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…