Radio Times: The Swash Caps Era

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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