Your Sinclair - Content - Letters

Letters

From the magazine's inception, letters were answered mainly by the magazine's editor. The letters page contained several subsections, which varied through the magazines' lifetime, but included:

• Small Print - either deliberately short letters, or parts of longer letters taken out of context, most often for comedy value.
• Doodlebugs - readers' cartoons, often based around puns on current Spectrum games (e.g. a cartoon based on the game Midnight Resistance showed a house with the bedroom light on and a speech bubble saying "Not tonight dear, I've got a headache"). Doodlebugs spawned one of YS's occasional comic strips, Ernie The Psychotic Madman, drawn by Phil McCardle.
• Kindly Leave The Stage - readers' jokes, often nonsensical or surreal (an example being Q: Why is an orange orange? A: Because you can't clean a window with a spade), and often met with a gong.
• Wonderful World of Speccy - letters from readers for whom English was not their first language, many from Eastern Europe, where the Spectrum scene was flourishing well into the early 1990s.
• Trainspotters - where readers would send in mistakes they'd noticed in a previous issue of the magazine, in the hopes of convincing the editor to send them a Trainspotter Award. Most of the time, however, the editor found a way out of sending the award, by coming up with convoluted reasons why the 'mistake' wasn't a mistake at all (for example, by insisting there was no such place as the Isle of Man after accidentally omitting it from a map in Issue 50). The Trainspotter caricature was supposedly based on the man pictured on the cover of Issue 1 of Your Spectrum. As with the Jugglers, this was drawn by Nick Davies. The last ever award was given to Stuart Campbell, a then former writer who had since left, who found a mistake in a reprint of an article that he wrote.
• The Picos - a fictional family created for a series of columns in the letters page. Firstly there was Madame Pico, a psychic and agony aunt who answered readers' problems with "ooh, you poor dear". After her kidnapping, her son Bud Pico, a DIY specialist, took over. His solutions to readers' DIY problems often involved Rice Krispies. After Bud's "death", the baton was passed to cousin Femto Pico, a scientist and nightclub bouncer, and finally, Femto's sister Soya Pico, a vegetarian hippy. Most of the letters to the Picos were fictional.
• Norman Tebbit's Dead Serious Corner (originally Peter Snow's Dead Serious Corner) - one of the last additions to the letters pages, containing, as the name suggests, more serious letters than the rest of the pages. These often dealt with consumer issues, such as the price of games, or declining software support for the Spectrum.

The Star Letter was awarded three full-price Spectrum games. When asked what qualities a star letter possessed, editor Linda Barker answered "A star letter is one that makes the entire Shed crew rock with mirth, or touches their hearts," although other editors had their own criteria for the type of letter they awarded Star Letter status to.

Like many later computer magazines (such as Zero and Amiga Power) Your Sinclair created a sense of community with its readers through the letters page, and many readers wrote in regularly, becoming almost part of the team themselves. Indeed, several letter writers went on to write for YS in a freelance capacity, including Leigh Loveday and Rich Pelley. Along with Jonathan Davies, Pelley had formerly written for the fanzine Spectacular, and both became regular contributors for the magazine between 1988 and 1993. After YS closed, Davies went on to become editor of Sega Zone, Amiga Power and PC Gamer, while Pelley regularly wrote articles for a number of magazines.