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ITV footie commentator Brian Moore was another Look-In face with his On the Ball page. I can't remember if I brought him in or if he had come in via Alan but I used to meet up with him maybe once a month just for lunch and he would sometimes have tip offs for us. Sometimes not, so we would have to compile our own fascinating facts about that week's player. I say 'we', the approval or choice of player was made by us in the office but a really good guy called Sheridan Davies used to write and illustrate those pages. But you had to spot trends outside of just TV? Yes, obviously ITV was the starting point of most of what we did but later we had to keep our eyes out for movies, so obviously Star Wars, Grease … the mega ones. Also, we had to keep our eyes out for shows that weren't designed for kids but ended up being popular with them. Like Starsky and Hutch. Kids aspire to those kind of shows even if they can only understand it on limited levels. Not just those more violent action series but risqué sitcoms that Look-In featured like Man About the House or Mind Your Language. They see it as a set of recognisable, repeated rituals. There was familiarity there then. These series ran for a number of years and quite often a lot of weeks per year, so they were almost like soaps today in a funny way. It's maybe stretching a point but it's the same kind of rationale that has kids like EastEnders today. I mean EastEnders is pretty grey and grim and miserable but most of that miserable side does seem to wash over children who watch it and they're getting something else out of it. We were ruthless about not covering things that went out after 9 o'clock. The Sweeney always went out after 9 o'clock so we wouldn't have done anything very much on that [there's a one-page article and poster in one issue - Al] but while Starsky and Hutch also went out after 9 our way into that was to cover David Soul the pop singer. And of course S&H was BBC so we weren't allowed to touch that series at all really! Was the Star Awards really useful for feedback? Well there are cheaper and quicker ways of getting feedback but the Star Awards was good for publicity and it got some television coverage [they were usually announced on Magpie - Al]. It did throw up some strange ones mind you - Brotherhood of Man once got best pop group! I met Joanna Lumley through it - she won one for The New Avengers. Colin sent a picture for us to see - how amazing is that? The awards were great fun - at that time there weren't really any other children's awards. A lot have come along since. Mentioning The New Avengers, it made the cover of Look-In twice and as you say Joanna won that Star Award - was there ever a plan to run a strip? Sitting here now you'd have thought it would have been an absolute goer. Perhaps it wasn't available? You'd think that would have been on our hit list. I can't think what the circumstances might have been. [I am quietly cursing Colin for not getting to it and sorting this out back in 1977 but I'll try not to hold it against him! - Al] Do you recall any other might have beens? Angus mentioned The Muppets? Yes, I think that would have made a great strip. I can remember meetings with the licensing people and I think maybe the Henson people maybe had misgivings about what we might do with their property in our own strip. They were very strict guardians of their property. Another one was CHiPs which we ran for a while but I remember a big problem with that. We either had a problem which meant it delayed the strip or once we started it we had a problem that meant we cut it short but either way we ran fewer than we would have liked. Punk rock - was that another trend you had difficulty fitting into the Look-In style, like the post-watershed TV series? Yes a little bit. Look-In was always based on chart singles, on what would be on Top of the Pops basically or what was on TV on a Saturday morning so the fact that a record was fantastically popular with non-kiddies didn’t cut any ice with us - that wouldn’t have made it right to do in Look-In. I can think of some terrible misjudgements about people we featured when we shouldn't but that was often over-enthusiasm from one of us in the office. But I think it was pretty clear the sort of pop we would go for and not go for in the magazine. With regard to punk, I don’t think we ever did anything much on the Sex Pistols but what we did do was The Police, Boomtown Rats. There was enthusiasm from us in the office for Elvis Costello as the kind of 'acceptable face of punk' but I don’t think he ever did appeal that much to kids. When he started of course he had a 'look' and those things are important. ABBA were perfect for us - glamorous looking, over the top dressing - like dolls almost - catchy tunes. Nowadays ABBA are seen for the greats they were but there was a time when ABBA were really, really out of favour and only really liked by kids. By the time of punk and the end of the 70s people were sneering at ABBA but kids loved them for much longer than that, hence their continued coverage in Look-In. What was your involvement with the ITV companies? We would go to see companies in their offices every six months maybe, hearing the gossip from the guys on TV Times who had advance info and were sworn to secrecy but let us in as were in the fold, also we were reading the trade press like Broadcast. Also, while there were 13 separate ITV companies, not all of them were equally weighted in importance to kids. So there was Thames and LWT in London, ATV (then later Central), Granada and Southern down on the coast were big for kids. So really we kept closer contact with six or seven. People from the companies would come into TV Times so we'd go for a drink sometimes. We had close contact with Thames particularly because a lot of the buying of American shows for the network was done through Thames.   Download PDF print version Page 1  2  3  4  5  6  7  Next