Anyone who's enjoyed reading excerpts and images from my teenage diary will be delighted to learn that MY 1975 DIARY is available as a 50th Anniversary Calendar for just over a tenner.
12 double page spreads from Kev F's Picture Diary 1975, each from the month in question in 1975, for your wall-hanging pleasure.
See the TV I enjoyed, the comics I read, the music I loved, and how amazingly little went on in the actual life of a 13 year old in Leicestershire in the 1970s.
My heavily decorated Picture Diary was on its last legs by this stage, January 1978. I was 16 years old, and working towards my O levels that summer. I was also getting more serious about writing and drawing comics, and it was possible that things might actually start happening in my life. Or not, it certainly doesn't make a riveting read yet. Okay, it snowed. That was quite a big deal.
The illustrations have, appropriately, faded too. They were from Banda, the school magazine which I edited and produced most of. It was run off on a Banda machine, which produced a weedy purple ink, with a smell much stronger than its actual permanence. These images have almost gone, haven't they? I should imagine the next time I look at these pages they'll have evaporated forever.
They're from a strip called The Hawk, co-written by me and Steve Noble when I'd visited him in Bristol over the Christmas and New Year period, and drawn by me through the novel method of pressing hard with a biro so you could make an impression on a carbon/purple copy sheet below. The type had to be hammered through, on a manual typewriter, on the same carbon paper sheet, with no scope for error.
Try and tell the kids today the effort we had to go to to see something in print, and they won't believe you.
My Record For The Day was new at the time, though it's hard to imagine that ever being the case.
My, someone had a whole load of nothing much going on in his life when he was 14 years old. January 1976 and you'd be hard pressed to find a less interesting couple of days of diary. A nifty, if lop sided, attempt at drawing The Six Million Dollar Man by me, and it looks like Fawlty Towers was being given a re-run which would mean me seeing it for the first time.
My Records For The Day were the long-forgotten follow up to Motorbiking by Chris Spedding (who must have been meeting the Sex Pistols for the first time about now), and Sgt Pepper, which I think I had recently bought with my Christmas money.
Excitement of excitement, something actually happens in this diary, and I even try and draw it. This is from the early days of what I called my Picture Diary, when I honestly thought I was going to make a comic strip of my life. Sadly this was as eventful as it ever got: me being pushed under a shower fully clad at Scouts, then having to walk home, and me drawing myself in the back of a spoon.
My fascination with what I was watching on TV was clearly worth spending more time over, with episode four of Doctor Who in Robot getting the full treatment, along with cameos from Jennie Hanely, Ed Stewpot Stewart, and Black Beauty. And, for no obvious reason, The Lone Ranger.
My Records For The Day were a couple of classics from Stevie Wonder and the Bay City Rollers.
They just reran Doctor Who Pyramids Of Mars on telly (in June 2024) and it occured to me I must have seen it at the time and recorded it in my diary. And lo, I did. Here it is, among a full night's TV, in November 1975.
Those comics I bought on the Saturday afternoon, at one of the three newsagents in Kibworth between my house and Nick's, were published by a short lived company called Atlas, and I still have them.
Despite the prominent image of Freddie Mercury to the top left (drawn by Arnaldo Putzu, clipped from the cover of Look-In, as so many pictures in my diary were, by me), and the fact that Bohemian Rhapsody was well into its run at number one by this point in the year, my Records For The Day were by the Bay City Rollers and, unbelievably, The Band Of The Black Watch.
I just posted a diary entry from 1975 that I thought was the first appearance of DoctorWho's Pyramids Of Mars, but in fact it wasn't. This is. And that's about the most interesting thing about these two days in my diary.
I seem to feel the need to be inordinately precise about exactly how many minutes of TV I've watched each day. Good job, cos I obviously did precious little else, apart from illustrate a page of diary every sodding day. Kids eh?
My Records For The Day were the woefully obscure Checking On You by Flame, and Giving It All Away by Roger Daltrey.
Here we have the day Elvis Presley died. A commemorative spread, and why not. We were on holiday in Montrose at the time, and my enduring memory is that, when I broke the news to Uncle Bill about Elvis he confessed he'd never been that big of a fan. I remember thinking that was a sacreligious thing to say, though in truth I wasn't that much of a fan either. It was my generation's Princess Di moment, and 15 year old me was happily swept up in it. Though I see that, by the following day, I've moved on from listing Elvis records in the RFTD slot and featured David Soul and Harry Chapin instead (let's face it, Harry Chapin knocks spots off Elvis).
Because there's been interest in using some of my childhood diary spreads in a BBC TV show called the Peoples History Of Pop - my Records For The Day caught the eye of a researcher - I've dug a few more out and put them up here on the My 1970s Diary. (I kept the Picture Diary from 1974 to 1978 but to date have only found a couple of volumes from 1977).
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