The Junk Strategy

For nearly twenty years I designed sleeves for the Network DVD label. It’s fair to say that I got the job on the strength of having known the company CEO Tim Beddows since childhood, but I was also uniquely qualified for the role, which involved designing packaging and promotional items for releases of vintage TV series. For as long as I’d been able to hold a pencil and make marks with it, I’d been drawing my favourites from television, sometimes creating comics or books based on those series, and always paying special attention to the graphics, even if my attempts to render them in biro, pencil crayon and felt tip were often laughable.

The Network DVD label has now sadly closed, following the untimely death of my old friend Tim. In this blog, I’ll be reviewing some of my work from the past 19 years, talking about how I created various designs, and occasionally sharing some of those that didn’t make the grade.

First up, a design I did very recently for a revamp of Network’s Public Eye box set. This is an example of what I call the ‘junk’ sleeve, and was inspired in part by an old TV Times cover, and equally by a series of James Bond paperbacks that appeared in the 1970s. These covers, superbly art directed and photographed, featured tableaux of impedimenta associated with the novel in question. They had the feel of advertising photography of the era, and were reminiscent of the kind of set-ups one would see in mail order catalogues. At the time, I didn’t care much for them, preferring the minimalist approach of the mid-60s Pan paperbacks with their iconic typography.

The so-called (by me) 'junk' covers of James Bond Pan paperbacks, circa 1974

The ‘table top of junk’ was a strategy I remembered years later when called upon to design a sleeve for David Nobb’s comic drama A Bit of a Do. I thought it might be a good idea to give the impression of a table at the end of a wedding reception, strewn with bits of confetti, empty bottles, glasses, etc. On this occasion, I photographed most of the items in situ and did the rest in photoshop. But when it came to the sleeve for the BBC’s A Very Peculiar Practice – which I’d decided would benefit from the ‘junk’ strategy, I did almost the whole thing in photoshop. I’ll look at that sleeve in more detail in another post, but today, let’s have a quick look at Public Eye.

I’d not long got through watching all the surviving episodes of this classic down-at-heel detective drama when the opportunity arose to revamp the sleeve design for a re-issue of our DVD set. I’d seen a 1969 TV Times cover which I thought it would be fun to recreate, but mine turned out to be more of a homage than a straight copy. I’d already created some faux paperwork (complete with coffee stains) for another sleeve (ITV’s Bill Maynard sitcom, The Gaffer), so I reused some of these, alongside a few other, shall we say, found items (kettle, coins, mug, etc). The ‘mug called Frank’ was easy enough to create, simply warping some type to wrap around a generic image of a white mug. The rail ticket was one I’d created for a Goodies release, with the destinations altered to suit Frank Marker’s milieu. Added via photography were the wallet, keys, pencil and coins. The wallet had belonged to my dad during the 1960s, and looked like the kind of thing Marker might have stuffed in his raincoat pocket. Marker was frequently to be found in his tatty offices brewing cups of tea and coffee using an old fashioned kettle, so that had to go in there too. I had a moment’s inspiration when I decided to include Marker’s refection in the kettle...

I had no idea at the time of designing it, but this elaborate sleeve would be one of the last designs I did for Network. Junk would prove to be an appropriate theme for the design...

Three more takes on the same idea... some of Marker's paperwork can also be seen on The Gaffer's desktop... presumably they worked for the same clients...