FROM THE ARCHIVE QUIZ
Head-scratching headlines
If there’s one overarching trend of recent weeks, it’s the rise of the Zoom family quiz. And From the Archive is
always happy to jump on any passing bandwagon. All of these stories are from the nineties and noughties,
when lock-ins rather than lockdowns were the norm, but what were the years (answers below)?
Forecasting king
ANSWERS May ; May ; May ; April ; May ; April ; May ; May
April & May 2020 Printweek
You don’t need
From the Archive
to tell you that
printers are a
bright bunch,
especially when
it comes to business.
However,
Bob Egerton, a Kall Kwik franchisee in Plymouth,
is one smart cookie. In , he won The
Guardian’s economic forecast competition for
the third time in eight years without any qualification
in economics. According to the report,
the figures he submitted to the competition,
sponsored by Macmillan Press, were more accurate
than chancellor Gordon Brown’s. He puts
his success down to the scope of the printing.
Cracking ad
From the Archive
isn’t quite sure
what sort of message
this ad wants
to communicate.
Rolling green hills,
two naked chaps leaping about with gay abandon
and, in the distance, a small yellow sign
saying “Düsseldorf”. “Perfect – in every way”,
reads the strapline at the top. Well, okay, if
that’s your idea of perfection. “Let’s go –
quickly” is probably good advice if you’re discovered
in flagrante, but Düsseldorf seems an
odd choice of safe haven if you’re starkers, particularly
when Drupa is on.
Card sharps
Even as a child,
From the Archive
could never see
the point in trading
or collecting
cards, but plenty
of kids did and obsessed about completing sets
of… I don’t know what. Football players?
He-Men? Transformers? Which brings us to
Pokémon, the Japanese trading card phenomenon
that took the West by storm. These cards
became so valuable that it was very profitable
for forgers to knock out faked versions, provided
the copies were good enough to be sold. But
never underestimate the natural suspicion and
cynicism of children, nor their unerring ability
to spot when they are being cheated by grownups.
A London newsagent was investigated
after local kids alerted police to faked cards sold
in the shop. Apparently, the youngsters picked
up on different crimping styles on the packs and
lower-grammage board used for the cards.
Stinkin’ badges!
For From the
Archive, and many
others of its generation,
the Blue
Peter Badge was
perhaps childhood’s
most coveted object, so imagine our
horror at the idea that some unprincipled
scoundrel was flogging hooky ones! Print technology
was recruited into the team tackling this
heinous villainy, with the Centre of Industrial
Collaboration in Digital Print volunteering its
expertise in colourants and security printing to
help the BBC identify the fakers.
What’s in a name?
Repro house Orange
Communications registered
its name in
at roughly the
same time as a certain
mobile phone network
– something that Joe
Public is much more
likely to associate with
“communications” – set up shop in the UK.
As a result, the repro firm found itself fielding
endless phone calls from disgruntled Orange
customers “moaning about disconnections and
faulty lines”. Director Ian Greatorex said: “I’m
pretty p****d off.” (From the Archive is going to
go out on a limb and suggest he said he was
‘pissed off’.) “We were here first… Everyone
knew us as Orange and then this monolithic
telephone company came on the scene and it
was like ‘tough s**t’.” (FTA: “shit”, reckon).
Sadly, the future was dim for Orange
Communications; it didn’t last long enough to
see its mobile network adversary merge with
T-Mobile to form EE and enable it to reclaim its
nominal birth right – it was liquidated in .
Paper up in the air
From the Archive
wonders how
“junior” a team
from the junior
chamber of commerce in Tokorozawa City, north
west of Tokyo, were when they conceived a plan
to launch a .m, kg paper plane into the air
as part of a plan to secure a spot in the Guinness
Book of Records. That said, the plane’s m
flight must have been an impressive sight.
Much wow
Stephen
“Spielberg”
Moon was the
focus of this
news item following
completion of his own -minute contribution
to the Star Trek cannon, a project that
had taken him months to film on a handbuilt
set in his back garden. Sadly, a trawl
through YouTube has failed to locate Dog Trek:
The Next Generation, but it apparently starred a
pedigree akita as Captain Kaisha and Admiral
Buster, a -year-old mongrel alongside the rest
of the seven-strong canine cast. “My workmates
thought I was barmy, but I’ve given them
copies of the film and they think it’s great,” said
Moon. Sure they do, Stephen, sure they do.
All change
Back in this year, a remarkable
transformation was taking
place. At the end of April,
“Britain’s best-read printing
magazine” LithoWeek had
retreated into a chrysalis to
emerge a week later as the
glorious butterfly we know
today as Printweek –
although it eschewed gossamer wings in favour
of metallic gold cover wrap. The mag was now on
all-gloss stock and printed four-colour throughout
(well, nearly). “More of everything” was the
message, but the real story was the acceptance
that litho was only part of an industry that was
progressing technologically in leaps and bounds.
The move was a recognition that the print “village”
was expanding and its community more
diverse. Well said, but what was the year?
From the archive
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