The printing process more suited to our print run was Web-Offset which in those days was more expensive per page in colour. TV Times technical department, which was huge in those days, would have found a printer with one of those presses which in those days were fairly new. The way to do it, as a buyer, was as a mix of black and white printing on cheaper paper and lovely colour printing by necessity on the glossier paper. So that's where the combination of papers came about. The placing of colour pages was given by a set pack of possibilities created by the presses.
Having a pop poster centrespread - Colour Centre as it became known years later - was really about making a virtue out of the necessity created by the switch to Web-Offset.
Moving into 1973/4 the pop policy
was paying off with the likes of David Cassidy and The
Osmonds featuring heavily. The American series King
Fu was very popular too - did that series and the kung-fu
craze help push Look-In to another level?
The Kung Fu TV series was a little violent but a more acceptable way for us to cash-in on the martial arts craze at the time - earlier we had run a Bruce Lee cover and article and we got some flak for that because his movies were X-rated and people wondered why on earth this was in a children's comic. The TV series was astonishingly popular with kids for a time. I remember going to a preview with Alan and possibly Angus. After it finished I said 'That's awful, no kid will like that. It's so slow, nothing happens'. And Alan was like 'What the hell are you talking about? Kids'll love this. It's got martial arts in there'. So he was right and I was wrong. But the series did have these great longeurs where nothing was happening and he was mooching about and then there'd suddenly be some kind of brief, explosive action and what I was spotting was the mooching and Alan was spotting the explosive action.
I can't remember the figures year by year or anything but for most of its life Look-In sold in the 200,000s - 200 and something-thousand a week. There were times when it was over 300,000 and there were times when it was under 200,000. When I left in 1992, it was selling around 100,000 and I think it lost more from that in the next two years before it closed.
There were some strikes in 1973/4 and issues went out with no numbers or dates on them - do you recall what happened there?
There were two aspects at work there. One was the wider printing/publishing world outside of TV Times, the other was a strong journalists' union and occasionally - not very often - they would go on strike. Because Look-In was part of the same chapel as TV Times our writers would be obliged to go along with them (often they were one and the same). But I think most of the times we were forced to miss an issue were down to external circumstances rather than internal.
So you were promoted to editor in 1975 when Alan Fennell left to work on annuals at World Distributors?
Yeah, I think January-February? So the issues that would start to show 'me' would be out in the Spring. I think Alan would have put in a good word for me.
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I'd been playing a bigger and bigger part as the years had gone by and while I don’t recall if I was ever officially Deputy Editor, in effect I was. I'm not sure of the exact timescale here but Geoff Cowan left after maybe two or three years - he went to IPC. By virtue of me being there a long time and having taken a hand in its creation I guess I was an obvious candidate, except for the fact my background was in design and not editorial which I guess must have been an issue for the bosses. But to their credit they overlooked that and didn’t see it as too much of a problem.
There is some tradition of that - Dennis Hooper [whose first editorships were at Countdown and then TV Action - Al] came from a design background. In magazines more generally there's a smattering of people who have come through that route. Obviously with kids, delivery of the 'stuff' in the first instance is visual, it's a presentation thing, so that was helpful. I don’t remember a formal interview but I imagine there may have been some conversation with the Managing Director.
It did just evolve but actually my work as editor never was writing - apart from coverlines - it was in shaping the thing and finding great people to do the writing and illustrating. The thing is about presentation - the way the thing comes at you off the page, which is a mixture of words, pictures, design.
What was great about Look-In was how it seemed to have such a great grasp of what was in vogue or was going to be. Often you had to go on things from, as you say, preview screenings so was it about backing hunches?
It was backing hunches, it was about gut feel - mine and that of others on the team. But it was easier then - there were two channels (BBC1 and ITV), and we couldn’t touch BBC as we were TV Times. Therefore any reasonably decent series for children or that children would watch that ITV bought would be transmitted by ITV and have a critical mass of viewers. Whether they ended up liking it or not was a different thing but it would be seen by a hefty bunch of folk. We would know in advance that ITV had bought the A-Team or whatever and so the view for us was to decide whether it was any good or not. Usually they were, otherwise they wouldn't have been bought by ITV. Then it was a matter of going about getting the rights.
So with you as editor, the sort
of public face of Look-In was Ed 'Stewpot' Stewart,
Radio 1 DJ and host of the BBC's Crackerjack in the
mid-70s. How did that come about?
Well the idea wasn't that we were trying to pretend he was the editor but that he was the editor of the Newsdesk. And he would bring us the news because he was this great TV presenter with his finger on the pulse of what was going on. We used to write it but he and his agent used to submit some of the more touchy-feely personal stuff. The real news we did although it was often that the items came about through something he tipped us off about if we went to lunch or something. Yes, it was a ghosted column as you get on most newspapers. |
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