This is the first of my diaries to record the Sutherland family's legendary Hogmanay party. I say record, obviously being my diary it makes no mention of anything or anybody and devotes most of its space to TV shows and pop records. But we learn that the party started at midnight and I, aged 13, lasted till 1.15 in the morning. Lightweight.
The Star Trek pictures, which this chapter of my diary is peppered with, were cut from my weekly Valiant and TV21 comics, rendering them near worthless when I finally put them on eBay 45 years later.
My Records For The Day include something called Feet which, elsewhere in the diary, I discover was by someone called Mark Stephens. Researching this post I've heard for the first time since. It's not half bad.
A novel bit of page design from my diary of March 30th and 31st 1975, allowing me to squeeze the entire Osmond family into the page, coinciding with their TV special on the telly.
My diary suggests I did nothing but watch TV all these days, but clearly I was illustrating these pages while in front of the telly. Also, surrounding diary entries suggest, I was writing and drawing ongoing comic series, including my own version of Planet Of The Apes which seems to have run to more than 30 issues, and my superhero team the Galactic Union Of Superheroes, which you see references in those little squares at the outside corners of the pages. These are my versions of the Marvel diary panels that had been in recent comics.
I was also working on a movie, Blunderbirds, as other entries record, still to be blogged. Till then, let us enjoy again the faces of the Osmonds and those teeth which were, at the time, the whitest thing that had been seen on British TV. I remember Clive James commenting that, if you turned the brightness down on your telly, all you'd see are those teeth floating there. We took him literally and tried it.
My Records For The Day include the winner of the previous night's Eurovision Song Contest, a song I still love to this day.
Ooh look it's Leela off of Doctor Who, drawn by me from a picture in the paper, though Doctor Who's not on the telly that week so it must have been about to start. Not, I confess a big mystery there.
A bigger mystery is the book 8 Happy Dayz and whatever became of it. In this diary, written at the end of half term week, Nick and I have clearly been writing a book I'd totally forgotten about, called Happy Dayz. And, if memory serves, it was a book looking back at the week long school trip to the Italian alps we'd enjoyed in April that year. Which begs two questions. Where is this Happy Dayz book, cos I can't remember seeing it since. And where are my diary pages from April 1976, was it really that memorable a holiday? I'll have to dig them out and see.
My Records For The Day run the gamut from A for awful to B for bemusing. Jonathan King, who you don't hear much on the radio these days; Lalo Schifrin's theme for Starksy and Hutch, which which I seemed enamoured; and Rock Me Baby by the Steve Miller Band, which showed I wasn't totally bereft of taste.
Will you look at that picture by Frank Bellamy? If you're not familiar with his work, check it out. He did a legendary run on Dan Dare, created Heros The Spartan in the Eagle, and was the long running artist on the Daily Mirror strip Garth, but it was his illustrations for Doctor Who in the Radio Times that I had in my collection. And look how I treated them. Hacked out and stuck into my diary with cow gum.
My diary is as eventful as ever, trudging round the shops with Mum and moaning about what TV shows I've missed. I also seem to have written and/or drawn a strip called The Moronic Man, of which history has no record. It was a while before I was to have anything published.
This Bellamy illustration was for 1975's Doctor Who story Terror Of The Zygons. And we can see from the TV listings that, on Saturday, Sarah Jane's final adventure The Hand Of Evil was on.
My Records For The Day are classics, though one seems to have been a new release, If You Leave Me Now by Chicago. Andy Kim remains a favourite and, being two years old at the time, was obviously already one then too. Did that sentence make any sense?
A legendary line up graced the stage of The Monkhouse Comedy Club in Leicester in October 1988. Linda Smith headlined, supported by Henry Normal.
The club was run and hosted by Alan Seaman, who can take credit for booking the acts, most of whom also stayed overnight on the floor of his flat in Clarendon Park, and myself. I did the posters, including this one, produced with a mix of Letraset, freebie typesetting (which I would get done alongside official jobs at the design company I worked at, and much photocopying.
The shows took place every month above The Magazine pub on Newarke Street Leicester. Don't look for it, it's not there any more (demolished in the 1990s to make way for the Newarke Business Centre).
Linda Smith was easily the funniest act we'd had that year, and went on to be the star of radio 4's The News Quiz, before her untimely death to cancer in 2006. Henry Normal, then a performance poet, went on to work with Steve Coogan and co-found Baby Cow Productions, one of the most successful television production companies in the country. In 1988 they were both playing above a pub in Leicester for less than fifty quid each.
By April 1978 the pressure of my impending O levels and the general busying up of my life meant that I didn't have the time to do the heavily decorated diary I'd been producing since mid 1974. I still managed the nice touch of a fold-out section in which I've written by review of Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, but the rest of this period is just sped through.
In fact the letters I sent to Steve Noble in Bristol were where I was now putting my effort and, if he's kept his copies of mine like I've kept my copies of his, then between us we have some record of what we were up to for the next 18 months or so, until student life really puts paid to diary writing time.
My Records For The Day are quite the obscurities. Who remembered Slade's Give Us A Goal or Bill Withers' follow up to Lovely Day called, amazingly, Lovely Night?
Ho ho very satirical, wasn't I just the wag? Not only doing my April Fools Day in the style of my very first diary pages (the first of which you'll find here) but also packing the page with details of my many injuries including my Hunting Expedition on the Shetlands and the fitting of my cybernetic arm. Oh stop, my poor aching sides.
My Records For The Day include the obscure Star Gazer by Neil Diamond, me neither, and the classic Strawberry Fair - rifle rifle come and get an earful.
Though not celebrated in pictures, and indeed no photos of the event exist, deep in the text of April 2nd 1976 you'll find the first and only gig by our band, then called Mercury. (Later that same year we became the legendary Walter Tottle).
Though my diary is more concerned with how hectic my day was - and it certainly seems to have been, from waking up with a killer cold, slogging through school, getting notice of the gig on the day, doing a paper round in the day, then playing in the school hall in the evening and not getting home till 10.30 - I can actually remember how the gig went.
We played House Of The Rising Sun, as an instrumental, because at this stage none of us was brave enough to sing, and at one point Nick's guitar fell over and he said 'shit' in front of the vicar. Why that didn't make it into the diary I do not know.
Check out that marvellous panel from On The Buses by Harry North, by the way. My Look-In comics, from which most of the illustrations in my diary, are going on eBay as I type and some buyers are expressing surprise that when I tell them the comics are cut to pieces, that they in fact as cut to pieces as I said they were. I eviscerated those magazines, all for the sake of a diary that no-one but me has seen until now.
My Records For The Day were minor classics that still leap immediately to memory, from the Carpenters and (maybe I wouldn't have recalled the name) Barry Mann.
For April Fools Day 1975, in which I have indulged in no foolery myself though by this time Noel Edmonds was doing them regularly on his Radio 1 show so I must have heard that, I seem much more obsessed by Planet Of The Apes. I'm reading the Marvel comics adaptations (which, at time of writing, I have just flogged wholesale on eBay), and that night I go with Peter and David Lloyd to see not one but two POTA films at the cinema.
When was the last time you sat through a double bill in the cinema? That must be nearly 4 hours of movie we sat through. Catch me doing that today.
Interesting to read about Scout Bob A Job week, for which I was raising 15p a job. And I can remember that goose that chased us off Briggs' farm, though my memory's been much kinder to Banger Lloyd who I had totally forgotten hid in a ditch. He's a vicar now.
My records for the day are both losts beyond the mists of memory. Well done anyone at home who remembered Take Your Mama For A Ride by Lulu or Naughty by Charlie Drake, both of which sound much more like Scissor Sisters records than anything else.
From the recently discovered, long-thought-lost early diaries hidden in a suitcase at my Mum's house for forty years, here's a spread from this week in 1976. Nothing much happens in my actual life, which is very much a theme in these things, but boy did I love my telly.
On the Monday I complain about a dentist visit, not because of any pain or discomfort, but because it makes me miss all "ALL" of the kids telly. And I seem rather obsessed by the fact that Tuesday's TV contains no first episodes of new series. An odd child indeed.
The 6 Million Dollar Man illustration shows you the level my drawing had reached by the age of 14. I was a dab hand with the felt tip pens, but had yet to master the realistic portrait. Hopefully I've got that together over the intervening years.
My Records For The Day go from most famous to most obscure quite nicely. I doubt there's anyone who's unfamiliar with Sgt Pepper, but who remembered Jump In My Car by Chris Spedding?
By January of 1975, my Picture Diary has almost given up on trying to tell my life story in comic strip form, but a few examples were still sneaking in. Here we see the dramatic incident of me being forced under a shower at Scouts - I was ever the unfortunate victim of lighthearted bullying it seems - leavened by the fun of me drawing my face in the back of a spoon.
On the right hand page we see Doctor Who among the TV shows that night. And coincidentally, as I type this, it's Tom Baker's 85th birthday. And on Friday night we see Ed Stewpot Stewart presenting Crackerjack. And what photo have I also just found among the piles of stuff at Mum & Dad's house..?
Mum and Dad with Ed Stewpot Stewart, at some event or other, sometime in the 70s.
By Jan 1975 I'd introduced the feature to my diary known as Record For The Day, this pair's treats being The Bay City Rollers' Saturday Night and Stevie Wonder's Boogie On Reggae Woman. I knew good music when I heard it.
From the newly discovered treasure trove that is my long-lost teenage diaries (discovered while clearing out Mum's house in January 2019, until now I thought only 3 volumes survived), here are the second and third entries, from June 1974.
The idea was, when I began my diary age 12, that I would turn my life into a comic strip. It wouldn't be long until I discovered my daily routine offered little in the way of visuals, and my diary morphed into a heavily decorated scrapbook of TV shows, music and comic reviews, with a little bit of diary squeezed in.
What a violent time I was having at Kibworth High School. Punched in the face and chucking someone down some steps yesterday, and now having my dinner ticket ripped. The horror.
Clearing out the cupboards and hidden corners of Mum's house I found something that I thought had been lost forever - my missing diaries.
I have had, and been posting pages on this blog, just three volumes of my teenage Picture Diary, volumes 9, 10 and 11 (mid 1976 to late 1977). For years I've assumed they were the only ones to survive the various clear-outs and tidy-ups that have happened in the 40-odd years since I drew them. Now I know better and I couldn't be more pleased.
From the very first skimpy folded-paper diaries, through the hardcover art books, I now have them all. I began on June 24th 1974 and entries dry up in 1978 as I start taking my O levels seriously. A written diary continues into the 1980s, but the full colour fully decorated version lasted a little over four years. As you can see from this first entry, the plan was to do a comic strip of my life. I don't think it took long before I realised there was nothing in my life worth illustrating. Though I must say, Day One proved quite action packed.
