What we moved to were strips that did something you couldn't really do on TV - so we moved away from the live action stories to things that were more pure comic strip in nature like Scooby Doo or Alias the Jester. Something where we felt it being a comic strip was still appropriate, still worked, was still funny. But I think eventually we ran out of properties that suited that to be honest.
From the mid 80s we moved towards more strips that were about celebs so it would either be people, usually pop stars, having adventures or the life stories of those celebs. That seemed to be quite a good use of strip for a while but again we ran out of people.
Look-In had always done that (probably due to Angus Allan having been bowled over by a preview of the pilot episode of The Monkees while at Lady Penelope) going back to running David Cassidy in adventure stories and the 1976 ABBA biography but I think there was more of it by the 80s both in terms of adventure stories (Madness, Bucks Fizz, the glorious Haircut 100 strip, Five Star) and life stories. TOPS did a brilliant Adam Ant time travel adventure in their early issues too ...
I'm sure there was a crossover in the artists who did Five Star for us - the Grays, Gordon and Maureen Gray? I think we might have seen their work in TOPS and then asked them to work for Look-In.
Yes, they did Adam Ant at TOPS (first) and Five Star and The A-Team for you at Look-In.
There was a fantastic series that Arthur [Ranson] did, The Story of the Beatles, that was really good.
Talking of artwork, Angus reckons most of the original pieces have been destroyed? Do you think he's (sadly) right?
There was a time when I think certain artists were given the option of physically coming in with a car and taking it away, I seem to remember. Such calls to the artists to come and collect might have been prompted by three physical moves of office we made over the years before we ended up at IPC's King Reach Tower. I haven't got a pile of it in the loft or anything - unfortunately!
A few pieces have been sold in
recent years including some Ranson Beatles work and
Angus was gifted work by John Burns so some of it's
out there [since conducting this interview I've read
that John Burns was instrumental in campaigning for
strip artists' rights over this issue and co-founded
the Society for Strip Illustration (SSI) so it's possible
this call to collect work was the result of Burns' pressure?
- Al].
How did Look-In, and your role, come to an end?
IPC bought TV Times when the listings magazines went deregulated multichannel - the ITV franchise
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companies cashed in their chips at this point basically, selling the shares they held in TV Times. And when IPC bought TV Times they got Look-In as part of the job lot and a women's magazine called Chat.
This was in Spring 1991 then.
We moved into the IPC offices at King's Reach Tower. I was eventually made redundant by IPC - I was told at the end of 1991 and finished working as Editor of Look-In in January 1992. Obviously I wasn't happy about that but to their great credit IPC took on Look-In and kept it going at the time they had just got rid of their children's publishing. And what remains of that portfolio of titles is here now, at Egmont - they bought what years before IPC had sold to Robert Maxwell's Mirror Group, the IPC Fleetway imprint. It was IPC who stuck with Look-In and kept it running until the last knockings in 1994.
When IPC took over did you think it was the beginning of the end?
It was more, 'What's in store?', let's wait and see what IPC wants to do with it, what can they afford to do with it. At that time circumstances around children's publishing and around Look-In were changing enormously so it was no longer the magazine that was selling quarter of a million a week. It was no longer that cheap to produce, they were loads of rivals to it, both in terms of other printed matter but also just other calls on kids' time.
When I left Look-In at the start of 1992 it was selling 100,000. When it closed in 1994 it might have been, I'm guessing, 70-80,000.
At Egmont today, if we sell 50,000 of a title we’re quite pleased as long as we've done our sums right and have constructed the magazine appropriately for a 50,000 sale. The days of titles selling hundreds of thousands a week for kids are gone.
They say the past's a world away and in some ways it's true - the TV world was a different place then, unlike now when there's several BBC offerings for kids, three commercial channels, the satellite channels and all of the timeshifted viewing of stuff on videos and DVD. Comics - and Look-In especially - used to fill the gaps between the TV and so on going off but those gaps eventually closed. And with them the likes of Look-In.
Colin now works as Group Director
at Egmont, overseeing their output of children's comics,
putting all his vast experience to good use! I hope
you'll agree that the Look-In story is a fascinating
one - huge thanks are due to Colin for sparing the time
to share it with me. Thanks are also due for the fantastic
work he and his teams put in over those years - Look-In
was truly inspirational to so many of us who work in
publishing today.
My very
special thanks also to David Bishop who arranged this
interview for me - cheers, David!
Alistair D. McGown, June 2004
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