And when we say another chance we mean it in the same way that the ITV channels mean it when then show Mel "Twisted Dwarf" Gibson's "What Women Want" for the hundredth time this year! That's right - it fills a gap in the schedule! Enjoy!
The Rebirth of the Football Fanzine
The birth of mass publishing in the 16th Century led to the cataclysmic division of Europe into bloody religious conflict, whose repercussions are still being felt in the 21st Century.
Whereas, the sudden availability of slightly quicker, small run publishing in the 1980’s and early 1990’s led to the mushrooming of football fanzines where people could have a bit of a moan about their team’s performances.
Not quite the same!
Lorne Cheetham, Peter Wilson and the writer assumed the awesome responsibility of producing, publishing and selling the Poppies fanzine for most of the 1990’s. The only criteria for inclusion was that an article should strive to amuse, or be in some vague way about the Poppies, or both if we were lucky.
Producing PATGOD was fun at times. A stranger telling you that something you had done had made them laugh is never a bad thing to hear. Hearing Ginger opponents given a hard time after we’d suggested they somehow deserved it, gave us a glow of pride. And obviously it was fun from a point of view of all the groupies.
But you had to balance the good with the bad - regularly coming up with new ideas, or assembling the material to fit the issue, or, worst of all, standing like a lemon outside the ground trying to sell it to passers-by who either ignored you or thought you were programme sellers. It was also never much fun to be told by the Club you support that your efforts were not welcome (although curiously the money we raised and donated always was….)
We did our bit for Poppies and Country until boredom, lack of time and actually developing a semblance of a life away from Rockingham Road saw us drift away and leave others to keep the fanzine torch burning for a few more seasons.
Peter and I still attended games of course. Who was going to miss out on thrilling trips to Hitchin, Workington and Gainsborough? Only now we didn’t have to worry about how to make a 10 hour round trip to Barrow for a 0-0 sound like the game of the century. We’d become kind of single entity – “Them that used to do the fanzine“. Fair enough.
Fast forward to 2009 and it struck me that it was the 20th anniversary of the first appearance of PATGOD. Questions flooded my mind. Should we do something to mark this milestone? Was it still actually being produced? Did I really waste my youth on the damned thing?
We didn’t really want to go down the route of producing a “Special”, or even a “Best Of”. God alone knows how the costs of printing the thing would have ballooned over the years. Had we the infinite patience to scan every page of every issue this may have been an option. But, there was a lot of stuff in there we wouldn’t necessarily want to see the light of day again. And anyway, we didn’t want to go through the death by a thousand cuts of having to stand outside the ground again and sell it.
What we needed was a magical way of showcasing the bits and pieces we still quite liked, and perhaps write new material, and not be constrained by deadlines or printers. But how? HOW?
“What about that new-fangled Interweb?” It was no longer the preserve of Star Trek nerds and rich Nigerian Generals. No, now football geeks could find a home there too, and electronic football fanzines seemed to be the way forward.
We set up a modest little site, which, to our surprise is still going strong over a year later. There are in excess of 200 articles covering everything the Poppies fan could possibly want to read, including, if you look really carefully, some stuff about football! If you have the Interweb thingie you might want to check us out at www.patgodonline.blogspot.com.
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