Magnum sells archive

The Financial Times has put up a set of Magnum photos, marking the sale of the famous Paris-based agency’s print archive to a US millionaire.  It’s a very limited selection, though,  mostly Magnum images taken in the US.

Now the lords want to privatise BBC Worldwide

Radio Times: up for grabs?

BBC Worldwide should be partly privatised the House of Lords select committee on communications will say today as part of a push to allow it to become a global brand for distributing British television content.

The report, The British film and television industries – decline or opportunity?, says the £1-billion-a-year company cannot expand using the licence fee and needs access to commercial sources of funding.

The Sunday Times says the corporation is lining up the magazine division – including Radio Times and Gardener’s World – for sale. Worldwide is Britain’s fourth-biggest consumer magazines publisher and sells 85m copies a year of its 50 titles.

It is also reported to be preparing a push into computer games – an area where it has had little presence since the 1980s. Then, under software editor Dave Atherton – who went on to found Dabs.com -  BBCSoft published titles such as White Knight and Dr Who. However, it was never able to fully exploit the Doctor’s adversaries such as the Daleks because of a copyright dispute with Terry Nation who as a freelance producer for the series held the rights.

In November, Worldwide was told by Sir Michael Lyons, chairman of the BBC Trust, to cut back on its commercial operations, the profits from which are used to fund programmes.

BBC profile

1 billion a year. All
the evidence suggests that there is further scope to expand but to do this will
require private capital. It cannot be achieved by using the license fee

‘My crochet partwork hell’

‘My crochet partwork hell’ is hardly the sort of headline you’d expect but it sums up the problems one newsagent had in getting hold of copies of one of the surprise hits of the new year – The Art of Crochet. The Hachette partwork has ‘been drastically undersupplied’ one newsagent tells Retail Newsagent.

Hachette reveals that it had planned to cut distribution of the second issue by up to 70% of the first, but that figure will now be 55%.

A newsagent in Honiton was supplied 3 copies and sold them all in 24 hours.

There’s a copy on eBay at £5.01 with 4 days to go. No doubt there’ll soon be more and there’ll be a black market in photocopies.

Pink Floyd’s brilliant comic

Pink Floyd played the Liverpool Empire in November 1974 on their Wish You Were Here tour with a brilliant programme. ‘The Pink Floyd Super All-Action Official Music Programme for Boys and Girls‘ was a comic with a two-page cartoon strip for each of the band. Nick Mason and album art specialists Hipgnosis were the brains behind a great concept with art from Gerald Scarfe, Paul Stubbs, Joe Petagno, Colin Elgie and Richad Evans. I remember thinking when I saw the centre-spread cartoon by Scarfe -Why would anyone pay to make themselves look as ugly as that?!

Pink Floyd 1974 tour programme

Magazine cover of the year

Jeremy Leslie is right, Time’s top 10 magazine covers of the year are a pretty dull bunch – even repeating a four-year-old image. So he’s put out a call for you to suggest yours.

Der Spiegel gets my vote.

Cowles on magazine covers

Last lecture this year at the Editorial Design Organisation is IPC director  Andy Cowles on ‘Death by Coverline’. £20 on the door for non-members; Wednesday 16 December at Pentagram’s office. Cowles made his name at Emap before doing a stint in the US, running his own consultancy and starting at IPC in 2004.

Magazine cover secrets at Magforum.com

Oz obscenity film in 2010

The Oz magazine obscenity trial from 1971 is to be the subject of a film scheduled for release in 2010.

Hippie Hippie Shake, from Working Title Films, is based on a memoir by Richard Neville, who launched the underground magazine in London after having been found guilty of obscenity in Australia and then released – as was to happen in London.

Although IMDB gives a May 2010 release, the film is almost invisible on Working Title’s website, though an item from 2007 describes it so:

Beeban Kidron (Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason) will direct Hippie Hippie Shake in August. Starring Cillian Murphy, Sienna Miller, Emma Booth and Max Minghella, the film will take the audience on a psychedelic journey through the late ’60s in London, with Murphy playing Richard Neville, the editor of the famous satirical magazine Oz. The screenplay is being adapted from Neville’s book ‘Hippie Hippie Shake: The Dreams, The Trips, The Love-Ins, The Screw-Ups: The Sixties’. Tim Bevan, Eric Fellner and Nicky Kentish Barnes are the producers.

Chris O’Dowd plays fellow editor and now multimillionaire publisher Felix Dennis. O’Dowd was also in Working Title’s The Boat That Rocked, loosely based on the 1960s pirate ship Radio Caroline – which was funded by Queen owner Jocelyn Stevens and run from the magazine’s office. I like to think that the Bill Nighy character Quentin was based on Stevens.

Hippie Hippie Shake at Amazon.co.uk

Razzle dazzle on eBay

A copy of Razzle is going on eBay with bidding at £21! What is going on? What can possibly be in issue 49 (probably from 1953)?

Copies of Razzle, a pocket men’s monthly, typically sell for less than £5 including postage. Its big feature was a ‘dream girl’ colour illustrated pin-up by George Davies on the centre spread, the rest was timeless, humorous articles and cartoons featuring leggy girls.

Razzle’s big claim to fame today is that it inspired the flipside of ‘Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll’ by Ian Dury and the Blockheads.  The lyrics to ‘Razzle in my Pocket’ (1977) are about trying to steal a copy of Razzle from a newsagent (Dury was born in 1942):

‘In my yellow jersey, I went out on the nick.
South Street Romford, shopping arcade
Got a Razzle magazine, I never paid…’

Could it be this is the issue he was trying to nick (he’d have been about 11)?

Like many of the big-selling men’s magazines of the 1950s, the title lives on as a top-shelf magazine published by Paul Raymond (since 1983).

Commercial BBC to draw back

The BBC has been told to cut back its commercial activities with its Worldwide arm being banned from mergers and acquisitions. Also, it will be forced to sell off any of its operations that are not ‘in keeping with the BBC brand’.

Under these rules, Worldwide would not have been able to take over Redwood in the 1980s – which launched almost all today’s BBC magazines – or its Bristol-based Origin division, or Lonely Planet, probably its most controversial move.

In 2005, Worldwide was forced to sell women’s monthly Eve because it did not fit with the BBC’s aims.

BBC profile

The old, the young and Vogue

In a comment piece on marketing to the young, Mike Skapinker in the Financial Times quotes Carol Phillips, a marketing academic, who has done research  on how people respond  when reading Vogue.  The findings showed that younger people concentrated on the design, colour and font, whereas older readers focused on the content.

The way youngsters now take in information is so different that  the English lord chief justice said recently that lawyers might have to provide evidence on screens so that jurors could take it in better because they eree no longer used to sitting and listening.

Profiles of women’s magazines