Graphic Journey Blog

Send in the clowns

David Bowie: the man who started it all.

The Bay City Rollers

Prince charming in the shape of Adam Ant

 Garry no longer Glitters.

Boy George in his sartorial heyday.

There was a time when it was only performers in the pop world who made deeply embarrassing fashion mistakes. I’m thinking here of the ’70s and ’80s. They were quickly followed by the disc jockeys, who, bathing in the reflective glory of their rock and roll masters, started to appear on television looking ridiculous…

The least said about this despicable man the better.

But most other individuals involved in television presenting tended to be kitted out on the lower slopes of sartorial sensationalism…

In his ‘everyone’s favourite uncle’ outfit, John Betjeman was perfectly pitched for his television appearances in the ’60s and ’70s.

When John Betjeman made his famous British Transport Filmseries, he dressed in his own everyday attire, often topped off with a rather shabby looking mackintosh or trilby hat. But it didn’t distract from his brilliance.

Originally Michael Portillo presented the series in a fairly conservative mode.

Contrast that with the more recent Michael Portillo series Great British Railway Journeys. We see him wandering around clutching his precious Bradshaw railway guide close to his chest like a Gideon’s bible. When the series started, he was dress in a relatively low-key way. However, halfway through the series, something strange started to happen. Brightly coloured shirts became the order of the day.

As the series developed into Great Continental Railway Journeys, Portillo started to wear rather bizarre colour combinations of jackets, shirts, trousers and socks, so much so that I became more transfixed with his dress code than with the journeys and scenes he was describing.

One wonders who advises these presenters on matters of styling. In the case of Portillo, someone is surly sending him up. I can imagine it – Producer: “Michael, I think the lilac jacket and lime-green shirt will work really well.” Out of earshot, directed to the cameraman: “He fell for it again, Charlie.”

Portillo in his true clours

It amuses me how this clamouring to become a ‘character’ through fashion is increasing – mostly in middle-aged men – across the board and is no longer the bastion of the young.

The original presenters of the Antiques Roadshow were rather sober in their dress code, like the red-faced, rotund figure of the late Arthur Negus, whose point of difference was his down-to-earth Berkshire accent. But, over the years, the presenters on this programme have not only got increasingly posher, looking down their noses in mild disgust at the hoarding middle classes who hope to be told that their heirlooms are worth £50,000, but have also become far more garish in their dress code.

Arthur Negus in his old tweeds.

They are now desperately attempting to ‘brand’ themselves with an array of trappings from bow ties to fake tans, from veneers and brightly coloured waistcoats to novelty spectacles: all to elevate themselves to ‘personality’ status.

Bargin Hunt's Tim Wonnacott

"Yes well, apart from all that how much is it worth?"

The Antiques Roadshow's Paul Atterbury

Mr perma-tan David Dickinson presenter of Bargin Hunt

Here are some presenters from the past and more recent prize peacocks... 

The architectural critic Ian Nairn was totally disinterested in his onscreen appearance in Nairn across Britain (1972).

 Kenneth Clark allowed the world be the star rather than himself in BBC’s Civilization in 1969.

Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen: he no doubt wore his outfits to detract from the dreadful interiors that he created during the run of Changing Rooms.

 The former TV horse-racing pundit JohnMcCririck must take the prize for wearing the most ridiculous outfits.

 

The kings of the fashion world are in a league of their own. The Nazi-ranting pirate John Galliano.

And Harry Hill lookalike Karl Lagerfeld.

Long before Sarah Lund’s jumper became famous in The Killing, we had Gyles Brandreth’s monstrosities on TV-am in the ’80s.

Just one of the many horrors worn by Brandreth while on TVAM

 Braces became the branding device of Ground Force’s Tommy Walsh.

 Meanwhile, Tommy’s Ground Force co-presenter Charlie Dimmock had two other distinguishing presentation points that she used to great effect, cheering up many an ageing gardener.

 The darling transvestite of the art establishment, Grayson Perry.

 Related Fashion Posts:

Jelly mould politics

Fashion Feature

Dedicated followers of Fashion

Things I like...

Yusaku Kamekura 1915 - 1997

Nostalgia: A thing of the past

Nostalgia is a funny thing. It can either be a longing for something from your own past or a longing for a past you never actually experienced. The latter is ever present in the world of design and architecture. Graphics, for example, is awash with remnants of design thinking that has gone before.

Above a delightful spoof 60's style paperback series by an enterprising young designer.

The internet has enabled designers to plunder the past world of graphics at a click, and the source material can be replicated, approximated and adapted to produce convincing facsimiles of that graphic heritage, mostly in the hands of young designers who were either far too young to recall the period or were not even born then.

The beloved coal lorry. The smell that really takes me back.

Nostalgia can be triggered by a smell, texture, taste or piece of music and suddenly you are transported back decades. If I happen to get a whiff of coal, I am instantly propelled to the streets of Dagenham, where I lived in the 1950s. Coal merchants still made daily deliveries of their jet-black cargo to every household. The moment the familiar truck appeared in our street I would rush out, stand by it and breathe in the magnificent aroma of those loose lumps of natural coal.

Sellers, Milligan and Secombe in The Goon Show still running on BBC4 Extra

At night, by the glow of our brown Bakelite radio, I would tune the dial to the BBC Light Programme to hear The Goon Show or Journey into Space,which I was besotted with. I used to remember them fondly – I say used to because, in recent years, both programmeshave been resurrected on BBC Radio 4 Extra and its predecessor Radio 7. Having originally listened to them over 50 years ago, my own fond recollection has now been eroded due to the constant repeats, which have devalued their potency.

A bit of America comes to Britain in the 1950's with, Life with the Lyons

Paul Temple currently rerunning on BBC4 Extra

And it’s not only my particular favourites: there is a raft of 1950s and 60s programmes spewing out on BBC 4 Extra: The Navy Lark, Life with the Lyons, Paul Temple, Ray’s a Laugh, Round the Horne, Educating Archie and many, many more. If you have the radio on all night, like me, you can easily wake up in the early hours thinking you’ve been transported back to the 1950s.

As a teenager in the late 1950s, Sundays were without doubt the most boringly depressing day of the week: shops were closed and nothing seemed to happen. I would normally be drawing, and the smell of the many Sunday roasts on the go emanated from the surrounding houses. All the mums were tied to the kitchen and all the dads would be down the pub. The radio would splatter out an assortment of extremely dull programmes like Life with the Lions or Educating Archie,

Imagine a ventriloquist act on the radio, well, Educating Archie was just that

but the worst of these was the Billy Cotton Band Show, and what a horror it was for me. The humour was out of the ark, along with the appallingly bland music.

The man that made my, and many other teenager's, Sunday's so deeply depressing, Billy Cotton and his band show.

And if that wasn’t bad enough, there was a singer in the show called Alan Breeze, who looked like someone’s dad and not the teenage pop stars of the period. Embarrassingly, Breeze would sing the latest hits, be they by Cliff Richard, Elvis, Fats Domino, Little Richard or Buddy Holly. The latter collection of stars would rarely be played on the BBC at the time – for that, you had to tune into the crackly reception of the commercial station Radio Luxembourg. So, we had to put up with Breeze, and it was so depressingly awful for a teenager to have to endure his annihilation of the hits we liked so much.

This is a crystal set. Many of us had these back in the 1950s to tune into Radio Luxenbourg under the bed covers.

At the time, the BBC was awash with programmes like this, all aimed at a ‘family audience’ – teenagers didn’t exist to the corporation. The formula had remained virtually unchanged since the Second World War radio era. And the liberation for teenagers, pirate radio, was still a decade away.

The digital age has given us so much, but it has also devalued the distant and fond memories of radio programmes that seemed so special then but are never quite the same on rehearing. Nostalgia really is becoming a thing of the past. 

To give you a flavour of my dreary Sundays back in the 1950's here is a sample of The Billy Cotton Band Show (This is a 1960 TV version, but the 50's radio version was exactly the same).
Click here to be depressed.

And here is a short film of a Radio Luxembourg broadcast, rather hilarious

 

Fifty years on No. 13

The year: 1975

This is what was happening:

The British Conservative Party chooses its first female leader, Margaret Thatcher.

The Vietnam War ends as Communist forces take Saigon, and South Vietnam surrenders unconditionally.

A London underground train crashed into a brick wall on February 28^th at Moorgate in London’s financial district.

US Apollo and Soviet Soyuz 9 spacecraft link up in space. Russian cosmonauts and American astronauts shake hands.

    On TV The Good Life with Felcity Kendal and Richard Briers took the nation by storm and an upturn in grow your own.

Ken Russell’s film version of The Who’s Tommy premieres in London and is an example of his visual over-indulgence and fading star.

By 1975, I was deeply entrenched in my new world of paperback publishing and rather liked the immediacy of the industry. The studio was running smoothly thanks to my super-efficient secretary Rosemary and my dedicated assistants Tad and Bill.

Designing covers for Fontana was akin to being a character actor with the ability to assume different identities at the drop of a hat. One minute I was designing or art directing covers for rather esoteric philosophical or religious studies:

Just one of dozens of religious covers illustrated by the immaculate Tony Meeuwissen.

and the next I was creating covers for some hard-nosed commercial detective series:

Just two of very many Ross McDonald, Lew Archer detective story covers that I designed along with photographer Graham Miller

 

Also this Eric Ambler series that I designed with photographer Roberst Golden and great fun to work on.

I also love spoofing things up like these two newspapers, all set in letterpress and printed on the correct paper.

 John Gorham, a man know for his highly decorative and nostalgic work could also be remarkably minimal and conceptual, as in this beautifully simple cover he designed for me.

 

Giving an authentic look to photographs by hand colouring, sepia toneing and distressing, as in the above two covers from '75, were all hand done by me in that none digital age.

I absolutely loved the extremes and have come to realise that is why all of my subsequent work is a little hard to categorise. I had so much fun being commercial one minute and super-sensitive the next that I never got out of the habit. I can’t understand designers who just doggedly follow the same stylistic rail track: it must be so dull and monotonous.

The uniformed typographical spines

To help give the covers a more coordinated look, I dispensed with the historic myriad of typographic styles that appeared on the spines in favour of a simple, uniform style using Goudy Bold and Goudy Old Style (above). I also strengthened the logo and colour-coded them into four categories: blue for fiction, orange for non-fiction, green for science fiction and red for religion.

Left the original Fontana logo designed by Leslie Lawrence and John Constable in 1969 and right the strengthen version with colour coding introduced by me in 1974

William Collins Publishers was another of those environments filled with high academic achievers, many from Oxbridge universities. And then there was me with my one O-level from a secondary modern excuse for a school. But, by this time, I was a pretty adept chameleon and Collins became my second university. A perk of the firm was that, by default, you became a member of the delightful La Petit Club Français, just a few doors down from the Collins offices. What you have to know is that in the 1970s, there were still strict licensing laws in operation: pubs only opened from 12:00 to 14:40 and then again from 18:30 to 21:30. By contrast, licensed drinking clubs could serve alcohol from 15:00 to 23:00, and La Petit Club Français was such an establishment. On any given day, it was not unusual to find a large gaggle of Collins staff propping up the bar. It was a place where births, funerals, divorces and departures were discussed or celebrated and it was also the perfect venue for illicit affairs of the heart. With its crackling fire in the hearth, intimate lighting, weathered leather couches, an upright piano, constant flow of wine and an upstairs dining room serving food as variable as the weather, it was a sheer delight to be a member. They even celebrated Bastille Day and hung bunting across the road.

Freelance designer Ken Carroll became an extended part of the Fontana team. He could turn around work at an astonishing rate, and I would keep him topped up with covers to design.

One of the first Fontana covers that Ken Carroll designed in 1975

By that time, we were great friends and pretty much inseparable. Along with our wives and children, we holidayed in the Dordogne area of France. Ken’s wife Sue was a friend of the designer Jim Northover (of design consultancy Lloyd Northover), who owned a charming farmhouse there. So, we spent, as I recall, a boiling couple of weeks there, trying to avoid the blistering sun.

The Dordogne, France 1975. From Lto R: Sue Carroll, Joe Dempsey. Ken Carroll (holding Oliver Carroll), Ben Dempsey, Daisy Dempsey and Margaret Dempsey.

Ken and I had a bit of a passion for enamelled signs, and France was littered with them. Following a pleasant meal one evening, and after the children had been tucked up in bed and our respective wives were quietly chatting, we set about recording all of the colour combinations of enamelled signs.

Here is the original magic-marker drawing from that hot evening back in 1975. I can’t imagine why I have hung onto it all these years.

The kind of things that obsessive graphic designers do.

One of the Monday routines at Fontana involved me presenting and discussing future covers with Lady Collins, who presided over the religious list, which went under the imprint of Fountain. These were no conventional meetings. Sir William and Lady Collins had a large flat within the house where they stayed during the week, and at weekends they would decamp to their country pile. So, my meetings with her were in the flat. We’d always have tea and biscuits or even scones. She would preside perfectly centred on a squashy sofa with her two beloved pair of shih tzu dogs by her side, feeding them titbits. Between this, I would show her the roughs for the various covers, often with the dogs jumping all over me. She was an absolute delight, with that traditional British ability to appear positive even when delivering something negative, just as Mary Berry does on The Great British Bake Off. “Absolutely marvellous” was Lady C’s favourite phrase. And it was with her religious list that I was able to produce some really adventurous and beautiful work during my time there.

I continue to use many of the illustrators, designers and photographers that I’d commissioned while at Heinemann, but I would keep my ear to the ground for emerging talent. One day, a rather doe-eyed, baby-faced young man dropped by to show me his work. It was unusual because he presented his illustrations like cell animation stills. A black outline was drawn directly onto acetate and then the colours were blocked in on the reverse side, giving a completely flat, immaculate finish. The young man’s name was Brian Grimwood. Not only did I think he had great potential and immediately commission him but he also had already plotted out a five-year plan for his future. I’d never met such an organised individual. And, over the years that I knew him, his grand plan seemed to fall into place seamlessly. This is the first commission I gave him:

Brian Grimwood's first Fontana cover in 1975

And below is an illustration he did of me to accompany an interview I had with AoI magazine in 1975. I remember that hair well.

Strolling down St James’s Place was always a pleasure, especially on a bright spring morning. The railings outside of Collins would normally have a collection of ladies’ bicycles chained to them, mostly with wicker baskets attached to the handlebars. It all looked so civilised and middle class.

This was the publicity department outside of 14 St James’s Place. On this occasion to promote the launch of Michael Bond’s Paddington Bear paperback series. From left to right: William Fricker, Michael Cheyne, Michael Bond (Author), John (designer),sitting: Helen Ellis, Julia Bennet, Debbie Jarvis.

Walking through the entrance was rather like arriving at a classic English house. There was a grandfather clock gently ticking away, a dark oak Elizabethan coffer, oriental rugs and runners, paintings, glass-fronted cabinets lined with books and a seemingly random arrangement of classic armchairs covered in russet-coloured hopsack with scatter cushions. The lighting came from a variety of low lamps. This was the main reception and everything led off from here. So different from the clinical corporate interiors of publishers today, with their security barriers and lanyard plastic passes. Back then they really were publishing houses. One day, while strolling through the reception, I noticed a young woman sitting on a window seat. She was engrossed in a book. I recognised the cover as it had been produced while I was at Heinemann: Michael Holroyd’s biography of Lytton Strachey. The young woman of dark complexion and the jettiest of jet-black hair and looking very Bloomsbury-ish instantly fascinated me.

I was, and still am, ever the curious romantic. It turned out she was waiting for an interview. I didn’t know it then, but our paths would cross again. But more of that another time.

My films for 1975:

Barry Lyndon Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

The famous forward tracking zoom used in Steven Spielberg's Jaws

My music:

By 1975, pop music was becoming rather bland. I still remained faithful to Joni Mitchell and Sandy Denny, who I adored, but I drifted towards much more classical music. Little did I know that Alex McDowell, a young student at St Martin’s School of Art, was in charge of college entertainment, and had booked a new group to appear there. Their name was The Sex Pistols.

Related post: Fifty years on No. 12