letters and reports, covering everything from Mysteron incursions to pictures of puppies, gave the comic a sense of community that its revamps signally lacked. As a TV21 reader, you felt a sense of belonging, whether it was to the USS Agents’ network or as a Spectrum ‘Shade’. When Colonel White fulminated in print about Shades ‘not pulling their weight’ you felt genuinely told off! And TV21’s readers often sent in inspiring ideas, including a couple of home-made comics which encouraged me to have a go at making some of my own.

Other comics, of course, had their letters pages, and no girls’ magazine was complete without them; but for boys, the end of TV21 left something of a gap which even the well-meaning Countdown and TV Action never quite filled. For a while, at its height, it really did feel like the centre of the Gerry Anderson universe, but with the end of the Supermarionation shows and the transition to live action, the Century 21 empire went to dust, and nobody seemed interested in keeping the comic end of the operation going.

Forty three years on from the demise of TV21, I was given the chance to ‘set the record straight’ and, as it were, get my own back on everyone who’d contributed to the comic’s downfall. As part of Network DVD’s ‘Filmed in Supermarionation’ box set, we decided to do a whole new issue of TV21, even engaging a few of the original artists to work on it. I decided to approach it as if the old comic had never ended, and dubbed it ‘Universe Edition 243’. Joe 90 now came on board, along with The Secret Service, making the one-off edition something of a hybrid of TV21 and Countdown. It has since been included in some of the ‘complete collection’ pdfs one sees for sale online, and is now considered as ‘canon’ to the extent of being name checked on the original comic’s Wikipedia entry, along with myself as editor – clocking up my one and only appearance in the online encyclopaedia!

Looking back, I can see how the decline and fall of TV21 was a key part of my own developing interest in nostalgia. At the age of just eight years old, I could see with startling clarity how the best years of my weekly comic already lay in the past. With TV21 gone and no new Supermarionation series to look forward to, I began to look back to those we’d lost, and spent a large part of the summer of 1970 fairly obsessing over Fireball XL5. Someone upstairs must have been paying attention, because the programme returned for a repeat run in the autumn, providing a dangerous example for a nine-year-old boy: wish for something hard enough and you can actually make it happen! Even Joe 90 couldn’t manage that…