A Christmas past...

1977, I was twenty and studying (if that’s what you can call it) for a Graphic Design degree at the University of Wolverhampton, Wolverhampton Poly as it was then. I’d been at Oxfordbrooks prior to that where I’d given up my ambition to be a fine artist in favour of my new ambition to be an illustrator. Young men are like that, chopping and changing with no ultimate plan.

At the time my dream was to illustrate covers for the Radio Times, something I never achieved, but the cover of the Christmas Radio Times that year was so very special and I was so taken by the image of a perfect village inside a Christmas tree landscape, that I could aspire couldn’t I?

Of course, the Radio Times had always played an important part in my life around Christmas, not just for the superb illustrations it contained throughout, but as a Radio 4 fan for the plays that would be broadcast over the Christmas period. I loved a good ghost tale and both Radio 4 and BBC 2 had plenty at that time of year. Ideally, when I wasn’t working on Radio Times covers, I would have become an illustrator of ghost stories… another ambition I never achieved.

I remember that the 1977 Christmas edition was the first double edition ever and covered both Christmas week and the New Year television. Even so it still only cost 26 pence, but of course it only listed BBC TV and radio programmes and not ITV, you had to buy the (by comparison trashy) TV Times for that.

Both the Radio Times and the TV that year were classics, Morecambe and Wise topped the ratings with their final show for the BBC. It was the one with Penelope Keith, Elton John and James Hunt as the main guests and the South Pacific finale featuring all the BBC newsreaders and presenters including Eddie Waring.

That Christmas Day I remember the BBC News reporting the death of Charlie Chaplin when he passed away on Christmas Day aged 88. It was also the year of punk although the Sex Pistols’ success in the charts was frowned upon and hidden and they weren’t on the TOTP Christmas Special as they should have been. That year Paul MacCartney and Wings topped the charts at Christmas with Mull of Kintyre and even performed the hit single on The Mike Yarwood Christmas Show. Peter Benchley's The Deep (a book I read and a film I saw, but can’t even remember the plot now) had been top of the film chart since Christmas Eve, although the Boxing Day ‘must see’ film was something called Star Wars; not a very promising title.

It all seems such a very long time ago now. The Radio Times isn’t the publication it was, the free TV mags, online and built-in schedules put paid to that. The once great publication rarely contains an illustration these days and of course it covers all of the myriad of TV stations available. I can’t even remember the last time I even picked one up to browse, let alone purchase. These days the Christmas edition of the Radio Times is just another TV schedule and not the exciting, long awaited (at least for me) publication it once was.

Sometimes I long for that world with just three TV stations and those two (quite separate) TV channel publications. More that this though, I yearn for the days of the illustrated Radio Times Christmas cover even if I never got to illustrate one...

Or is it the days of my youthful optimism and hope that I want to return to?