Adventures in Type and Space

My clever colleagues Graham and Jack Kibble-White and Stuart Manning have produced a lovely supplement to last year's Adventures in Type and Space. The new addition is The Sid Sutton Collection, devoted to the late graphic designer perhaps best known for the Doctor Who opening titles used between 1980 and 1986.

In February, I posted on Twitter/X some thoughts about Adventures in Type and Space, slightly revised here for clarity:

I’ve been utterly spellbound by this beautiful, brilliant book. It goes in big on a very small subject — the 30 seconds or so of opening titles at the start of each episode of old Doctor Who. But it’s just as thrilling and rich as those sequences, and so much more than simply a history of who made them and how. It’s funny and profound about the process of creating art and what’s going on in the artist’s head. Along the way, we learn the role of God and Fra Angelico in the whizzy opening titles for Sylvester McCoy’s Doctor, and what a CGI artist “sees” in their head as they tap out the code. There are connections to Alien, Bladerunner and Points of View, and everything you could want to know about the typeface Futura. Like the titles themselves, this is an extraordinary visual treat, all the more wondrous the closer you look.

My contribution to that original book was to supply a photograph of Sid Sutton from when I interviewed him at home on 2 May 2017 for Doctor Who Magazine's special The Essential Doctor Who: Adventures in Space. Another of my photographs and some previously unpublished bits of the interview feature in this new supplement.

There is also a long interview with Sid culled from multiple sources, plus an interview with his two sons - who both work in design - and with Sid's collaborator Terry Handley. Again, there's a wealth of detail here: how exactly things were done, using what bespoke equipment and in what premises, and what to look for in the familiar titles that reveal this painstaking process. (Clue: keep you eye on the question marks.)

There's also a revealing interview with Colin Baker as he's shown the myriad different elements Sid employed to create his Doctor Who opening titles. A video of this conversation is also available:

There's some revealing stuff here and not just about the way the titles were made. Baker compares his Doctor, and his plan for revealing this incarnation's true persona, to Mr Darcy in Pride and Prejudice.

"[We] don't want him anywhere near our heroine. But it turns out he's the only truly decent person in the story. Everything he's done, which others have found objectionable, has been for the benefit of third parties, not himself." (p. 37)

There's a sense that these opening titles are invested with great meaning by interviewer Graham Kibble-White, who was 11 when Colin Baker became the Doctor. The conversation is an attempt to explore what meaning they hold for Baker - very different as an actor on the other side of the screen and yet no less significant.

The separate versions of Aventures in Type and Space and The Sid Sutton Collection are now sold out but compendium edition Adventures in Type and Space: The Complete Collection is available to buy from the Ten Acre Films site.