A Photographic Memory #1
eidetic • /aɪˈdɛtɪk/
Batman in London!
I always thought I should write a diary, but never got around to it, because I figured it was far more interesting and spontaneous to just photograph everything instead. I realized then, that the photos became a trigger for the events that surrounded them, and gave me something akin to total recall... kind of.
Now I find myself writing these things down with a morbid anticipation that I’ll forget everything the way my father has since he got Alzheimer's. I’ll hope… pray! that it’s not genetic, and use Secret Oranges as my memory backup just in case!
Meanwhile I find that looking at photos I’d taken in the seventies suddenly seem far more interesting… to me, anyhow. So very retro! Here’s one I managed to take of Adam West signing autographs for kids as Batman, during a special appearance at Selfridges, London. My camera was pretty basic, but I’m glad a got a record of the moment. This would have been the summer of 1975, around the time I left high school. I’d also acquired a Polaroid camera and attempted to do a group portrait of my classmates just before I left. Trying to cram them all into this format and illuminate them with a tiny flashbulb was not an easy task!
Looking at my photo of Batman has made me realize that my obsession with comic books was pretty consistent. I had dreams of either being a comics artist or a graphic designer, though there seemed no comprehension of how these could be achieved by the ill-informed careers officer at my school. After I’d told her my ambitions, she said, “Aha!!! I have the perfect job for you… the Police force. I looked at her quizzically, very quizzically, and she said, ‘first you do your training, then you could easily end up drawing or assembling identikit portraits of criminals. How about that?’ For some strange reason at the age of 15, this almost sounded like a great idea, so I attended a tour of the Hendon police academy in London. Our tour guide seemed to take great delight in telling us stories of how their cadets had got themselves into trouble. One such incident involved a naked cadet flashing his wares at the women on the train station platform directly below his student dorm window. To me, this didn’t seem to be a good start to a career in the force. The other red flag was being shown the locker rooms and being told to lock our possessions up at all times due to a spate of thefts that had recently occurred. Despite all of this, I stupidly filled out the paperwork and applied to become a cadet.
A few weeks later, and luck was on my side when the response letter finally arrived to inform me that I was an inch too short for the force. I was devastated, but in hindsight extremely thankful, that in those days they were a little bit more… picky!
Land of Maple syrup
Once I’d left school I continued my after-hours job working at a local supermarket called Fine Fare, to save enough money for a trip to Canada. I had godparents there, and I figured if I was going to work for Marvel Comics (because that was what I’d now decided… oh, the optimism of youth!), I needed to get as close to America as possible and see what it was like.
On the day of departure, my parents took me to the airport to see me off. It was to be my second flight, and the first time I’d been on a flight on my own, and my excitement was palpable. So much so that as I started walking to the customs gate a woman tapped me on the shoulder and said ‘excuse me sonny, there are some people waving to you’. I looked back and realized I’d forgotten to wave goodbye to my parents, I was so eager to get on that plane!
It was more than an eight hour flight, and on arrival at Toronto airport I was greeted by my godparents and their son Andrew, (who was just a year older than me), and driven to their house. Once there, Andrew, said he was off to his weekly Judo class and wondered if I wanted to tag along. Having attended Judo classes myself as a ten year old, I thought it was a great idea. So after we’d arrived I sat at the side and watched the class until the last lesson, then Andrew called me over to introduce me to the instructor. He assumed I was checking out the class because I wanted to join, and hearing my accent, asked me how long I’d been in Canada. When I told him I’d arrived two hours earlier he looked kind of shocked, and must have thought I was an eccentric over enthusiastic Brit!
Yeah, breaker one-nine, this here's the Rubber Duck
Winter in Hamilton, Ontario was brutal. It was a couple of weeks before Christmas and I’d never experienced quite as much snow as this before, plus it was bloody freezing. Compared to Britain, everything seemed huge. Cars were huge, shopping malls were huge, and they had weird must-have items like Mood Rings, Pet Rocks™ and Earth Shoes. The favourite TV shows were Happy Days, The Six Million Dollar Man, and Wonder Woman, and the number one hit on the radio was Convoy by CW McCall.
1975 was the year Jaws was released, and Andrew took me to see it at the local movie theatre. He also took me to a rather dodgy theatre downtown to see a Swedish porn movie, which was absolute rubbish, but a worthwhile experience for a couple of teenagers.
A little way into my month long stay, the family took me on an over the border trip from Niagara Falls to Buffalo, New York, which to be honest was a complete shock, and looked nothing like the America I had in my mind’s eye. Despite that, I’d finally made it to NIAGARA FALLS, NEW YORK, and I bought a sweatshirt proclaiming those very words from a local department store to prove my conquest.
On Christmas day I was given some amazing gifts, one of which was a vintage 8mm movie camera. I managed to get some great shots of an incredibly ice packed Niagara Falls, but I spent most of my footage filming The Six Million Dollar Man off the tv. “Steve Austin, astronaut. A man barely alive. Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology. We have the capability to build the world’s first bionic man. Steve Austin will be that man. Better than he was before. Better, stronger, faster.”
This was the month that Jaime Sommers first appeared in a two-part episode titled The Bionic Woman and I became obsessed with the show having previously read the novel Cyborg, by Martin Caidin. This was the time before VHS video recording, in fact the VHS system wasn’t invented until the following year, that’s how ancient I am!
From my cuttings file, a lovely (uncredited) portrait of Lindsay Wagner. I wish I'd written the date and name of the magazine on it in retrospect, though it's most likely from somewhere between 1976 and 1978, which is when The Bionic Woman aired. I'm loving that typeface!
My copy of TV Sci-Fi Monthly from 1976, the year of the Bionic Man and slow-motion sprinting! This had a large… sorry, GIANT fold-out poster inside.
I enjoyed my time in Canada so much that I visited again in June 1977. Seeing Ontario in the heat of summertime was a whole different experience, and Andrew suggested going to a drive-in movie, something I’d never done before. This was a late-night horror double bill of David Cronenberg's Rabid and George Romero's Night of the Living Dead. Between the films came a trailer for something that immediately caught our attention, in fact we were so impressed that we decided to seek it out and go and see it the very next day.
The film was called Star Wars, and it was absolutely ground-breaking for the time. It was even more impressive with no background knowledge or hype to affect our expectations. Needless to say, I couldn't wait to see it again, but on my return to London I had to wait a whole six months until the UK release date of December 27th. It seems incredible that the gap between film releases in the US and UK was so vast in those days, but that's the way it was, and patience is a virtue. Above is the original flyer that I grabbed from the cinema in Hamilton, Ontario at the time. It’s interesting to note that before I left for the flight back to London, one of the news bulletins on Canadian tv gave a warning that British PUNKS were making their way onto flights to Canada. The horror!!!
London in the late 1970s was definitely very PUNK! More of that to come…
BOSTIN!
On that Sci-Fi monthly cover. it looks like the same artist painted Steve Austin’s cut-aways as did the Biotronic Man stickers for 2000AD #2