Grandstand

~ the obit ~

Grandstand was never a factory. It was a name that two men in Harrogate put on other people's hardware. For about ten years British children used that name as the word for the entire category of electronic games.

The company underneath it was Adam Imports Limited, incorporated on 20 August 1973 by Chris Rycroft and Les Kenyon to sell calculators by post. That worked well enough that by 1974 they were the largest single supplier of calculators in the country. Rycroft then went to Hong Kong, met the Leungs at Video Technology, and came back with a semiconductor tennis-and-football machine that plugged into a television.

From there the pattern was set for two decades. Find a machine in Hong Kong or Japan, then put a British badge on the box. The supplier was VTech first and Epoch later, with Tomy alongside. Even Fairchild went through the process: the Channel F console was sold here as the Grandstand Video Entertainment Computer.

In October 1983 the same trick was applied to a whole computer. Tomy's Tutor, sold in Japan as the Pyuta, arrived in British shops as the Grandstand Tutor.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the accountant named it ~

Rycroft has told the story of where the name came from more than once. It was a marketing meeting, the room was going nowhere, and the accountant said call it Grandstand. The first machine out of the door was the Adman Grandstand 2000, Adman being the company's own in-house prefix, a squashed version of Adam.

~ astro wars ~

The business had a wobble in the middle. In August 1978 Geo Bassett Holdings, the Liquorice Allsorts company, bought 75 percent of Adam Imports for 750,000 pounds in cash and a share of the profits above half a million. Rycroft bought it back in 1980, and at that year's Chicago CES found Epoch's Invader from Space on a stand, then flew to Tokyo unannounced to get the British rights.

That trip produced Astro Wars in 1981, a vacuum fluorescent tabletop that ran on four C cells and sat in the Science Museum's collection decades later with Epoch listed as its maker. It is the machine people mean when they say Grandstand. By 1983 the group turned over 25 million pounds with 300 people on the payroll, and it was listed on the Unlisted Securities Market.

The badge is where the distance lives. Epoch and Tomy sold these machines to whoever turned up with an order, so the same tabletop with the same chips inside reached shops in a dozen countries under a dozen names, and the word it did not carry outside Britain was Grandstand. Whatever version of Astro Wars a child in Turkey saw in 1982, it was not this one.

~ wound up and left there ~

Rycroft sold his holding in 1987 and stayed on as deputy chairman for about a year. The register tracks the rest without comment. Adam Imports Limited became Adam Leisure Limited on 18 March 1988, and on 9 August 1991 the name came off entirely, leaving a shell called A.L.G. No. 1 Limited. The last accounts were filed in November 1992, for the year to the end of 1991.

The court made an order to wind it up on 15 January 1993, and the filing history stops dead at that line. Nobody ever filed a dissolution. Company 01130052 is still on the Companies House register today, at a Leeds address, with its status given as Liquidation. The funeral was never finished.

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