How to annoy Cam: "Hello, Cam! Why, you look just like (random tall media celeb with glasses)."

Cam Winstanley

Tenure: AP21-AP54
Designation: Staff Writer (AP21-AP50), Editor (AP51-AP54)


As editor, my overriding impression of AMIGA POWER was that we'd probably given too much of ourselves away. I came to this conclusion round about the time that readers would write in to enquire after the well-being of my sister Wendy, or phone up and ask about Sue's dog, round about the time that one Izzy "l'Elf" Rees was writing between one and four letters a week to me. How did they know all of this? I thought. Because we told them in captions, irrelevant intros and flannel panels, I immediately replied. To myself. In my head. By the time an A5 hardback book completely covered in the multi-coloured scrawls of a clearly deranged man arrived in the office, I was starting to understand how killers like Mark Chapman are created, not born, and consequently started to vary my route home at nights. Just in case.

Life on AMIGA POWER, and in particular my life on AMIGA POWER, were best summed up by that King of Readers, Mil from Wolverhampton. Because he managed to KNOW EVERYTHING without being scary and deranged, and to KNOW EVERYTHING to such a degree of accuracy that I started to imagine him as looking just like one of the British Telecom workers who stand on the roof of the building opposite our office for hours at a time, seemingly drinking tea and chatting, but always in the position of keeping us under constant surveillance.

Mil's supposition was this - that I'd killed Jonathan Davies to be made editor simply so I could do what I want; that my job was nothing more than an elaborate ruse intended to defraud my employer by funding my play time; that I came to work simply to piss about. But how could he have ever known that?

He was right of course. AP was fun to work on, and therefore was fun to read. The good humour and good times of an office filled with bits of models and fancy dress costumes and littered with plastic pellets from numerous BB guns seeped into the magazine. ("Currant Bun" - Ed) and ("Michael Jackson" - Ed) hating us helped, as did their predictable way of giving their mates' games good marks regardless of merit. The oddball tantrums of Mark Dyson and Team 17 fortified us enormously, and with each of their bonkers proclamations or legal writs, we merely grew stronger and appeared "harder."

But of course dear readers, you helped by buying into the nonsense. We never had to make up any letters because we could always get enough proper good ones. You never voted with your money by not buying us simply because we talked bollocks, never went on sale on time or produced slightly biffy cover disks. We succeeded because the Amiga owner was from that breed of slightly odd ZX Spectrum owner and therefore appreciated entertainment over information.

PC owners seem to be the other way round, which is why a PC POWER would never have worked - too many people would have written in to say "Why must you waste space on features about the links between JFK and the Rwandan massacres? Couldn't you devote that space more sensibly to a roundup of modems?"

And then we'd have had to kill them.