When Shorts Were Short S3 E02 - David Hunt (Scorcher and Roy of the Rovers Editor)

When Shorts Were Short concerns itself solely with what was actually a very narrow window in football history when teams wore, well, short shorts. The podcast takes 1954 as its starting point, when Umbro made their first England kit with shorter shorts, to 1992, when short shorts were all but finished as Umbro's baggy shorts for Tottenham's new kit, ahead of the '91 FA Cup Final, quickly caught on.

If the shorts weren't short, we don't talk about it.

My guest for this episode is one of the finest comic editors to ever come out of the UK, David Hunt. David joined Fleetway in 1961, working on a couple of picture library titles before joining Tiger, then already one of the country’s biggest weekly titles, where he worked under its founding editor Derek Birnage.

By 1970, still only in his mid-20s, David became editor of the new football comic Scorcher, though it styled itself as a football paper, and it’s his years on that title, still my favourite all-time football comic/paper, that made him one of those people I absolutely had to speak to when setting up this show.

David and I had a long chat about his childhood, growing up in bomb-devastated East London just after the War’s end, his journey into comics, his influences, the Scorcher years that kickstarted a long editorial career, and which in the early 90s saw him caught in the eye of the storm after Roy of the Rovers finally folded in controversial fashion. David, as he tells us, was unfairly blamed for the storyline that saw Roy lose his famous left leg and 30 years on, get the chance to right that. 

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