Nifty drawing of Lee Majors winking, though I say so myself. The rest of the images are by a caricaturist whose work I greatly admired, even though he was in the Daily Express (like I had the faintest idea what a right wing rag it was back then), Cole.
I can only suppose this is half term, for me to be lazing around midweek in February, rehearsing with the band and buying records - The Goodies' Nothing To Do With Us album, which was a favourite for years.
The Records For The Day are A Groovy Kind Of Love by Les Gray (late of Mud), and a track from the Goodies' album, I Wish I Had Something To Say.
Oh come on, I was trying. Experimenting with coloured pens, working from photo reference, and you can tell who it's supposed to be can't you? Can't you? It's Starsky out of Starsky and Hutch, very obviously. And for that sense of completeness, there's Hutch on the next page, on the front cover of Look-In. The Hutch painting's a tad better than mine, being my Arnaldo Putzu, the regular Look-In cover artist whose work adorns a great many of my diary pages at this time.
The most surprising details in this diary spread is the news that I came first in a cross country run at school. As far as I can recall, that was the last physical exercise I ever took.
Some nice Records For The Day, none too obscure, but none too naff. Mind you, Chicago had gone past their best by then hadn't they?
Until I started uploading these teenage diary pages very recently, nobody had seen them since they were written, and as far as I know nobody saw them at the time. Though this entry suggests I showed it around, and to grown ups, occasionally. I've joked that no-one reads my diary, and asked anyone in the future who does read it to sign in the box. Lo, just the following month, it's been signed by someone who appears to be called Clive Whitehall. I have no memory of a Clive Whitehall. Maybe my diary was read by a ghost?
The illustrations aren't showing any great improvement. You can see what I'm trying to do with my superhero figure drawing - that's The Sensational Sta-Lite you're looking at there, by the way - but paying any attention to learning what bodies actually look like clearly wasn't high on my agenda. Life drawing, kids, concentrate on your life drawing.
The Records For The Day suggest I also wasn't paying that close attention to the music I was hearing either. "Play That Don't Ya Know" by Black Cherry can only be Play That Funky Music White Boy, heard for the first time.
I can't find Steely Dan doing Haitian Divorce anywhere, so here's a covers band. It's what they would have wanted.
UPDATE: Clive Mitchell. It was family friend Clive Mitchell. Thanks Mum for filling me in with that detail.
I'm usually too embarrassed to find amusing the cringeworthy nonsense my fifteen year old self writes in these diaries, but even I was driven to laugh out loud at this pitch-perfect Alan Partridge impersonation from January 1977.
"Fore and aft the execution of my paper delivery, yea verily did we produce punk rock sweet to the ears, and did we truly satirise the songs of yore in style hilarious". I hope I was being ironic, but I fear this may be an example of #AccidentalPartridge 35 years ahead of its time.
The Records For The Day were hardly "punk rock sweet to the ears", coming from Mr Big and Al "listen to the production on that" Stewart.
In my teenage diary I show incredible dedication to completing a fully-detailed decorated diary, even when there is less than nothing to report. So it is that we see the TV I watched, and some nicely eclectic Records For The Day; we see the results of my desecration of my Look-In collection (I still have the shards left behind once I'd stripped the best pictures out of the comic strips); and we see me stripping odd little themed items across the days, as if I'm inserting features into a local radio show, in this case little boxes commemorating famous birthdays. Elvis and Nixon? Have I mentioned I was fifteen years old?
My Records For The Day are Mae, a track from a David Cassidy album that I have to this day, though haven't played for a while (I bought a turntable a few years ago, but it went back on a shelf not long afterwards); and Don't Be A Do-Badder from Robin And The Seven Hoods. Like I say, eclectic.
As I write this, the Doctor Who story The Face Of Evil has just been repeated on BBC 4 (apropos of nothing, it wasn't promoted, it's not part of a series of repeats, we just found it on iPlayer. What's that about?). And lo, here we have me watching it for the very first time on January 1st 1977, captured in a double page spread which shows what was on TV, what music I'd been listening to, and how bad my figure drawing was.
Bruce's Choice, shown on New Year's Eve 1976, seems to have been remade by the BBC this past New Year too (though Bruce was too ill to host it, so Alexander Armstrong stepped in), and there's a Ronnie Corbett solo special, just like was on the BBC earlier last year. Is there anything on TV in 1977 that they won't remake today? *Spots new series of Jim'll Fix It, steps away from the subject*
And check out me DJ-ing till 2.30 in the morning. That's right, you heard me. Kev F was on the decks aged 14, rocking Hogmanay using our school drama teacher's cassette tape deck. Rock & Roll.
My Records For The Day were Come Together and "Honk Tonk Angels", aka Wild Side Of Life.
The Sensational Sta-Lite was co-created by my New Zealander friend Anthony Robinson and I in the third year (year 9 in new money) when we tried making comics together. I seem to remember we used to produce alternate pages in a sort of relay system. He'd take my page home and add his, making the plot up as we went along, then I'd do the same. If any of the strips have survived, I don't have any. So this version of Sta-Lite, who was one part Green Lantern, one part Warlock, and many parts made-up nonsense that probably stretched to half a dozen pages at the most, is all posterity has to go on.
The content of my day to day diary was as unremarkable as you must be getting used to. In a slightly meta-textual moment, it makes mention of the letter I was sending to my old school friend Steve (Noble) who'd moved away to Bristol at the start of the year. Our letters, as heavily illustrated as these diaries, and which went on to include cassette tape recording that were the podcasts of the day, were very much a sister publication to the diary. I wonder if they survive?
And look, horror of horror, at the two empty panels on the right hand page? Quite why I failed to finish the page, illustrating the other two TV shows I'd clearly left room for, we will never know.
The Records For The Day are wonderfully arcane. You know you're getting eclectic when you've chosen three records that, 40 years later, you've never heard Johnnie Walker play on Sounds Of The Seventies. (Mind you, if Johnnie Walker ever plays anything that's not on The Most Obvious Greatest Hits Of The 70s, we do a celebratory dance, if we haven't already turned over to Radio 6).
