'The Christmas Special'

I have always loved the idea of 'Christmas special editions' of things. Even as a kid my eyes would light up at the sight in the newsagents of a festive edition of my favourite magazine or comic. There is something wonderfully universal ( or was) about the holiday season and glamming up everything once a year to make it seem special seems like a great idea anyway! Communication has also always been a big thing for me. In the 70's I used to invite friends round and we would record 'The Tony May Show' on  a cassette in my bedroom. I used to do the presenting, interviewing, make up a pop quiz  and produce the whole thing and my friends would help me pick the records to play and sometimes contribute by making up a mix of current records or by doing a stint on record reviews etc. It was all great fun...

Ironically, three of the friends I interviewed on 'The Tony May Show' went on to be people well worth interviewing! Martin Curcher became a well-known musician and Martin Smith & Darren Ash ended up as two of the 'Mastermixers' associated with 'Jive Bunny & The Mastermixers' of numerous number 1 hits fame! Martin & Darren also had a hit record ('Time To Make The Floor Burn') and a couple of hit albums under the name 'Megabass' and saw their song appear on TOTP and themselves in Smash Hits! 

Another late 70's/ 80's hobby of mine was writing my own magazine - 'Amayzing'. As well as a love of presenting, singing, songwriting and film making I have always been a journalist at heart. I peddled my home-made magazines around a few of the local newspapers etc back in the day but was never able to get an offer of a job in that field. The world now is OBSESSED with qualifications and bits of paper but it was a little better back then. I have always been a 'flair' person rather than an academically brilliant one and thus thrive on inspiration, gut feeling and passion to help me produce work. The finer art of 'dotting t's and correct placement of punctuation marks' has never really interested me and so I have perpetually found learning stuff like that difficult. If I am not interested in something it tends to go 'in one ear and out the other' which often seems like arrogance to others. I don't see it as arrogance though. I am always a buzzing hive of ideas and just need to get them down on paper with all of the passion still fizzing off the page. Trying to think about how to

put things down in a grammatically correct way and struggling to do that just hampers my flow and blunts my artistic bent. Once you have the full body of an idea you can always get someone else to help you with all that if needs be but if your writing is soulless, dry and boring who is going to want to read it?

Anyway, I guess because of my inability to cope with the finer points of learning I have ended up where I am in life. People (employers) don't want to take on individuals with 'flair' - they want to take on those who have shown that they have the ability to do the job by taking the relevant exams. The snag for me is that I really don't want to try to 'rein in' my natural way of doing things because I am quite happy with the results  and don't want to turn into a 'regimented, trained robotic writer'. I guess this is why, however, in 2013 I am sitting here writing this blog and others in jobland are getting paid a fortune!

Anyway, the real point in this particular post here is to (ironically, seeing as this is the Internet) mourn the continuing decline in the need for physical magazines (or indeed printed material of any kind) these days. Kids still have a great selection of comics with free toys, stickers or gifts attached to them but most of the more adult mainstream magazines have now either disappeared or been reduced to 'monthly' editions. With the Internet taking up more and more of peoples time and attention it seems inevitable to me that one day the printed word will become virtually commercially dead. Things have already gone the same way in the music world (mp3's have killed the physical format) and it is getting harder and harder to sell physical newspapers, magazines and books these days (kindle and free online newspaper reading). So I am writing this little blog entry as a kind of tribute to the days of the printed word and as a little reminder to the child in you of 'The Christmas special'...