An Early Magazine Read - Look In – The TV Times For Kids

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Among my earliest regular reading material was a weekly magazine called Look-In, which was basically the TV Times but just for children’s programmes aired on British commercial TV. BBC shows such as Doctor Who and Blue Peter were not covered, which often confused me. The magazine would run features on shows suitable for kids that were coming up that week, interviews with the stars, and sometimes even a comic strip based on one or more of the shows, giving its cast extra adventures and story-lines. Some shows got more attention than others, with regular features on Magpie (ITV’s version of Blue Peter), and Follyfoot, a Black Beauty style farm based adventure with horses. There were some fun and factual features – living scarecrow Worzel Gummidge had a cartoon sketch in there, and there was a feature each issue by science presenter Peter Fairley. The back pages were TV listings and summaries of all ITV shows deemed suitable for kids, so the listings ended abruptly about 6 pm as the news came on and that was seen as the switch over time to grown up TV. Ultimately, I found that my viewing was getting more grown up, and I was happy to switch channels to see the BBC output too. Look In grew from the erroneous myth that British people were only watching BBC or ITV and not channel hopping between stations. It also assumed that kids didn’t stay up to watch the news, soaps and more grown up shows. I was into Hammer Horror movies before my teens, so Look In was becoming increasingly inadequate towards covering my tastes in television. I quit reading it in the early 70’s, and probably only got it for about two years at best, though it ran until the mid 1980’s. The explosion of new TV channels, video, cable and computer games rendered Look In obsolete. Strangely, I miss Look In. It marked my transition from comic reading-to-reading more text driven magazine supplements and some basic media writing and journalism. The added Youtube is the beautiful folk song Lightning Tree theme to the TV version of Follyfoot by The Settlers Arthur Chappell