Gilly wrote: So the big mystery on here now is am I male or female.
Well it does provide a bit of lighthearted relief, Gilly. I suppose it comes down to the pronunciation of Gilly. If the G is a hard sound, as in Gordon, or the surname Gill, where I think your choice of username might come from, I would be correct in assuming that you are male. On the other hand, if the G is soft as in Jilly or jelly, then Digi is probably right. And after all, you are turning out to be a bit of a tease........... Then again you could be Digi's next door neighbour, in which case he's cheating because he knows the answer in advance. However, in that case, why has not come back to prove his assertion? Conclusion, we're both guessing. We await your revelation, Gilly, with bated breath!!
As we are on the subject of Gilly male or female, but (off topic),for what its worth im going Male, reasons being likes football, Sheffield United, although that could be a worry! Also likes video games. And just by past posts.Yeh i know some girls like football and video games but...
Did anyone else notice how some parts of the covers they showed were selectively blurred or filled in with flat colour? Beanos #3577 (the one the lady was holding in the beginning) and #3551 both suffered from this, probably as well as some others. I checked for those two comics, and in both cases the top-secret areas were advertising the price - which was then, of course, £1.35, not £1.50 as most of the programme hinged on. They were really diligent about it too - in a later segment, where lots of random comics were shown in close-up, #3551 made a second appearance at the left-hand edge of one shot, with very little more than the barcode visible. Right in the bottom left-hand corner was the section of the barcode which then announced the price. They'd remembered to smudge that out as well.
I could understand it if it was the other way around - trying to make out that the Beano was cheaper than it really was, and blurring the price on some post-rise issues, which would seem to fit their agenda nicely - but why on earth did they bother doing that?
Also, the twelve-year-old's 'menacing' interviews - and filmed segments in the background in which he self-consciously pretends to 'play' while his grandmother pretends to give him orders - made me cringe. I know film crews insist on this sort of thing, and nothing has ever persuaded them that it's really far more embarrassing than necessary (hence the infamous 'door-knocking' scenes which decorate so many travel documentaries), but that poor lad has probably already suffered three days of hell in the school playground.
And did anyone else feel the Beano segment sat rather uneasily with the preceding segment, in which two pensioners were left freezing over the coldest Christmas in a century due to a design fault in their expensive boiler which the company then forced them to cough up two hundred quid of their own cash to rectify? I suppose I can't say I wasn't given fair warning by the hyperventilating "it's the principle of the thing!" speech at the beginning, which sounded like a letter by Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells.
As for the price rises themselves, the film didn't really cover anything not already covered on this forum, but I did feel it left out one important fact, as yet unrevealed, which really can't be accommodated in the traditional consumer rights 'filmed segment demolishing a given company followed by a dead-eyed recital of one of that company's endlessly recycled press releases' template - why are gifts necessary?
A few months ago, when the Dandy sales figures were published, it came to light that there were six issues of the comic which stood head and shoulders above all of the rest. These represented the comic's entire complement of school holiday overpriced 'gift' issues in the period covered. Why did they sell so much better? Is it because retailers try harder (or at all) to sell them, or because ignorant parents insist on getting the gifts because they think a mere comic will never keep their offspring quiet, or is it, indeed, the children doing the insisting?
And if it has been conclusively proven that the only way to sell a comic at anything approaching a decent rate is to hike the price and bag it with worthless 'gifts', then why don't they do it every week? DC Thomson's statement on the programme said that, because gift issues cost more to produce, they must pass it onto consumers, but that's circular logic - why are they willingly inflicting higher costs upon themselves, and if the answer is that it boosts sales, why are they willingly inflicting lower sales upon themselves every time they don't put up the price? Toxic uses this model and it seems to have suited them well enough, judging by those same ABCs - was it just residual sentiment, rather than hard-nosed commercialism, at DC Thomson which led to all the bad PR (exemplified here) which inevitably accompanies the current awful worst-of-both-worlds compromise?
"But every other publication is doing it!" not accepted as an answer, by the way. Why are all of them doing it? The Dandy and Beano were born in 1937/8 out of a desire to change the marketplace, not follow the crowd, and having a "flexible pricing policy" just because the Joneses are doing it is just pathetic.
I don't like gifts, free or "amazing". I wish the Beano could be £1.50 every week, 52 weeks a year (not 51 weeks, as of 2005, or 50 weeks, as of 2011), standing or falling on the quality of its comics, not a drunken competition with everything else on the shelf to see how much plastic they can Sellotape to the flimsy paper of the cover before the comic is ripped to pieces under its weight (which is a very real hazard these days). I'm convinced that continuing to push the comic solely through increasingly hostile retailers is tantamount to banging one's head against a brick wall, that they really need to find new distribution channels (getting comics onto Apple's Newsstand is a step in the right direction, but not nearly far enough removed from the existing 73-year-old business model), and that, more likely than not, the current mania about 'gifts' is symptomatic of this underlying problem.
Help! Help! We're being held prisoner in a signature factory!
On a related note does anyone here remember back in the early 2000s when the Beano was on Short Change because they had messed up someone's beano club membership.
I think Swirly's made some good points here. I don't like having to pay extra for the gifts with the Beano - even as a kid I was never bothered by most of the free gifts. Personally I do think it is a shame that so many children now seem to be more interested in the gifts than the comics.
However, I have to say based on what I've read about the programme (I haven't watched it), it did not provide anything new to say about the Beano, or indeed comics in general. I can also clearly imagine what the filmed sequences were like despite not actually seeing them, as those types of feature are in my opinion rather hackneyed - I imagine it's similar to the sort of segments you see on the local news.
'Michael Owen isn't the tallest of players, but his height more than makes up for it' - Mark Lawrenson
I actually thought the piece mostly put the comic itself in good light and portrayed it as a worthwhile purchase for your kids - obviously it was negative about the pricing but they had good things to say about the content of the comic. Some really nice archive footage as well.
Jon wrote:Some really nice archive footage as well.
I wouldn't be very surprised if they had a warehouse of that stuff. It probably came out of the same archive as that picture of a car sliding down a hill.
It's like stock sound effects - you don't notice, until you hear one of them being used again.
Help! Help! We're being held prisoner in a signature factory!
Jonny Whizz wrote:I think Swirly's made some good points here. I don't like having to pay extra for the gifts with the Beano - even as a kid I was never bothered by most of the free gifts. Personally I do think it is a shame that so many children now seem to be more interested in the gifts than the comics.
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At least when i was kid the gifts were free & very good & useful to me like the various star wars & panini football sticker books but the gifts now are useless & break within 5 mins as was witnessed by me last weekend as i let my 8 year niece have her pick of the tat out of a big plastic bag i throw them in,most were destroyed by playing with em for a few mins.
Somehow in the 30's the gifts on the Wizard, Hotspur etc were useful, informative, entertaining, had new artwork/text created for them and were free! Things such as books about footballers / cars / aircraft, supplements with additional long complete stories etc.
Mind you I suppose the economics of scale would prevent such a thing happening today. Back then those papers were probably selling hundreds of thousands.
Then again I recently got a small press comic that came with a 'free' (well I was probably paying for the package as a whole) sketch book that had the character from the comic on the cover. In fact the sketch book is thicker and taller than the comic it came with!
So the big mystery on here now is am I male or female.
Then again you could be Digi's next door neighbour, in which case he's cheating because he knows the answer in advance. 
Guess I should've said "They" instead of a gender specific word, lol. I was thinking Gilly as in Gillian, which is a female name.
Also likes video games. And just by past posts.Yeh i know some girls like football and video games but...
