Badge-making

Keg Buster and CAMRA: Bill Tidy drew the Keg Buster character for regular appearances in ‘What’s Brewing’ and agreed to supply these cartoons in 1985 for a small fee and commission on the sales. He actually drew the artwork to the 25mm size!

These badges were on our badge-making stall at the Great British Beer Festival in Brighton the same year. With other assorted ready-made designs to sell and many other slogans penned and stamped at the event, we sold over 2,500.

If Hedli Nicklaus (Cathy Perks) and Trevor Harrison (Eddy Grundy) had never arranged to be at the Erdington Carnival in 1990, the Dum di dum badge might not have happened. I had the idea of the non-electronic musical badge, presented it in a very simple way, and got permission to sell the badge from a stall at the event. (It wasn't as easy to produce as it would be now - I photocopied lines of Letraset, and cut and pasted them together for the master copy). From that point on until the end of this badge trading in 1993, the ‘Archers Addicts’ official fan club ordered this one regularly.

It was a talking point at other events as the rhythm can be mistaken for the theme tune to East Enders until you get to the end of the second line and the ‘diddle’.

The badge-making stall was a popular activity at many family events. I experimented with many different backgrounds, for example layering tissue paper. Permanent pen on diffraction foil was popular, and doll’s house brick wall paper for graffiti badges went down really well. Our family teddy found himself on a badge. The owl was Pienkowski inspired.