It’s been a hot summer, so I’ve certainly had a lot of wear out of my t-shirts. However, I had to retire a few worn-out shirts recently and due to uncertainty around my employment I didn’t replace them.
Magpie was Thames Television’s answer to the BBC’s flagship children’s magazine programme Blue Peter. It came from a tiny studio, seemed to have a tiny budget1 but nevertheless stood up very well against Blue Peter due to the sheer inventiveness of the production team and the professionalism of its presenters.
I think my strongest memory of Magpie was watching Jenny Hanley go to a military base to undergo underwater helicopter escape training. When I watched it I think it was one of the bravest things I’d ever seen a presenter do on television.
And, of course, the treks around the magnificently shabby Teddington Studios during the Magpie appeals were also fascinating to me as a child.
I always loved Magpie’s graphic design, so I have always wanted to have a Magpie t-shirt. Mick Robertson-era Magpie is the distilled essence of a 70s childhood.
The Magpie font, Mania, dates from 1967. This means it would have appeared strikingly new and fresh when Thames started to use it for Magpie in the summer of 1968. It was designed by the brilliant type designer Ed Benguiat and it became emblematic of the 70s in Britain as it was adopted by Spangles, The Goodies and The Dick Emery Show. If you like the font it is available to download here.
My first brush with this font was designing a Spangles T-shirt for Al Duprés.
Magpie used a semi-circular word mark in Mania, with a heavy drop shadow that was airbrushed to give a 3D appearance. It reminded me of a set of false teeth.
To get this into Inkscape I traced all the lettering by hand, as I didn’t want to risk using a font version of Mania only to find that they used a subtly different version of the font for the logo.
I could then draw the drop shadows on the shapes. These were straightforward to trace.
The airbrushing seemed a bit of a challenge at first. I toyed with the idea of using Inkscape’s rather complicated mesh gradients to shade the logo, but my laziness kicked in and I thought I would try and wing it using simple radial gradients. Fortunately this worked.
The best source material I could find for tracing Murgatroyd, Magpie’s mascot, was the cover of the single2 of the theme tune, so I loaded this into Inkscape and started tracing.
I always trace things by hand. I know there are vectorisation tools, AI Tracing tools and so on. But I don’t use them; I like everything I do to have the minimum number of nodes possible, and I also like to have correct Bézier node and handle placement on vector designs. I do this to make sure my vector drawings look good at any size—otherwise, what’s the point of creating vector artwork?
Hand tracing Murgatroyd is quite a long job as he’s pretty detailed. It’s just a case of putting on a box set (in this case The Essential Capella Istropolitana) and zoning out. I could have cheated and used the simplified 1969 version of Murgatroyd, but I think I prefer the original.
As usual, I work using Git, and have a remote GitHub repository, to protect against losing any work. Using Git means I can rewind back to any point in the creation of artwork which is very useful if I change my mind about things.
Finally I got the whole of Murgatroyd traced. You really have to get into the zone to do this kind of tracing, and if you manage it you don’t notice the amount of time it’s taking you!
The next challenge was for me to somehow put Murgatroyd and the Magpie word-mark together for the t-shirt. The programme itself came up with two solutions. The official Magpie t-shirt cheated by unbending the word-mark to a shallower angle:
Whereas the studio set kept the semicircular nature of the word-mark, but made Murgatroyd too small to really see.
I wanted to have the semi-circular word-mark and Murgatroyd the magpie at a decent size. Murgatroyd always looked fat and greedy to me, so he had to be big, and the word-mark had to look like a set of dentures.
It soon became clear that the only way to do this was to have the word-mark both in front of and behind Murgatroyd, so he would be nestling in it.
I did toy with the idea of changing the colour of the word-mark, but I really like it in black and white as it harks back to the original 1968 monochrome titles.
For the back of the t-shirt, I wanted some kind of Thames Television branding so I selected the print logo from 1980, which is something I had already traced for something else.
Therefore the final t-shirt design, front and back was this:
Notice again that I used the Inkscape Pages feature so I could keep the front and back of my t-shirt design in one file. For t-shirts I have to design at 30cm x 35cm at 300dpi.
In Hungary, I always get my t-shirts made by a company called LetMicro. I’ve used them for many years and they always do a fantastic job; the clothes wear out long before the printing and most of my t-shirts have lasted about 5 years. Here’s what the front will look like:
And here’s how the back will look:
Now I have Murgatroyd and the Magpie word mark, I can do a number of things. I can recreate some of the sets of Magpie titles, or some of the Thames 35mm continuity slides for Magpie. I could even recreate the Magpie studio set in Blender. However, these are jobs for another time.
Magpie faded away, feeling a bit tatty and rather unloved, in 1980. It was replaced by Ace Reports (which was rather forgettable) but fortunately Thames eventually came up with a worthy successor in CBTV: Channel 14, and of course we could still wonder at Mick Robertson’s amazing teeth and barnet on Freetime.
- Thames liked to blow its cash on poaching BBC stars to make piss-weak versions of their BBC series, rather than rewarding the talent it nurtured itself. ↩︎
- The single recording (Decca F-13256) would have been a bit of a disappointment to young record buyers: even though it added a fabulous middle eight, it completely missed the soaring bass line during the verses and the triangle on the intro that were essential parts of the Magpie theme. Here’s the television version of the theme. ↩︎
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