THE SCRAPBOOKS… OF DOOM!

It always amazes me what can trigger a memory.

A few days ago I was idly mulling over the part that the weekly ritual of getting the week’s Radio Times plays in the structure of my life* and I made a passing reference to an illustration by Frank Bellamy that had particularly caught my eye as a youngster. One of the few visitors to these humble pages is also one of the keepers of the Frank Bellamy flame on the web, and he left me a couple of messages telling me where I could find the images I was writing about and so forth. So, over the last couple of days, I’ve been reacquainting myself with those rather impressive examples of commercial illustration from a few decades ago via both those links and some of the dusty books I have on the bursting shelves of my little house.

Those books have sat there unviewed for quite some time now, so it’s been rather a joy to find a reason to dig them out. I still believe that Mr Bellamy’s rather fabulous comic-book inspired style of illustration (although, of course, Mr Bellamy was a massive stepping stone in the development of comic-book artwork already from his previous work on strips like “Dan Dare” in the Eagle) was a definite influence on the development of what I used to think of as my own ‘style’ back in my days as a struggling commercial illustrator, but that sorry tale, and the fact that I ultimately failed at it, is a long story for another time.

Anyway, all those references to those old days with the Radio Times also reminded me of my stack of scrapbooks (and by “scrapbook” I don’t mean the modern phenomenon of buying all kinds of expensive manufactured ribbons and bows and transforming what is essentially a photograph album into some dubious kind of art that wouldn’t look out of place on one of those stalls full of home-made tat that you normally wouldn’t give house room to, and which you might find in one of the cheesiest corners of a craft fair…) which still lurks in a forgotten corner of one of the cupboards, a collection of battered old volumes which I had meticulously maintained and updated for what seemed like many years but was realistically only about a dozen of them when I actually come to think about it. How is it that the ten years that pass as you hurtle through your teenage years and beyond last so much longer than any ten years you plough through afterwards? So, anyway, my memory having been prodded, I plunged into the deepest depths of the darkest corners of the house and dug one of those old books out; The first one, demonstrating those initial tentative steps into the world of archiving and collecting.

The beginnings of all the madness…

I opened it up and all the memories came flooding back. The hand-drawn renderings that I had to do because of a lack of reference material, the pale photocopies of favourite book covers, all those classy old comics like “TV Action” that I so mercilessly butchered for images. I turned another page, and there it was, still as bright and vivid as I remembered it, my own pasted-in copy of that Radio Times page with the Loch Ness Monster (or rather ‘the Skarasen’ which as a term probably wouldn’t have meant a lot to many of you, I guess…) on it. Then I remembered all over again (because I’d never truly forgotten, not really…) one of life’s smaller tragedies when part of the picture got itself stuck to the page opposite because I was too young and impatient to wait for the glue on the opposite page to dry.

The genius of Frank Bellamy
damaged by a gluepot

Here’s that very page now, with the bit of the eye missing due to the vagaries of the gluepot, still surrounded by my childish scrawl which somehow still manages to be more legible than any handwriting I might attempt today. You can tell how very impressed I was by Frank Bellamy as I’ve tried to copy his distinctive signature underneath the picture as an early fumbling example of trying to develop a thematic graphic link with the similar content over the page.

I remember starting the first of these scrapbooks in some desperate childish attempt to somehow preserve my copy of the “TV Comic Summer Special” from disappearing into the shredder of time. I know now, of course, that somewhere in one or two of the boxes in this house, there are comics like the “Beano” and the “Sparky” dating back forty years or even more, copies that date back well before that time, and so the treasured things around me ultimately did have a habit of surviving. But this was during a time in my life when someone else in the house could just throw such things away as they tidied up, and much valued publications like that had a strange habit of disappearing forever if you weren’t looking or were at school when the tidying-up wizards were doing their wicked work.

Daily Mail, Typhoo Tea, TV Comic & a postcard

The scrapbook shown in these pictures, which later became retrofitted as “volume one” when it became clear that a temporary distraction was about to be transformed into a long-term obsession, was not actually the original version. Prior to this, I had started a scrapbook of these materials in a smaller, more colourful format (i.e. with multi-coloured sugar paper pages rather than the plain grey) and, despite the obvious shoddiness of the layout that you can clearly see, I found its design to be unsatisfactory and somehow wanting, and so I hacked it all up and started again (which explains the orange bits surrounding the Frank Bellamy image and helps with the dating of all this stuff). However rudimentary they might well have been, the roots of the budding designer were already starting to form it would seem. Later volumes, I remember, would evolve a much more ‘professional’ house style despite a certain lo-tech charm that might not hold up to the scrutiny of more modern eyes.

Radio Times, Bubble Bath
TV Action & Cereal

Many of my young hours were spent hacking up and gluing down various elements that might now break the hearts of modern collectors who might very well crave with envy some of those long forgotten articles and issues that are now so very hard to track down to add to their own collections. Packaging for bubble baths, postcards from exhibitions, collectable cardboard figures from tea and cereal promotions and my parents’ ‘Daily Mail’ (I know...), all of them got treated to a pasting from the glue brush. If I got a spare copy of a book or magazine I would mercilessly hack it up and plaster it down, respacing the work of those publishers into my own choice of less than impressive layout, composition and imagery. Some of those publications I hacked to pieces are considered ‘rare’ or ‘collectable’ now, but youthful folly can always leave you full of regret in later years.

Some of the things I would use to fill up my pages were sourced from the most unpromising of items just because they had even the most vague and tentative of connections, which is how I came to get into the habit of marking the birthdays and later the passing of the most obscure of actors. Names like Timothy Bateson, Ewen Solon and Frederick Jaeger, character actors who popped up in just about anything during those golden years of television drama, would be scribbled down from their listings in the ‘notable birthdays’ or obit sections of the newspapers, just because of their tenuous link to the TV show I was celebrating in my own little way.

I miss having my old enthusiasms now. I spent too many years being embarrassed by them and trying to hide them away, trying not to let my fellow students see me buying what were essentially children’s books from the town bookstore or, in later years with more modern media, sneaking off to music stores and trying not to let my colleagues see the videos I’d bought during lunch, sneaking them shamefully into my bag like so much contraband.

I don’t suppose many people under the age of twelve do that kind of scrapbooking any more, especially as ‘scrapbooking’ seems to have transformed into an industry designed to exploit the frustrated creativity of people with much deeper pockets than the average child. The children are probably more likely to want to set up a website these days anyway, and can scan all the bits ephemera into it without destroying the original collectables, but I guess that it still adds up to much the same thing and keeps young minds focused and distracted during all those long evenings.

If they’re not just sitting watching the telly, of course..

* "Radio Times Day" http://m-a-w-h.blogspot.com/2011/03/radio-times-day_08.html March 08, 2011