(This post has been rated PG for adult content.)
Not long after I started my first full-time job, in Autumn of 1991, a ripple of excitement went round the office at the visit of ‘The Calendar Man’. One of the directors in particular was very excited – and very thorough, taking an hour or more to decide which calendars our company would be distributing that year.
You may be ahead of my naive younger self, but come December we took delivery of a small quantity of calendars with pictures of wildlife on them, and a much larger quantity with pictures of… of a very different sort of life. I wouldn’t want anybody to get the wrong idea, we weren’t giving out calendars of naked models – but this was only prevented by the very tiniest amount of fabric.
Nowadays, although not quite consigned to history the ‘girlie calendar’ seems the exception rather than the rule. Indeed, the last time I even heard mention of one was a few Decembers back when a sales rep came round to give us a pictorial scenes calendar but intimated, in a black market spiv, ‘back of the van’ kind of a way that he had ‘something else’ if we were interested.
No doubt the wildlife calendar is a step in the right direction away from young women and scraps of cloth; but the shine was taken off them for me when a friend pointed out that the photographers don’t spend months, Attenborough-like, assimilating themselves into the natural world in order to take the perfect picture – the cute animals greeting each new month are all dead and stuffed (in that order).
Say what you like about the not-quite-naked models that ‘The Calendar Man’ used to trade in, at least none of them died for their art!
Andrew Curnow's Ramblings 