Sleigh bells, holly, Santa, etc. You know the drill.
But right now, as someone rather brilliantly defined it on Twitter, it’s the brief and shining season between the bumper Christmas Radio Times coming out and the realisation that there’s nothing you want to watch in there at all.
So to celebrate, some Christmas covers from the past. When graphic design was much, much better.
That one’s Hans Unger, not unsurprisingly. I can’t tell you who the next two are by, but the date from 1965 and 1966 respectively.
I particularly like the latter one, and wouldn’t mind finding the original artwork under the tree, should someone happen to have it lying around.
But things were good before the war too – take this McKnight Kauffer from 1926. As I am sure many of you would like to.
For those of you who would like to do a proper trawl, the full Flickr set is here. But be warned, there are more than a thousand photos.
And finally can I note that this blog post was produced without any co-operation at all from my ‘y’ key, so apologies for any typos.
That third Radio Times cover bears a striking stylistic resemblance to some 1960s LT posters by Gaynor Chapman. Surely not a coincidence!
I agree. You definitely win the Christmas poster spotter award there.
I’ve just stumbled across this R4 ‘Art of Radio Times’ programme from 2013 which I’m sure you will find of interest… http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03bfsyw
…or, perhaps, even better a BBC4 Arena programme… http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01gwdnn
Ha, brilliant stuff – I will sit down with both of those properly (have had a quick look at the Arena already) at some point after the madness has abated slightly.
The Art of the Radio Times does seem a very uncool subject for Arena though. A few years further down the line, I used to work along the corridor from them in one of my early jobs and they were the scariest people in the world. We used to go round the long way rather than walk through their office to get to the canteen, that’s how scary they were.