Heaven and Hell
aka Consigned to Heaven / Going Down

AP49 to AP62

For no apparent reason by far the longest-lasting of the flurry of news section columns that appeared at the intersection between the Jonathan Davies and Cam Winstanley Eras, H&H championed the things we liked while drubbing the things we didn't, achieving its goal in a clear, visual style based on simple universal religious principles: good things are raised up, bad things are cast down.

The problem was that the (by definition) highly subjective nature of the entries were suggested by individuals, but presented as the house opinion of AMIGA POWER.

(Other, comparably personal views which would usually have been expressed in signed reviews were clearly delineated as such - say, in Who Do We Think We Are?, where everyone had a visually distinct box on the page to answer the month's question. Heaven and Hell's rigid, half-page vertical strip gave no room. On reflection, perhaps a better idea would have been to turn the column over to a single writer, rotating them each month.)

This structural flaw left the chart struggling to find an identity, with entries clumsily incorporating the suggesting writer's name virtually from its debut appearance. (This is why the name was shortened, so we could eke out a few extra lines of explanation for, say, Martin's championing of an extinct football magazine.) The traditionally hasty nature of its compilation and news-page position also poked Heaven and Hell in its appeal plexus, as the shout across the office for contributions during the last few hours of the two days would inevitable inspire meatier badness than uplifting lovely things. At times the Heaven part of the enterprise swung perilously adjacent to gentleman editor Jonathan Davies's House of Horrors, while Hell became a series of insular rants against (for example) the ticketing machine in the car park downstairs.

During the end days of AP, Heaven and Hell was cleverly broken up, separating and expanding the entries in order to replace the news section's non-existent game previews with stories about the even smaller office the mag had been pushed into that month with brooms, and other vexing elements. Plus, of course, those events or items which brought cheer to the imploding staff line-up.

Thus passed Heaven and Hell, leaving AP in purgatory. Clever wording, we acknowledge. Cheers. Perhaps its lasting legacy is the untiringly funny in-joke of the column's background art.