| Village Fete #4 The fourth Village Fete was notable for its iconic use of the sausage, courtesy of graphic designer Alex Rich, who made ‘sausage’ bags, a programme decorated with sausages, and special ‘sausage’ vinyls. The programme also came with a sheet of stickers that allowed you to stick your approval (or disapproval) on each stall (“Best in Show”, “I Like It!”. “Not Bad”). Needless to say, most people used the stickers to label their friends rather than the stalls. Best in Show was awarded by Wayne Hemingway to Fibre’s Photo Booth. Here was a normal-looking photo booth like any other you’d find in your local tube station, but when the pictures came through, strange things would have happened to your portrait - your lips would have become huge, or your eyes as big as saucers, or an alien would have appeared sitting on your shoulder. Fibre’s Photo Booth had strong competition from Multistorey’s W.H. Stiffs where you could grace the cover of Vogue, Creative Review or National Geographic and take home photographic evidence of your mug in amongst all the other titles on the newsagent’s shelves. Other stalls were equally compelling: Abake held a Car Boot Sale, Jon Hares sold Fortune Cookies, and Dunne and Raby presented a freak show where product equivalents of the world’s tallest man and the bearded lady were cruelly paraded for your amusement. Daniel Eatock had people making longer and longer paintbrushes – made of brooms, chairs, anything you could lay your hands on – roped together in the best desert island style – all to draw a… circle. Amos Marchant invited us to have fun with screws and had made special ‘screw’ products to win, Hyperkit gave us Brass Rubbings, while Muf had us busily pedal pushing to make bubbles blow. Morag Myerscough offered lessons in paper folding at her fantastic School of Origami which, by the end of the fete, had the pond covered in beautiful colourful paper boats. But perhaps the stars of the show were Carl Clerkin, Gitta Gschwendtner, William Warren and Alex Rich who came in their dirty old macs to flash Cheap Booze at us and offer us a swig for only 50p! The Children’s fancy Dress competition was won by a boy dressed as the London Routemaster bus. Sadly, we didn’t get his name. |