It brought the city centre to a halt.However, Crossroads’ days were numbered once ATV’s Midlands franchise was taken over by Central Television. The serial had long been criticised by the press for its standards of acting and writing, and Charles Denton, Central’s director of programmes, decided that it would not change without the removal of the pivotal character of Meg. Barton said, I agreed with Charles that she had to go, because we could not have the show revolving around one person She was a personal friend. I’d worked with her on 2,000 to 3,000 editions of Lunch Box and in the theatre before that.Denton sacked Gordon in 1981, and Meg was seen sailing off on the QEII from Southampton to make a new life for herself in America. As the camera zoomed out of a close-up shot on Meg, Barton could be seen at the ship’s rail a short distance from her, wearing a hat and looking the other way. Gordon made a brief reappearance in 1983, when Meg met her daughter, Jill, and Adam Chance on their honeymoon in Venice, and Barton was there again “doing a Hitchcock”, standing on the Rialto Bridge.Two years later, he retired and Central made two more attempts to revamp the serial, but it was finally axed in 1988. Long years of petitioning by fans for its return resulted in a new, younger look when Carlton revived Crossroads last year.Despite all the criticisms of Crossroads during his reign as producer, Barton was fiercely defensive of the programme “We loved it,” he says “That’s why it hurt when people slagged us off.

My aim was to make viewers happy, to help them while entertaining them.”Anthony Hayward. THE RICHLY imaginative paintings of George Jardine were among the most unusual and original of their period. George Wallace Jardine, painter and teacher: born Wallasey, Cheshire 8 January 1920; Lecturer in Graphics, Liverpool College of Art 1943-80; died Liverpool 29 October 2002. While his pictures were a complex stylistic and thematic hybrid, linking Victorian fantasy illustration, pre-Raphaelitism and Surrealist collage and frottage, he was essentially a modern artist with an independent, even rebellious streak that resisted easy categorisation.George Wallace Jardine was born in Wallasey in 1920, the son of a Scottish postal worker. His lifelong interest in the natural world was fostered in the unspoilt pre-war wilderness of Didston Hill, the sand dunes of Wallasey, the southern estuaries of Deeside and the bird sanctuary of Hillbre Island. In 1936, aged 16, Jardine entered Wallasey School of Art and it was both here and at the Royal College of Art in London – where Jardine went on to study between 1939 and 1943 – that Jardine’s strong individualism was moulded.Jardine’s illustrational bent was developed at the Royal College through the tutors Cyril Mahoney, Robert Austin and Percy Horton. His precise linework was complemented by the kind of chance textural effects favoured by the Surrealists.When the Royal College was evacuated from wartime London to Ambleside in the Lake District, Jardine found himself in a landscape that, together with North Wales and later still the Balearic Islands, would inspire the topographic backdrops to his theatre of fantasy, legend, myth and make-believe.

Jardine’s early interest in the work of Max Ernst, Yves Tanguy, Salvador Dali and other leading Surrealist painters, established by seeing a large exhibition of their work at the Walker Art Gallery in 1936, was complemented by a passing acquaintanceship with a wide range of sources of inspiration such as classical and pagan myths, medieval art, Renaissance fresco painting and photomontage.Jardine’s transition from student to art school tutor was as rapid as it was fortuitous. A Wallasey neighbour, Allan Tankard, a tutor at Liverpool College of Art, introduced Jardine to Henry Huggill, the college’s sympathetic principal, who subsequently employed him in the graphics department. For the next 40 years Jardine commuted, Magritte-style, from prosaic Wirral suburbia into Liverpool, where he taught generations of students, many of whom remembered him with respect and affection.Jardine’s involvement with Liverpool as a cultural centre extended beyond teaching to embrace membership of the Sandon Society, a longstanding artistic club based at the splendid Bluecoat Chambers in the middle of town. There he associated with intelligent, well-informed artists such as J. Coburn-Witherop, Roderick Bisson and the printmaker Geoffrey Wedgwood. Jardine maintained a top-floor studio at the Bluecoat between 1950 and 1975, after which he painted at home.Despite showing work at Lionel Levy’s Portal Gallery in London during the 1960s, Jardine enjoyed a mainly local Merseyside following. Frequent exhibitions across the region – including several retrospectives at the Williamson Art Gallery, Birkenhead – reassured traditional audiences while finding new admirers.

Both the Williamson and the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool own notable examples, the Williamson’s Fountain of Youth revealing the exoticism of a vision of secret gardens peopled with nudes – always drawn from local life models and students – satyrs, centaurs and other mythological creatures. The Walker’s important Full Fathom Five (1966), by contrast, is a collage rather than painted composition, a mosaic-like portrait made up almost entirely of seashells and feathers.Jardine’s distinctive collages, using diagrams and fragments of text from old Victorian books, led on to his catalogue cover for Art in a City, the exhibition of contemporary Liverpool art organised by John Willett at the ICA, London in 1967 to accompany Willett’s book of the same name. Jardine’s work contributed to Willett’s thesis that Liverpool art was more progressive than Manchester’s Lowry school. The establishment in 1957 of the John Moores Biannual painting competition confirmed Liverpool’s contribution to the progressive wing of contemporary painting.Although Jardine featured in an early John Moores show he did not reappear frequently in subsequent biannuals. As Liverpool artists created a dialogue with contemporary modes of abstract painting, and then with London and New York Pop Art, Jardine continued with his own unique recipe of fin-de-si?e and pre-war modernist ingredients as if nothing had happened.Although he travelled across Europe many times after his retirement in the early 1980s and visited Majorca every summer with the life model June Furlong, Jardine was as much a home lover as he was a confirmed bachelor. He cultivated a fascinating garden at Wallasey and used the plants and flowers as subject matter in his paintings.Peter Davies. SIEGFRIED UNSELD was a giant in the post-war world of European letters, his name virtually synonymous with the great German publishing house of Suhrkamp.