DYING ART

Out of the blue, I got asked to do some illustrations the other day.

Naturally, I declined.

“Why?” you might ask “Is this not some glorious opportunity to add to your reputation and bank balance?”

Probably not.

Still, when someone you’ve had very little to do within perhaps a decade or more sends you an email asking “Do you still draw?” it is a time to reflect soberly upon where your life actually is at the moment.

After all, I did used to draw. Quite a lot, actually. It just stopped being “fun” when I had to try and earn a crust doing so, and somehow, because I was doing it during the daytime in my role as one of life’s underlings, it somehow never seemed like something that I’d want to be doing when I got home in order to unwind.

Oh, I know that there are people who make quite a tidy living by coming home from work and doing another day’s work on their “freelance” stuff, but I tend to think that that’s the sort of thing that younger, fresher, more eager minds than mine want to spend their lives doing.

It’s a bit like the wordsmithery, to be honest. Sitting here blogging to the indifferent world is what I do for “fun…” but, in the unlikely event of someone deciding on commissioning me to write some words for them, the shutters would bang down, the “significance” curve would head towards the sky, and the fear would grip me and, ultimately, I know that not a word would seep out.

(So, if you ever want to find a way to finally shut me up… Then you know precisely what to do, don’t you…?)

Drawing for fun is something that I do still do from time to time, actually. Usually when I’m on holiday, or when an “amusing” idea strikes me, but drawing to someone else’s agenda, well, that’s really no fun at all.

The enquiry was something to do with a children’s book… something to do with jungle animals, and, because I’m me, even after having said no, I couldn’t resist doing the slightly rubbish pencil scribble which is attached to this posting, just to make sure that the immediate idea I had escaped from my head and didn’t lurk inside there colouring my dreams.

I gave a few reasons or excuses for not wanting to pursue the matter; Being far too “rusty” to be much good at it, my mother’s Estate consuming all of my weekends, time-management issues, all of the usual guff… but the truth is that I just don’t think that I could do it any more, and, I suspect, that I don’t have the patience for it, either, and I do believe that I was always a bit rubbish at it anyway.

And also, in my admittedly limited experience of such things, I decided that it would probably involve a great deal of effort for very little reward, a massive amount of annoyance when my efforts turned out to be “not quite what he had in mind” and, eventually, as the extended silences stretched on and my confidence collapsed accordingly, I would probably end up letting him down completely in the end.

Either that, or he wouldn’t like what I’d done, or the finish, or the style, or something else, and I’d stroll away from the situation feeling all bitter and twisted like I used to do in the old days.

To be honest though, during my few forays into “Commercial Illustration” I very quickly realised that I really dislike doing several drawings of the same thing because doing things more than once utterly bored me, and those “could you do something similar but at a slightly different angle” chats were just too bloody annoying for words when you’d just spent a couple of days on something.

Also, I was never really good enough. I’ve always been a mid-range, mid-ability scribbler and, whilst this means that I could make a living, it was never going to mean that I showed any natural flair or talent for it which would make me a unique and sought after commodity.

No genius living here, Mrs MacTavish…

Of course, what I should be doing is grabbing the opportunity with both hands. After all, when you reach my age and have a career path like mine, it’s probably a good idea to use whatever pitifully few contacts you have left to make sure that you’ve got something you could do to earn a crust once you’ve been flung onto life’s scrapheap as well as giving some thought towards having a “profitable sideline” that I’m known for and can be relied upon to fulfil.

Sadly, I’ve never been much of a one for forward planning and thinking about what I could do rather than what I couldn’t, so I never seemed to achieve such wisdom.

In the end, I passed on the details of another friend who I thought might be better at it and thought I should let sleeping dogs lie.

Interestingly, it seems to have been a week for old friends getting in touch. I got an email (or personal message or somesuch) from an old college friend, and we exchanged a few interesting memories of the old days for a couple of hours, and it was also the birthday of another old friend from those times this week, so I had a brief chat to her, too.

Maybe we’re all just getting to that kind of an age.

After all, once you start to reach those “significant” ages, we all want to cling together in the cave, staying as close to the receding pool of firelight as we can, whilst the darkness full of those unseen wild animals closes in around us.

SAM AUGUST

Aaargh! That bloody "Inspector Gadget" theme is rattling around inside my head again. Occasionally, it does have a nasty habit of lodging itself inside my mind for no very good reason that I can think of other than to taunt me about my past failures.

I think that it really does try to taunt me from time-to-time, because I created a comic strip character not unlike the Inspector myself when I was a teenager and then never did anything about it or had any success with it, only to find that something very similar popped up on my TV screen during the children's programmes that were on during the late afternoon when I was still at college training to become the kind of person who might have made a living drawing such things if I'd only got up off my fat backside and actually done something about it.

As with most things, timing is everything.

That's why I was so filled with dismay when "Inspector Gadget" appeared on our screens because, if I did then do anything with it, they would probably say that I was ripping them off, despite me having done mine first…

After all, how could I have proved that…? By calling up a former acquaintance (and future airline pilot) who used to read out these adventures during our Sunday evening Youth Club gatherings but who'd probably forgotten all about them once he'd impressed his latest crush with his performing skills…?

Hardly, as they say, conclusive evidence, m'lud…

And so Sam August, P.I. and his sidekick Sunny Jim were destined never to have their adventures played out in front of the entire world, whilst I could quietly seethe as "Inspector Gadget" became a worldwide teatime phenomenon and future unsuccessful movie franchise.

"Hah!" I thought "That'll teach them!"

But of course it didn't...

Sam August looked quite similar in many ways to the Inspector, in that he wore the ubiquitous trench coat and hat of the classic "Private Eyes…" although my creation also sported the kind of toothbrush moustache much favoured by early twentieth century dictators, a facet of him which might have counted against him if he'd ever made a breakthrough.

He used a lot of ridiculous and surprising gadgets in that "James Bond" way which so impressed the teenage version of me at about the time that the films first started to be shown on ITV during the mid-1970s, although, it's fair to say that none of Sam's gadgets were "built-in" like the Inspector's were...

There were four twelve-page adventures in all which I "completed" to a barely competent level before finally getting fed up of drawing the same thing over and over again and my pals moved on to having far more interesting things to pay attention to. Four probably either massively plagiarised or spoof homages (depending upon your point of view and which side of that particular fence you choose to fall) on both the "James Bond" and "Pink Panther" movie franchises, which probably shows you where my interests were headed at that point of my life.

It's actually quite interesting to me that I could still churn out page after page drawing the same character back then because, when I made my laughable attempts at becoming a commercial illustrator, the one thing that bored me to tears was having to repeat myself and draw something more than once. I do sometimes wonder whether I could have carried on drawing the same thing for year after year if it had been "my" thing rather than someone else's? After all, a renowned cartoonist like Charles M Schulz  was able to draw and write for his "Peanuts" characters for decades once he found that people enjoyed what he did, and that was most definitely "his" thing…

Interestingly, though, he came up with a style which could bear relatively simple repetition, and most of the best cartoon characters have had a simple shape and silhouette. This is probably the key to it. If it's not a chore to keep on drawing your creations, you can have more fun in creating new situations for them to appear in.

I don't know if I could ever have the patience to draw those highly detailed comic book panels which are sometimes barely glanced at, and I've always struggled when the ideas brewing in my mind are ten steps ahead of the thing I'm currently working on.

I have the same problem with the blog. Sometimes the post after next is the one I'd much rather be writing than this old nonsense, and this might also explain why I've never been able to sit down and concentrate on one idea for long enough to compose one of the several great plays and novels which once lurked inside my head.

And so we return to the lost tales of Sam August, a man who had to be called Sam because, after I'd first drawn story one, page one of "Dan August", I noticed the listing in the "TV Times" for the series of the same name starring Robert Urich.

All-in-all, it was not a promising start for the uniqueness of my fledgling detective character, but, well,  I was young, and I was still learning about how to draw and how to tell stories, and so I created my rather badly-executed and childish comic strip mostly for myself which, because it reflected the type of telly I used to watch, was about the adventures of a Private Investigator whose name was, thanks to the intervention of a bottle of "Liquid Paper" now indeed “Sam August”.

Yes, my own comic strip and, because it did get read alound to the members of my youth club to a general lack of hilarity, and consequently gave me a certain amount of what we might now call "kudos", I persisted with it for a few months. After all, don't all awkward teenagers crave just a little bit of attention from their peers from time-to-time…?

So, there he was, a gadget-laden detective created years before Inspector Gadget, showing exposed roots which were probably pretty obvious and were pretty much based on my youthful interests in Film Noir and Bond movies and the fact that the cruise ship “Titan 1 C” crops up at one point is also probably fairly significant, too, given the kind of volumes which still fill my bookshelves to this day.

I can't quite put my hand on the four dozen or so sheets of A4 paper which tell the story of Sam at the moment, but I do remember some strangely contemporary moments which made their way into the stories. There was a character called Fatima wearing a burqa, and a spherical floating computer whose name I've now forgotten, and I even recall an early example of metatextuality which occurs when the character “Sunny Jim” was shot at the cliffhanger of one episode only to have the bullets miss when the next episode began because that storyline, I decided, would be "too sad”.

That's such a cheat! Even though I was obviously channelling my disappointment with some of the "get outs" from the "Flash Gordon" serials...

There were four adventures completed, although I vaguely remember starting a fifth, and these were called “The Case of the Plastered Prawn” (which turned into a kind of “Moonraker” movie pastiche), “The Case of the Crimson Cobra”, “Sam August vs Goldstealer” (I think its roots were very clear) and “The Case of the Blue Baked Bean” and, if you're really unlucky and I manage to track them down, they may yet turn up in these pages one day…

Although I doubt it.

After all, aren't everyone else's teenage scribblings just far too embarrassing for words…?

As indeed these postings will be one day, too…

THE QUICK FLYER ROUND

Yesterday I sacrificed my usual blogging time in order to do a favour for a friend. I’m not mentioning this so that you will think any more of me (although Christ knows there’s a very long and steep climb that needs to be done there…), in fact I’m not really quite sure yet as to why I feel the need to talk about this at all at this precise moment, other than that I’ve just reminded myself about the old saying about no good deed going unpunished and maybe I’m trying to get ahead of that particular nightmare. Possibly it was that I just felt the need to explain any shortcomings in the following text as it unfolds from my head via a keyboard and ultimately into your minds this morning. You see, my whole writing routine got rather hijacked – no, actually, that’s much too hard a word for it… let’s just say sidelined - yesterday by a small request for a favour which suddenly grew into a little project for me to work on and then evolved into a battle to get the old computing equipment to work properly. As ever, these things are seldom as straightforward as you may hope when you sit down with limited time available and very few ideas rattling around in your head.

I very rarely get personal emails any more. To be honest I never really did. I have a small (but highly select) band of chums with whom I stay in contact every once in a blue moon and that seems to keep my life ticking along in the slightly dreary manner with which you are now becoming semi-regularly acquainted. Suffice it to say that every once in a while I will get a personal communication and, after having bounced around the room with a certain amount of glee at the mere fact of having been remembered by anyone at all, I will read the message and, with rather more haste than seems necessary (and which probably smacks rather too much of unhealthy desperation…) I will probably reply to it and then spend the intervening couple of years before getting another reply wondering quite what it was that I wrote which was so utterly terrible and hideous in thought and content that it frightened my communicant away. Once those two years have passed and everything is forgotten, then the next exchange will occur and the pattern will be repeated.

Probably.

At least we can now estimate that there are now possibly half a dozen times remaining in our brief spans until one or the other of us turns up our toes and this sorry farce will be concluded forever.

Anyway, to cut a long (and mostly exaggerated) story mercifully short, I received an email asking me if I could knock out a quick flyer for a play that’s going to be performed at the end of July. “No problem” thought I, this being just the sort of thing I sometimes actually enjoy doing to keep the rusty old cogs of the brain from seizing up entirely. The message itself had come in about ten o’clock at night but I’d not actually seen it until the following morning, but I guessed that there was a certain amount of urgency to it and so I thought I’d better do something. Not that the ideas were flowing yet, but I thought I’d better at least acknowledge the message and replied saying that I had no problem in doing the thing, but it might be a few days before I had enough free time. As ever, I over-estimated hugely the time needed to do these things when you actually put your mind to it and start to get on with things. If you’ve ever wondered why I turn up so very early, it’s usually because I tend to allow for anything up to an hour extra onto any journey time because I believe such things always take much, much longer than they ever do. Unless of course the journey actually does take forever, then all those wasted hours are suddenly vindicated.

So anyway, I had a bit of a notion that some sort of sub-Quentin Blake style illustration might be an effective way of handling this little project, and so I grabbed my pens and pencils and set about scribbling one of those second-rate daubs, much like the ones that I used to do, which does go a long, long way towards explaining the singular lack of success I had as a freelancer back in the day. Truth be told, I do so much of my work on the computer these days that I’m really very, very out of practice with the whole process of drawing that it was rather nice just to have the opportunity to try something out that (probably) wouldn’t mean a big shouting at when it was finished. I still find it hard to believe nowadays that I used to draw for fun when I was a child.

Somehow, in and around breakfast and the run to the station, one of my childlike daubs was completed to a barely satisfactory standard, and I headed upstairs with my usual blogging hour still available before the employment clock would need to start clicking. I launched the scanner and for some reason that it took me an absolute age to get to the bottom of, it wouldn’t scan the whole image and so my “Stressed Eric” vein started to pulse as I tried to figure it out. Oddly enough, within ten minutes, probably more than fifty percent of which was spent irrationally bellowing “Why are you doing this?” at an inanimate object that would never answer, I had my scan and I set about quickly colouring it in using a very “loose” style, before setting about composing the type that I was going to use.

After that, all the elements came together surprisingly quickly, hardly any time at all in fact, thanks to some rinky-dinky software that can make my pathetic notions seem a tad more exciting than they might otherwise appear, and I was able to zap the image off to where it was needed for the usual list of tweaks and amendments that will no doubt be needed. Oddly, what I produced was something that fundamentally probably still resembles one of those adverts I used to do when I worked in the small ads business. It still surprises me how much that we fall back on what we used to know and the basics that we first learned no matter how far we move away from these things. I guess the fundamentals remain the same no matter what you do.

I was tutored by a lecturer once who theorised that everyone’s personal dress sense tends to generally freeze at what you’re wearing when you’re about eighteen, and that all the clothes you buy after that will basically be slight variations upon whatever that is. I suspect that was probably not actually true for any of you, but I think I know what he was driving at, and I’m beginning to suspect that it’s much the same for those of us who consider ourselves to be designers, however loosely the term might be applied; we tend to fall back on what we first learned, and whatever was considered “good” design when we were learning our trade is the benchmark by which we judge any artwork we produce, no matter how much (or – in my case at least - little) we develop from that point.

So, why am I telling you all this today? Well, to be honest, I’m still not entirely sure. I suppose that I’ve been becoming increasingly aware that I don’t really write enough about what’s going on in my life but instead tend to burble on about things that really have little bearing on the day to day occurrences here in Lesser Blogfordshire, so, for once, I thought I might just tell you something that actually happened to me instead.

Anyway, the first version of the flyer is attached. I’m sure those of you still in the business of proper graphic design will be trying to stifle your giggles at the ineptitude of my humble efforts, just as I’m sure that the final piece won’t resemble this at all. In the meantime, if you aren’t going to be doing anything else on those particular dates, there’s a theatre show going on in Stockport that some very good friends of mine are involved in, and I’m sure they would appreciate you being there.

RADIO TIMES DAY

To a creature of habit such as myself, daily, weekly and monthly routines become part of the very fabric of your being, and so it is that Tuesday is the day I like to get my new copy of the “Radio Times”. Not for me the trashy splurgy layouts of the other, ‘inferior’ TV Guides (although, of course, other TV guides are available…), oh no. This house is a “Radio Times” house and hopefully always will be. Weekly magazine sales might well be plummeting, but the Radio Times still claims a circulation record that in 1955 it sold over 8 million copies a week in a time when there were only just 2 television channels and most people still listened to their radiograms. Nowadays it still shifts about 1.5 million copies a week, but times are hard in the publishing world with all that lovely free online information persuading folk that they really don’t have to fork out £1.20 a week when they can get it “for nothing” (discuss…) online.

On my way to the station every Tuesday morning, except during December when publication dates go all to pieces, I will pull across into the lay-by outside the much beleaguered newsagents and pop inside, passing the surly youngsters that pass for delivery persons nowadays and hand my coins over to the retailer as he fights the good fight against the supermarkets which have bludgeoned their way onto his ‘turf’, and flit back to my car with the latest issue tucked under my jacket to keep the rain off. Then, after my railway duties are completed, I scurry home for a cup of coffee and a quick browse before the Tuesday toils begin. Variations on this routine have accompanied my various jobs and geographical locations across the years, but the result is always very similar. Next week’s TV and radio programmes, laid out in relatively easy-to-understand terms (although recent layout changes have proven to be a ‘talking point’ in our household and triggered the odd exasperated ‘tut’), ready for me to peruse over and pick and choose from.

For as long as I can remember the Radio Times has been a cornerstone of my week, even though we didn’t used to actually have it at home until I was old enough to get my own copy. I think my own love affair with this rather excellent publication started with the announcement of an ‘Tenth anniversary special’ being available at the end of an episode of Dr. Who when Mr Jon Pertwee was still in charge. I suspect that I whisked around to Mr Pennington’s as fast as my tiny legs could carry me, only to be bitterly disappointed when, being unaware at that young age as to how publishing actually worked, I found that they hadn’t come into the shop yet. A couple of years later there was a lovely painting by Frank Bellamy illustrating Tom Baker in mortal combat with the Loch Ness monster and so began the many years of hacking up my old issues to paste the important bits into my various scrapbooks.

When I had my paper round, I would dawdle more with my Wednesday deliveries (Wednesday? Wednesday! But I thought you said Tuesday was Radio Times day…) as I took a sneak peek at the latest issue just to see whether there was enough material that week to justify me getting my own copy. I was a good kid, you see. Never once did I even consider just swiping one and putting the blame on some inefficiency on the part of Mr Sellars who ran the Post Office. Wait a minute, wait a minute… (as I’m sure you’re not actually asking), who’s this Sellars bloke? What happened to Mr Pennington? Ah well, Pennington’s was the newsagency (or sweetshop if you prefer) that was halfway to school, but Mr Sellars ran the Post Office and newsagents that was in the other direction, but for whom I worked on my newspaper delivery duties during the long, dark morning hours in my brown ‘snorkel’ coat.

Being a good kid, I also went to Sunday School, and the church I reluctantly attended used to collect old newspapers to help keep its roof from leaking. Obviously they didn’t just stuff the roof with old newspapers, there was some kind of financial jiggery-pokery that meant that they got financial remuneration for every ton or so of papers they collected and the cash was used to maintain the roof (presumably by nailing the coins in place to keep the rain out – no wonder villains used to steal church roofs…). This meant that by the back door of the old Sunday School building (which is now rather strangely where my mum’s flat is…) people would leave boxes of their old newspapers and I would be able to sneak a look and grab any copies that I knew had photographs and articles in, whip out the relevant pages and stuff the rest back into the box without anyone noticing. I like to think that whatever God I thought might have been looking down on me back then didn’t resent the loss of those few pages and the pennies that he or she didn’t get for his or her holy roof-work because of the general happiness they added to my little life. Truth be told, you know that I almost certainly have the scrapbooks in a box somewhere hereabouts if he or she really wants them back.

Of course, in later years, via a rather lavishly illustrated book I found in the school library called “The Art of the Radio Times”, a book, incidentally that I never actually bought for myself (if you happen to have a spare copy lying around somewhere… Hint! Hint!), that the world of illustration and the Radio Times had a long and very noble history in each other’s company which sadly seemed to falter during the 1980s when full colour glossy printing and photography rather took over, and illustrators across the land had to seek other outlets for their dubious genius, although the bumper two-week Christmas edition (and what an exciting prospect that used to be!) still has a tendency towards the artwork option even now.

The Radio Times is an ephemeral thing, really, which is what they are supposed to be. Something you use for a week and then, like a cruel lover might, cast into the dustbin of history when you are all done with it. The problem is that I do find it very difficult to throw the bloomin’ things away, because there’s always something in them that I might just want to read again later, and so they start to pile up in various parts of the house, like having various accusatory elephants sitting in the room demanding that something be done about them. I could and would blame it on the film fair I went to a few years ago when I saw someone selling back copies for six quid a throw and the table was full of issues I remember having, but unfortunately it predates that. I remember throwing out a huge stack from my mother’s garage just before she moved house a decade or more ago, and there was a definite pang when I had to do it, which became a positive pain when I saw some of the issues on that traders stall and realised how many potential pounds I had just thrown away, although, if truth be told, I’d never have organised myself enough to have actually done anything about it.

However, I do know that somewhere hidden in the darkest corners of this abode of ours lurk the Christmas editions of both it and the TV Times (until they were each able to list all the channels) dating right back to 1974, from such times as when Morecambe and Wise and a Sean Connery James Bond film were still the biggest Christmas Day attractions, such is my compulsion to hang on to my rapidly diminishing memories of my youth, and various other copies that I considered “special” for some reason or other are still scattered around in various other nooks and crannies. I did however have a bit of a clearout over last weekend, and there’s now a load of them from the last twelve months or so just sitting in the recycling bag even as I write this. Now if only I can resist the urge to go a rummaging and rescue a few. Well, you never know when you might need one of those recipes…