Your Sinclair

~ the eulogy ~

It launched in January 1984 as Your Spectrum, published by Sportscene Specialist Press, bimonthly at first and monthly from that June. The ZX Spectrum was barely two years old and there was already a crowded shelf of magazines serving it. With the January 1986 issue the title was relaunched as Your Sinclair, officially so it could cover the QL and whatever Sinclair built next, and the numbering started again at one. In practice it kept writing about Spectrum games and almost nothing else.

In 1990 Dennis Publishing sold it to Future plc in Bath, and the April 1990 issue was the first under the new owner. The news pages handled the change by joking that Future had gone out meaning to buy a Sinclair C5 and come back with a magazine instead. That is roughly the register the whole thing operated in for nine years.

The end came in September 1993. The Spectrum had stopped being a machine anybody was writing new software for, the issue had shrunk to under forty pages, and the staff list was down to two permanent names: Jonathan Nash editing and Andy Ounsted on art. Issue 93 went out with a cover that said BIG FINAL ISSUE in letters built like a monument, priced at 2.95 pounds, with the Future logo in the bottom corner.

The hardware did reach Turkey. Spectrums and Spectrum clones were around, mostly secondhand, mostly loading games off cassette. What did not travel with the machines was the magazine culture built on top of them, because that culture was never really about the machine. The jokes in Your Sinclair carry the weight and they are jokes about Britain in 1988, written for people who had watched the same television the week before. I can follow the facts in it and miss the point of every third sentence.

~ the dossier ~

~ the voice ~

The thing people still talk about is the writing. Launch editor Roger Munford set a tone borrowed less from computer journalism than from Smash Hits and Just Seventeen, with some Private Eye and some Viz mixed in, and every editor after him pushed it further. The news section was called Frontlines and later Pssst. A rumors column was named T'zers after its original writer, Teresa Maughan, and kept the name long after she had moved on.

By 1992, under Andy Hutchinson, the magazine was running sections that had nothing to do with computers at all. There was an agony column called Haylp! and a film and book page that went through two names. Inside that page sat The Killer Kolumn From Outer Space, a science fiction page written by Dave Golder, who later edited SFX and described that magazine as hundreds of Killer Kolumns stapled together. A Spectrum magazine in its final years was quietly incubating a newsstand science fiction title.

~ what the last issue was ~

Future did not stretch it out. The Spectrum's software industry had wound down, the ad pages had gone with it, and a games magazine without games to review is a features magazine nobody commissioned. The 93rd issue of Your Sinclair, or the 114th if you count the 21 issues published under the Your Spectrum masthead, was the last one printed.

Wikipedia's infobox on the magazine still lists Dennis Publishing as the company, which was true from 1987 to 1990 and wrong for the last three and a half years. The cover of the final issue settles it in one glance: that is a Future Publishing logo, September 1993, issue 93.

~ issue 94 ~

Eleven years later the magazine got one more issue. In 2004 a 94th was produced as a retrospective and given away free with Retro Gamer, carrying interviews with former writers alongside a four page memoir by Phil South. The reviews and tips in it were new, written in the old house style. Almost no dead magazine gets a closing issue, and fewer get one written by the people who were there.

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