Amiga Power - Amiga Power Regular Features - Do The Write Thing

Do The Write Thing

"Do the Write Thing" (an obvious pun on the movie Do the Right Thing) was the magazine's letters page. One distinguishing feature of the letters page was that the magazine gave the letters titles by taking excerpts of the letters' contents out of context, often by going across sentence boundaries or cutting in the middle of a clause. The most celebrated example of this was when a reader wrote in humorously bemoaning the lack of national media attention given to AP's then-editor Linda Barker being seriously ill (she'd suffered a brain haemorrhage and was absent from the mag for over a year, but went on to recover) compared to the blanket coverage of the trivial ailments of the Queen Mother. "Are the newspapers concerned ?", queried the reader rhetorically. "No! But the Queen Mother swallows a fishbone and we get three days of media panic.". Naturally, AP headlined the letter with the quote "THE QUEEN MOTHER SWALLOWS". Another example was the headline "Commander/Dangerous Knob, er, sorry", derived from a letter criticising two games Commodore bundled with the CD32, Wing Commander and Dangerous Streets.

The letters, and the magazine's replies to them, started out fairly normal in style, but later became more and more bizarre. Readers even started writing in about things that had nothing to do with video games, to the point that the magazine once had to specifically ask for letters on appropriate topics. APphilosophy was that a magazine's letters pages defined both its character and its relationship with the readers, and it therefore devoted more space and attention to the letters pages than most magazines, often in the form of lengthy responses to more serious letters, explaining and justifying issues of policy.

Amiga Power was avowedly a magazine for games only, unconcerned with the Amiga's productivity uses, and it frequently advertised this fact on the letters page. If a reader wrote in with a question about hardware or productivity software, the magazine staff replied either by flaunting their ignorance, employing sarcastic mockery, or supplying blatantly false information. These letters would commonly be saved up and used as the bulk of a special irregular round-up section called Ask Amiga Power.

A well-known contributor to the letters page was Isabelle Rees, a British woman who first started writing letters to the magazine at the age of 15 years. Her letters, which were usually fairly long, had a cheerful tone about them, and many other readers took a liking to them.

Rees signed her letters as "Isabelle, L'Elf", and sometimes prefixed the signature with "hugs". Another of her trademarks was excessive use of exclamation marks. One reader pointed out that he had seen Isabelle having been 15 years old for more than two years, and thus suspected her of being a pseudonym. Another reader jocularily compared her to Bob, a female hamster (despite the name), who was also a famous character on the magazine's letters page.