Did you go on set visits and locations shoots - Angus Allan remembers seeing the Tomorrow People in studio?
Down at Teddington, yes. I'd be there a couple of times a year maybe.
I wondered about your ties with
Gerry Anderson and Space:1999 (particularly given the
track record of Fennell and co in Anderson shows). Did
you visit the 1999 set at Pinewood I wonder?
Yes, a few times as I recall, while we were running the Gerry Anderson half-page (compiled and illustrated by David Jefferis).
What about Look-In's involvement
with Gerry's Space City exhibition at Blackpool? I was
one of the 50 prizewinners in the 1978 design a spaceship
competition and somewhere among my mum's photo albums
is the letter, signed (well,
it’s printed anyway!) by yourself! My name's in the
winner's list in a 1978 issue.
What a memory! I remember visiting the exhibition in Blackpool and having a very nice weekend at the same time. Was it near to Ripley's Believe It Or Not Odditorium, or am I hallucinating in my old age?!
Space City was on the Golden Mile, just North of Central Pier the Odditorium’s now in the Pleasure Beach! Was there any exotic foreign travel on Look-In?
The foreign travel I can remember was to Stockholm to see ABBA. This was a trip with Angus. It was known that we were going to do this Story of ABBA strip and we'd signed contracts and paid money to do so, so the promise was that we would meet ABBA out there and Angus would hear all their stories face to face. As it turned out we didn't at all but we did meet Stig Anderson, their manager. I think we were there a couple of nights or something but my memory of this was that Stockholm was ferociously expensive and we quickly ran out of money. Angus bailed me out on his credit card and I had to reimburse him later on!
Looking back at it, a lot of the ABBA strip was 'narrated' by Stig so that'll be why.
As far as other programmes went, most live action shows that were made for kids would have some sort of presence from Look-In at the time of their shooting. So either I would go, or Angus, or someone else from the office. I remember the series about the train, The Flockton Flyer. They filmed that down near Minehead and I went down to see that on location. That was one of many so I don’t know why that one particularly sticks in my mind. Follyfoot's another one I remember - do you know, I think that was the first time I met Angus. Follyfoot was up in Yorkshire - I remember a long train journey with Angus. And that was in the very early days.
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The annual endpapers in particular always had photographs of the series being filmed out on location.
Those pictures would either be taken for us by the company - we would ask for those to be taken - or they would come from TV Times. It had its own team of staff photographers. Amazing to think of now when everything's freelance but there was a team of five or so in-house. They'd be out round the companies and studios every day with a brief of the kind of pictures that were needed. Amazing to be able to do that.
In Autumn 1979 there was an ITV strike that blacked out the entire channel for about eleven weeks. Was that difficult for you or could you absorb that?
Do you know, I'd forgotten that. While we might not have had the new TV shows to promote we probably just filled it with more pop people or generic stuff and some lateral thinking.
Was the 70s a golden age for Look-In or were the 80s as successful or as much fun for you?
The 70s were more naïve, the 80s a bit more knowing. In terms of enjoying working there I've got very happy memories of both, in terms of sales it was pretty much the same. The sales of Look-In went up steadily in the first four or five years to this plateau over 200,000. The greatest sale ever I think was in the mid-80s which I think was about 350,000.
What caused that? The A-Team?
No, it would be the pop content - Wham! Duran Duran, Culture Club.
The big change, it seemed to me as a reader who had been with it on-and-off since 1977, was in September 1981 when that logo disappeared. Was it a spoiler for (TV) TOPS from DC Thomson?
I remember Tops - I can’t remember the thought process that led us to that big shake-up at Look-In. It might well have been Tops. There was certainly the feeling that Look-In was due for refreshment because it hadn't had one for a long time - that's a common industry thing to stop you getting tired. Maybe it was a reaction to a dip in sales?
And there was a switch to photo
covers.
That would be to create freshness and newness and would have been coloured I'm sure by the huge success of Smash Hits [published from 1978]. You'll notice that most of the covers from then on were pop and that meant the fact that the picture was not very active - going back to the original problems in 1971 - doesn't matter so much.
So the famous Arnaldo covers
stopped.
Was the split that sudden? Did we ever use any illustration after we moved to photos?
Yes, just two or three montage
covers.
Yes, it was a change of policy, yeah.
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