Creating a classic... the story behind an evergreen Radio Times cover
We contacted the artist who painted the ingenious and popular 1977 Christmas cover and discovered exactly what inspired it...
It is December 1977. The big BBC programmes on Christmas Day are Bruce Forsyth and the Generation Game, the Mike Yarwood Christmas Show (guest stars Wings) and the Morecambe and Wise Christmas Show (the one with Penelope Keith and an acrobatic South Pacific routine). Over on ITV there's Stars on Christmas Day with the unlikely billing of Bing Crosby and Don Estelle, plus the film Young Winston.
But few things are getting us excited for the occasion like the Radio Times cover. At first glance it’s a big, snowy Christmas tree, but on closer inspection it’s a whole world of festive adventure. Children build a snowman, carol singers knock on doors, a dog scrabbles at a gate (the tree's "bucket") and the moon shines brightly behind a church (at the top of the tree).
It's a brilliant concept, rendered in delightful detail. As one reader put it soon afterwards, "I should like to congratulate Pauline Ellison on her most beautiful cover." Indeed, annual posts of vintage covers on social media in recent years have revealed the 1977 front page to be one of the most popular in the magazine’s 101-year history. So Radio Times decided to reach out to the artist to ask about its origins.
"The Christmas tree village is not entirely the product of my imagination," Pauline tells us. "In the spring of 1977 I went with my husband – the landscape painter Poul Webb – on a working trip to Provence, a fairy-tale land then, with castles and fortified villages perched high on rocky peaks in beautiful valleys.
"In one of these villages, slightly below me on a narrow outcrop, I saw a monastery built in the shape of a cross. Of course we've all seen cruciform churches, but this was a whole settlement of living and working buildings, as well as a church, so it took a moment to perceive."
As to the cover's creation, Pauline, now 78, continues: "The image was difficult to make, I had to airbrush the background first – not my favourite medium – but the only way to achieve the soft tonal graduations in 1977. A good deal of walking backwards from my drawing board and squinting went on, trying to balance the two meanings of the image.
"I thought I had finished, stood back and realised I'd not included a single television aerial, the way TV was relayed back then. The ever vociferous readers of Radio Times would have had something to say about that, I thought. Easily remedied though!"
Pauline describes her work as "watercolour, tones and colour", with a fondness for plants and animals. Born in Keighley, West Yorkshire, in 1946, she was educated at Bradford, Leicester and Cambridge Schools of Art. She has illustrated magazines and newspapers in Europe and America, and books for the likes of HE Bates and science fiction writer Ursula K Le Guin.
Pauline's RT cover certainly had the spotlight shone on it 47 years ago. "I was delighted the image was taken to BBC Television Centre and used to advertise the Christmas programmes, the rostrum camera moving down into the lighted windows and then out into the programme trailer. So the image was often on TV over that Christmas, as well as in print." And she believes there's "something universal in this 'looking into windows', a fascination with the lives of others".
There were a few detractors, however: "The image provoked a lot of discussion in the letters pages of Radio Times, among other things among birdwatchers as to whether the robin would still be out at dusk.
"I hadn't even considered this, just seeing the robin as an essential element in a Christmas landscape, but maybe, being insectivorous, the robin would be the hungriest bird in the snow, still out searching for food? Eventually, in February the editor called time on this row I'd unwittingly started!"
Nevertheless, "Christmas Tree Village" is indisputably an all-time great, and that timelessness is put into context by a case of second thoughts by its creator. "Originally, in the foreground, I'd drawn a girl with the dog on a leash, but later I realised that anchored the image in time, and I wanted it to float free, so I removed it. The right decision, I think."
You can see more of Pauline's work via Artist Partners Ltd at https://www.artistpartners.com/portfolios/pauline-ellison.
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