Andor

In our recent podcast about Andor, Neil asked me “where I stood” on Star Wars, and I gave a brief overview of my fandom which started when I saw the first film in a Llandudno cinema in Spring Bank Holiday week 1978, and which ended about halfway through the Return of the Jedi in the Long Eaton Ritz at some point in 1983. It was a relatively brief dalliance, but it pretty intense while it lasted, and the podcast got me thinking about what it actually meant to be a fan of Star Wars during what was mostly a pre-home video and VCR era, and you only got a film once every two-and-a-bit years. So I’m going on a trip down memory lane.

After I saw the first film, the only way of keeping my interest alive was to badger my parents to get the novelization which was tantalizing me from one of those spin around book displays every time I went into my local newsagents. The Star Wars comics were a no-no, mainly because apart from my regular weekly hit of The Beano and The Dandy, and the occasional copy of Shoot, my parents couldn’t really afford them, and I sensed that they disapproved of American comics. It was a similar thing with the toys as well – too expensive, and I wasn’t all that bothered about them anyway. Since I was a bookworm, they obviously thought the 50p or so for the novelization was a sound investment that would have the bonus of keeping me quiet for a few days.

The novelization was great at helping me remember notable bits from the film - “a lumbering Imperial cruiser, its massive outline bristling cactus-like with dozens of heavy weapons emplacements” – but also intriguing. The prologue was said to be “From the First Saga Journal of the Whills”. What on Earth was that? Another book? And more importantly, would it be stocked by our newsagent? I read and re-read the novelization but even I started to tire of it eventually, until I was blindsided by a friend telling me that there was another Star Wars book out called Splinter of the Mind’s Eye. This time the newsagent couldn’t help, so I got my mum to take me to Long Eaton Library and as usual it came up trumps and the book was mine.

The novel was by Alan Dean Foster, as indeed was the Star Wars novelization despite George Lucas being credited, and I didn’t really know what to make of my first experience of an extended Star Wars universe. Maybe because it was on loan from the Library, and in demand, that I didn’t have enough time to get to grips with it. All I remember now is that Luke and Princess Leia are clearly portrayed as a couple-to-be with lots of unresolved tension, which seems odd now, but was perfectly in keeping with the first film then, and that Darth Vader has his arm chopped off and doesn’t really pose much of a threat. I now know that Lucas had given Foster a free hand to write a story that would act as the basis for a low-budget sequel film if Star Wars didn’t do well. Of course, the film did spectacularly well, and Splinter of the Mind’s Eye was left as a rather stranded curio.

This seemed less important after some time had passed because everyone knew that the sequel was coming. My brother used to buy Photoplay magazine, and that had updates in virtually every issue on the progress of the film, as well as occasional photos. Fans started crossing the dates off the calendar as the release grew nearer – May/June 1980 depending on where you lived – but then something quite weird happened. I’d popped into our newsagents for some reason when I was stunned to see the novelization of The Empire Strikes Back on display. What madness was this? Within minutes I was begging my mum to buy it for me, and I must have been particularly annoying because she buckled immediately. But this is when my memory starts to fail. I have no distinct memories of reading The Empire Strikes Back, but I know I must have because I do remember performing an early attempt at comparative textual analysis, which involved, of all things, The Sun newspaper.

Back in those days, tabloid newspapers used to advertise themselves on the TV which seems slightly strange now. They were incredibly cheap, and either had a disembodied male voice bellowing about The Sun and its contents - in later years nearly always focusing on bingo - or a celebrity such as Christopher Timothy or Roy Hudd would do the bellowing to camera. One day in April 1980 an advert for The Sun trumpeted “EXCLUSIVE – the exciting story of Star Wars 2!” It caught my attention to say the least, but I knew straightaway there would difficulties. We were a working-class family with a staunch devotion to the Daily Mirror, and an equally strong aversion to The Sun, so the thought of asking my parents to buy the latter made me cringe. But I overcame my qualms – anything for Star Wars – and my parents bought the hated rag.

The Sun’s exclusive was in fact a highly abridged serialization of The Empire Strikes Back novelization. From today’s perspective, it seems crazy that Lucasfilm would do a deal with the most popular newspaper in the UK resulting in the whole plot being blown a month before its premiere, but that’s what they did. I knew almost everything that happened in the film before I entered the cinema, and for some reason that didn’t seem that odd. The only thing that was held back from The Sun was the revelation that Darth Vader was Luke’s father, but if you really wanted to know that you could just read the novelization. The situation was even more extreme with the book of the original film. It was scheduled to come out at the same time as the film, but because the latter was delayed, it was published a good six months before and sold well. So, tens of thousands of people ended up knowing everything that happened in Star Wars long before they went to the cinema. It really brings home how the current obsession with spoilers is a relatively new thing, and nobody seemed to give a damn about it back then.

Back to the textual analysis. The reason I know I must have read The Empire Strikes Back is because when I read the abridgment in The Sun, I spotted something odd. In the scene where Han first kisses Leia, The Sun’s version runs “He felt her body as he pressed his lips to hers. She did not resist.” This slight raunchiness didn’t ring true to me, so I looked up the relevant passage in the novelization which read “Han Solo drew her to him and felt her body tremble as he pressed his lips to hers…This time she didn’t resist at all.” The Sun’s adaptation was written by Roslyn Grose. Did she sex up The Empire Strikes Back under orders or was she just having fun? Maybe the answer is in her book The Sun-sation: The Inside Story of Britain’s Bestselling Daily Newspaper, but I lack the necessary fortitude to read it.

The excitement of The Empire Strikes Back soon faded and the interval until the next film seemed impossibly long. There were some compensations – the NPR radio adaptation of Star Wars was transmitted daily on Radio 1 at noon (!) during the 1981 Easter holiday, and then repeated weekly in the summer of the same year. I contrived to miss this on both occasions, which resulted in me trying to stay awake until 2am on a Sunday when the radio series was repeated for a final time on Radio 2 in the insomniac slot. I think I heard about ten minutes of a couple of episodes at best. The series was adapted for radio by Brian Daley, who also wrote the three Han Solo spin-off novels which provided me with a bit of Star Wars content to fill the yawning gap between films.

Aside from getting older with all the distractions that brings, my outlook changed fundamentally when something even more exciting than Star Wars happened – my brother rented a Betamax VCR in November 1981. Thanks to our unsavory local video shop, I was fed an endless diet of video nasties, and my tastes started to change. I still had a fondness for Star Wars, and it suddenly became accessible. The film came out on VHS and Betamax in the summer of 1982, and it was premiered on ITV a few months later in October. Of course I taped it, watched it to death, and got bored of it. By the time Return of the Jedi showed up I was burnt out.

I suppose my Star Wars fandom followed an expected pattern. I loved it for a few years between 10 and 14 and then grew out of it. That’s the way it’s supposed to happen. Quite why that didn’t happen to me with Doctor Who is still a mystery, and a whole different story.