JUST recently, TCW made a reference to Compact, an American online ‘alternative’ magazine that started life in 2022.
But I wonder how many readers remember a much earlier Compact, a fictitious women’s magazine that was the subject of a TV serial between 1962 and 1965?
I remember it well because I was revising hard for A-levels at the time and I gave myself permission to come down from my bedroom and watch Compact on Tuesdayand Thursday evenings, having half an hour’s respite from mugging up on the Tudors and Stuarts. I loved it, not least because I longed to be a writer on a magazine such as Woman and Woman’s Own, publications that in the 1960s sold in their millions.
Somehow, I thought that watching Compact might help me to achieve my dream by giving me an insight into what happened in women’s magazine offices. I’m not saying it did, but the dream never died. I did eventually become a writer on women’s magazines and discovered that the life there was as glamorous, as bitchy and as full of office politics as depicted on Compact. There was also much camaraderie and many firm friendships developed.
I had a massive crush on one of the Compact actors, Moray Watson, who played the art editor, Richard Lowe. Art editors on women’s magazines were almost always men. In later life I met Moray at a party, and he was astonished that I remembered Compact, as not only did it attract negative reviews from the snooty critics of the day, but all but four of the total 373 episodes televised have long been wiped. I have found this single 1962 edition on YouTube.
Once shown, the series was never repeated, unlike, say, Dad’s Army. This is a shame as it would be great to watch the series again through today’s perspective. The soap also introduced the young Penelope Keith although I can’t recall which part she played.
The series was written by Peter Ling and Hazel Adair, who later became famous as the writing duo behind Crossroads and other TV series. I never took to Crossroads but Compact was something new for TV: a middle-class soap where talented, professional and ambitious men and women – particularly women – interacted in and out of the office.
Before and since, long-running TV soaps such as Coronation Street, EastEnders and Crossroads have been mainly about working-class communities where few characters have much ambition apart from having affairs and doing each other down.
The show’s name derived from the powder compact: a cosmetic accessory that every woman had in her handbag in the 1960s. Compacts were tiny metal cases, often embossed with jewellery, which opened to reveal a mirror and pressed powder. In old films, women are often seen touching up their faces with powder from a compact, and a euphemism for going to the loo was ‘going to powder my nose’. (If you still have one, it might be worth something – see here.)
It is sad that, along with most of the episodes of Compact being lost, women’s magazines have sharply declined since their heyday. Woman and Woman’s Own, which at their zenith enjoyed circulations of around five million, now sell around 60,000 copies per issue. Most people don’t even realise they are still going as, I imagine, most people nowadays have no idea that Compact was a popular soap that had the nation’s young women hooked in the 1960s.
