J Nash

AP51 marked the second meddling with the Subs Letter by the head of the production department, a gibbering fool who shall remain nameless because I've forgotten it. Experimenting with new effects like the curvy writing for the stuck-through logo, I completed the letter only just in time for the triple-final Janet-Queen-Of-Subs-Letters-enhanced deadline. The next day, alerted by Janet, Queen Of Subs Letters, I scampered to Production to be faced with the department head holding up the finished film and demanding it be redesigned.

The gibbering fool had previously rejected the The Man From UNCLE Subs Letter because "This line goes off the page," and this time indicated the background photographs, which had been inverted so they were completely unrecognisable. This was obviously one of those inexplicable lino palpitations and made the joke slightly funnier. But no. The gibbering fool refused to allow the Subs Letter to go to print. It would reflect badly on his department, he insisted, seemingly unmindful of the fact that no one in the whole world cared in the slightest least possible way and that the printing deadline was that afternoon.

Once more, Janet, Queen Of Subs Letters saved the day. Smilingly acceding to every gibbering fool demand, she took the film back to her desk to mark up the non-existent errors with a special pen and sent it to the printer the moment the department head went to eat his horrid little lunch.

A few weeks later, the department head went on holiday. His position was filled entirely successfully by a small cardboard replica constructed by the production bods.

Oddly, the two toughest bits of this page were The Game Of Life ("Throw a six to start! Start... Become suspicious... Die") as the dots took ages to space correctly at the corner, and the World Of Strangely Big Things logo, which took approximately years to line up so it curled around the column exactly. Another part of the pattern was settled this month with the "AMIGA POWER Subs Letter" bit fatally wounded, only to recover on page two, and I was so pleased with stumbling across the rich shade of blue for the spot colour, it turned up again on AP57's Subs Letter. Unspeakably tedious technical points, then, but they did introduce The Sinister Blueness as a sort of anti-host, so a snap of the fingers for your glazed expression. Rasppp.

Hamble was on holiday this month. Amazingly coincidentally, Steve Faragher used her photo in Complete Control, making a neat and clever thing. Thanks, Steve. Hamble's place was filled by Q-outfitted training mannequin Pupazz from Shadow Fighter.

Following a pleased mention by Cam of his new BB gun in AP, possibly as the ideal weapon with which to pepper the authors of a particularly loathsome game, the manufacturers offered him any model from their catalogue at cost price. He chose an enormous M16 rifle-y thing, later to be wielded by a Cyclist of the Apocalypse to machine-gun Stuart to death in the final episode and prompt Cam to beam of the (perhaps disappointingly authentic) plasticky lawrod, "It's never looked so realistic."

At the time though, Cam's snipery pops at terrorists symbolised by upturned vending machine cups and, one memorably alarming afternoon, the BT building opposite, prompted a reconstruction of the assassination of President Kennedy to determine once and for all, by proper scientific methods, whether Oswald acted alone.

Swiftly and with exacting detail, for nothing could inspire AP more than the utterly, utterly pointless, the scene was set. Cam, naturally, played Oswald, reproducing the sixth floor sniper nest by kneeling on a dangerously extended hydraulic office chair with a pot plant crudely jammed in his way. A photograph of Kennedy stuck to a cardboard box pulled by string, a crowd drawn on a roll of wallpaper and a stopwatch were collected. The experiment was later reprinted in an abridged form in the Unrelated Assassination Special, but in a hintish manner I can reveal that was Cam in Dealey Plaza at the time, he would undoubtedly have been soundly beaten by the police.

The booking advertisements of Big Band Fu and Greenstreet and Company now form part of my CV. This is not strictly relevant, but adds local colour.