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| Jugglers Ahoy! | |||||||||
| The Jugglers, eh? A fine body of bods. Here we get a few words of wisdom from, er, the ones we could track down. | |||||||||
'We hope you enjoy coming along on this little trip down memory lane,' said Val Doonican in his 1978 Christmas Special, and, do you know, we like to think that he was a really irritatingly nice man whose jumpers should have been burnt under the Geneva Convention. But anyway. If you're a regular YS reader, chin up, still that quivering lip and settle back with this commemorative goodbye ish sort of thang. And if you're a casual reader who's just picked up YS for the first time, why didn't you buy us before we were closed down, you bast? Before you go, a word on the price. £2.95 for a 68-page mag without a covertape may seem a bit steep, but - hey! - remember that... er... hang on. Blimey. It is a bit steep, actually. (Snip! A Publisher)
JONATHAN NASH Oh no. I've been persuading so many people to stump up their few words, I've completely forgotten to do mine. And (as Andy's so kindly reminded me) I'm now the last, and I'm holding up the design of the page. Yikes. So, er, um, YS. Blimey. (This is tricky.) I suppose I could yatter on about my love of the Speccy, and how I while away many pleasant hours by breaking the law and hacking my games on to my beloved +D disk, but that would be awfully tedious and I'd probably get a nasty letter from FAST. Er, I could (if pressed) relate the story of my YS interview, when I turned up in a sandwich board, carrying little flags telling everyone how brilliant I was (and failed to get the job). Or I could throw in a crafty reversal sort of thang whereby I built up expectations by talking about the best ever Speccy mag, then revealing it to be Crash - but quickly averting disaster by mentioning that when Crash became indescribably crap I turned to YS and lo! it was extremely silly, or something. Actually, it's probably best if I stick to some general observations. Firstly, YS is so spanky because it's the silly bits that count - nobody gives a tinker's trouser if you stick to the subject or not. Mentioning the game in a review is seen as a sort of added bonus. YS is all about being funny - the legendary Tetley Tea Folk Pssst!, the even more legendary photo love stories, trillions of other non-Speccy-related stuff - that's what counts. And that's why I love it. And that's why I'm heartbroken it's closing. And now, in traditional YS fashion, an entirely unnecessary picture of George Formby. Yibble. ANDY OUNSTED Lummocks, was it really over three years ago that Old Faithful' (better known as the Crap Bike to regular Spec-chums) first strayed into the YS Shed pit for a quick refuel, never to rejoin the race? How well I remember being strapped in front of an Apple Mac for the first time and given vague instructions about something called Your Sinclair.' 'Lawks a lordy! I'll never get the hang of this!' I exclaimed, pacing up and down the freshly-mown Shed patio, Nowadays, of course, I can sit back in my big comfy chair, take a puff from my Havana cigar, smile glowingly and think to myself. 'Lawks a lordy! I'll never get the hang of this!' I started off doing mostly the black and white pages, but was gradually let loose on the big colour double page spreads. What fun! Sal (Bun In The Oven) Meddings took over from Kev (Delroy George) Hibbert as Art Editor from ish 57 (September 1990). The two of us set about redesigning the magazine, 'colourful but legible' being the watch words. Along the way. My beloved crap bike (quite rightly) emerged as a celebrity in its own right, becoming the subject of the occasional doodlebug and even a game! Andy Ounsted's Crap Bike Simulator was reviewed by YS's very own heartthrob Rich Pelley as part of his Crap Game Corner in issue 61. (Yikes.) Sal left us in the summer of 1991 to pop her sprog, and handed the baton over to me. Two years later and I'm still here. To date I still can't play Speccy games to save my life, but putting YS together each month is always much more than Just A Job. I shall miss it. (Sniff sniff awaaagh sniff sniff.)
MATT BIELBY Crap and Oscar ceremony-ish though it sounds, the first, and most important, thing about Your Sinclair was always the people. Such a roll call of talent - so many well-known names, many of whom have gone on to bigger, but not necessarily better, things. There are old Editors who since became publishers and more - Kevin Cox, Teresa Maughan. Old writers who've since become Editors: Andy Ide, Jackie Ryan, Linda Barker. And so many others - the rest of the 'big names' read like a role call of the sharpest talent in the business: Marcus Berkmann, now of the Independent and the Daily Mail; the supremely funny Duncan MacDonald; David Wilson, who later became editor of Zero, and now works at top software house Electronic Arts; Jonathan Davies from Super Play; Phil South; David McCandless; Rich Pelley; Sally Meddings; Kev Hibbert; Catherine Higgs, and, of course, the current guys. What a totally bloody brilliant bunch of people. Two other things make Your Sinclair so significant. One is the influence it's had on magazines like Amiga Power, Super Play, Game Zone, and the old Zero - indeed, there's hardly a games mag out there now that doesn't in some way try to ape the distinctive Your Sinclair combination of wit, cleverness (without, I think, being clever-clever) and attention to detail. Secondly, it was always, and remains, a bloody good read - just try taking a quick look through a pile of back issues some day. It can't be done - you'll find you have to commit hours to it, every issue of Your Sinclair being so packed with good bits it can't help but drag you in. It was something special, Your Sinclair, and I'm going to miss it terribly. ANDY IDE YS? Oh blimey. My best YS memories were of the Dennis days up in London with 'T'zer' Teresa, 'Whistlin' Rick' David, 'Teapot' Dunc and 'Me' Me. It was my first proper job, y'know, er, Prod Edding (Wa-hey! Oo-er! Etc), and I can remember coming into the office on my first day and seeing all these people buzzing around Macs in this complete chaotic tip and thinking 'I've made it! I'm in the real world.' What cruel tricks fate plays upon us, eh, Spec-chums? For I was actually in YS, which is about as far removed from reality as you can get without a really strong cup of my special herbal tea. Or something. Er, what else? YS was certainly one of the best, funniest and most irreverent mags on the shelves at the time, but you probably know that already. Um. Oh, spoons.
ANDY HUTCH Have you ever wandered past a restaurant, smelt some really great food and been reminded of some long-forgotten memory? Every now and then I'll read or hear something and be transported back to the madness, loud music, great games, odd readers and ice cream that was Your Sinclair. It all started innocuously enough, Jane Richardson phoned me up and asked me if I'd like to edit Your Sinclair. I said 'Yowzer!' and moved my skateboard, skate-pads, spare AC-90 trucks and early collection of EMF singles into the shed. Before long though, I'd been touched by the hippy grooviness of the magazine and its team and left YS to find myself at a skate park in Swanage. Needless to say I didn't. Find myself that is. But I did buy a very fetching pair of Mambo shorts. Highlights of my all too brief tenure at YS include: Linda's amazing collection of WWF figurines, the Alton Towers photo-shoot, the river photo-shoot, Jon's and James' captions, those incredibly annoying kids from the Orkney Islands who'd always phone up when we were on deadline, Lisa's Inny Outy column, the Ernie cartoon strip and Andy O's crap bike. Which is still crap. Still, it's all over now and at least you get the goodbyes in one great big chunk rather than over the course of a weekend like they did with Cheers. I'm jolly proud to have been part of the most influential computer magazine ever, even if I don't get to keep the negatives. The next time you're confronted by that wall of computer magazines in WH Smith's, scan your way down the shelves and you'll realise just how much effect this bats-arse, not-of-this-earth, hokey, mad, bizarre and completely unique mag has affected everything that followed. Goodbye YS, you can keep the colander. LINDA BARKER I remember buying my very first copy of YS. I'd spotted an ad for a staff writer in the university careers library and I just had to pop down to the sweet shop and buy a copy. I was sold! I applied for the job and was asked to come down to Bath for an interview. I hurriedly contacted a friend in Bristol, packed my duffel bag and left! After the interview I went back to London and moped around for a week, convinced that I'd done appallingly. The day I got the job offer from Future my family must have rejoiced as much as me, What YS means to me above everything else is GOOD TIMES with BEAUT PEOPLE! Looking back, it's not the late nights or the non-arrival of games that I remember - it's the chatter, the laughter, the photo-shoots and that great feeling you get when an issue comes back from the printers. Actually, I think that's my enduring memory of YS - opening the first box of issues to come in and poring over them - despairing at any mistakes, rejoicing at the many pages that really worked. It used to amaze me that I was actually getting paid for this! Now call me biased, but I think the world's going to be a slightly sadder place without Your Sinclair - it's certainly brightened up a few years of my life.
JONATHAN DAVIES I bought my Spectrum in 1983. I've always loved it, and I always will, even though it spends most of its life under my bed these days. So when YS came along I was delighted. Hurrah, I thought. (My vocabulary already having become irrevocably altered.) And I was even more delighted when, shortly afterwards. I found myself working for it. Now, there aren't many magazines for which I'd have been prepared to write the tips pages two years running. And even fewer that would inspire me to compile their type-in pages for month after month. But YS tips and type-ins weren't like other magazines', and I didn't mind doing them at all. Not very much, anyway. At least, not to start off with. Actually, I hated it. But there were lots of nice things about working for YS - the people (there are none finer), the unrivalled sense of office camaraderie, and the money. And I had just as much fun reading YS as I did writing for it. It somehow managed to be funny, knowledgeable, stylish and completely useless, all at the same time. No matter how many people joined or left the team, what got sellotaped to the front of it, how few games it had in it, or how small it shrunk, Your Sinclair never stopped being the best Spectrum mag in the world. And now it's gone. MARCUS BERKMANN I started working on YS from issue 15 - that's February 1987, if you can think back that far without being physically sick. They were happy days. Crammed like battery hens into a tiny office full of unlabelled cassettes, press releases and six-month-old ham sandwiches (all of which belonged to Phil), we worked ludicrously long hours for virtually no money at all, only to be told at the end of every month that our work was 'complete crap'. Which, at the beginning, it may well have been, for YS was only third in circulation terms to those ancient warhorses Crash and Sinclair User. But at least we were trying something different. In fact, by shamelessly aping Smash Hits we were doing something no other computer mag had yet thought of - we were being funny. Look around you now and you'll find that almost all of the game mags of 1993 have been influenced to a greater or lesser extent by Your Sinclair of 1987/1988. Hot? We were so hot you could have fried an egg on us. Soon Crash was no more and Sinclair User was in steep and irreversible decline. How we laughed. Six years later I am writing TV reviews for the Daily Mail and a weekly sports column for the Independent On Sunday. But what of those glorious years? Would I swap my current enormous wealth and far-reaching fame for those halcyon days toiling in poverty tor Your Sinclair? Not on your nelly.
JAMES LEACH There comes, in every person's life, a perfect time. A joyous string of moments which you know will never be surpassed. A wonderful, creative era in which you pinch yourself, wondering when the marvellous dream will end. I had that time when I was at college. Then I was forced to get a job and had to make do with working on Your Sinclair. But I soon realised what a nice thing YS was. It covered the Speccy which, although not the most powerful computer, was certainly the happiest. I remarked to Andy Ide (before he became Andy Hutch, Linda Barker and finally changed his name to Jonathan Nash), that I believed Sinclair had put a happiness chip in the Spectrum. He told me to get out of his garden. It's little known that Prince Charles read YS from an early age, as did Norman Lamont. But there have been other, more successful cases where it has added much to young lives. It made folk laugh, cry and openly whine about the cover price. With its passing, a great age has gone. An age where Ernie was psychotic, where foreigners were mocked, where trainspotters diced with death and where the word 'crap' was tossed about like a smelly, dung-covered beachball. An age of fun, games, and the odd POKE too. It was an institution, possibly Hinckley Point Power Station. Times have changed, my friends. So now buy Gamesmaster, a fine multi-format magazine, available from all newsagents at a reasonably priced £1.95. RICH PELLEY One thing's for sure, my time at YS has indubitably taught me values - chiefly the values of waffling. If, when my journalist career began, anyone had beseeched me to write an article of what Your Sinclair well, was going to mean to me, then I wouldn't have had an inkling of where to start. But look! Four years on and here I am, 64 words through, having made not one relevant or coherent point at all. The art of concealing the truth has also been related to me over the years. I mean, being totally honest, my job at YS has done little more than provide me with an opportunity to make a fast buck before moving on to bigger and better things. Serendipitiously (YS has also shown me that you can't beat a good thesaurus) I now know far better than to mention things like that. And best of all, Your Sinclair has told me how to combine my waffling and lying skills, especially when fabricating a reason why copy is late. Actually, this article is going to be late too. And when I explained to Jonathan this was 'because I've just had both my arms amputated so it's going to take me a bit longer to type it all out with my nose', he believed me. Editors, eh? What suckers. (That's it, this time you really are fired. Ed)
KEVIN COX The ex-Ed, who's now a Publisher, kept saying he was far too busy to see us. But we pushed into his office anyway (chucking out some boring bloke in a suit who was trying to sign something) and shot questions at him. 'So, Kevin, what are your memories of Your Sinclair?' 'Oh my God, what have you done? That deal was worth over £450,000.' 'What was T'zer really like, then? And Davey? And did Marcus really banter?' 'Aaarghh.' (Kevin jumps out of window.) 'Blimey.' (We leave quietly.) PHIL SOUTH Sum up my years at YS in 250 words? Er... well, food. I ate a lot. I went out to lunch a bit. I spent all my money in Forbidden Planet, which was just around the corner, unluckily for me. I wrote a bit, a lot actually, and I reviewed an absolute donkey choking wad of games. Brilliant games, the like of which you seldom see these days. And I took all the screenshots in a dark little kitchen at the back of the offices. Nobody ever found out what I was really doing in there. Heh heh heh. I was the staff writer at first, Imperial Starfrighter in fact, and later technical editor for two years. It seemed like more, especially with first Kevin 'Kippers' Cox and then T'zer breathing down your neck, and Sara Biggs biting me bum every time I got my reviews in late. But it was the best fun I ever had and I got paid for it too. Eventually. (Arf.) Looking back, it was like being on a school trip with a lot of really good old friends and no teachers. There'll always be a soft spot for it in my heart. Soft, sticky, gooey and altogether not a very dry and not very well remembered thing. It's responsible for getting me where I am today, and by the way can somebody remind where that is exactly. 'cos I'm late for dinner. Bye YS, see you later. STUART 'AWARDY' CAMPBELL YS - well, it's just (sob) y'know, it was, (sniff)... well... (cough), oh God, it's no use, I can't go on... (BANG!)
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