Comfort Support Line

I don’t mind if people use the abbreviation CSL. Because Comfort Support Line does sound a bit like bras.

Another series it’s taken me an embarrassing amount of time to get round to covering. But I’m here now. I can tell you for definite that there WILL be more of this type of thing and apologies for taking so long to join the party.

To kick us off, we’re heading to the Comfort Support Line offices. And we’re pretty much staying there. The genius of this one is that we get the whole show delivered through the office CCTV cameras. It’s mostly close ups of Steve Pemberton in various stages of grief and anger, but the multiple screens really do flesh things out and prove to be important in the invoking of specific plot points.

We’ll leave the story and go for the design for now. You’ve probably guessed, but the Comfort Support Line is a play on a charity that you’re probably already well aware of. Like its real-life counterpart, they run off the altruism of volunteers and their main concern is offering people who might be suffering depressive episodes an outlet.

Now, I didn’t really like any of Samaritans’ logos (sorry, lads, Keep up the good work, etc.), so I had to cast my net further and ended up in a sea of mental health charities. Obviously with those types of thing, branding has to be fairly staid and conservative. You can’t just whack in a crocodile wearing a tube top giving a thumbs-up or whatever.

Anyway, I settled on one operating in a similar field that had a logo I liked one with a little bit more of a visual element going on, rather than *just* being a typeface. So all that squiggly business was where I started. Long story short, I ended up at the dove drawing you see here. And you might be thinking ‘ah yes, peace!’ And you’d be right – being ‘at peace’ with yourself is where I was going. Nailed it. HOWEVER, the double down in this instance is Pablo Picasso. A woman in the programme owns a cat called Picasso, you see. And Picasso painted a dove once. I say once. He painted and drew fucking loads of them, in fact.

Look, it doesn’t matter how you get there as long as you get there, alright? Pablo will tell you this himself. Or would do if he hadn’t have died in 1973.