Film posters following album covers for next season's West Brom programme

Jonas Olsson as David Bowie, Jonathan Leko as Jay-Z, and Tony Pulis as Bruce Springsteen; the front covers that mimicked famous album sleeves received plenty of praise from near and far.

Marvelling at the latest creation became part of the build-up to each home game, the national press started to take note, and even The One Show got in touch to see if they could feature them in the future.

They were the brainchild of the brilliant but humble long-standing programme editor Dave Bowler, who has been running Albion News for 17 years. But how do you follow such a hit?

Well next season, Bowler is going to break into Hollywood, and the players will be asked to ape famous film posters rather than album covers.

Bowler even revealed a teaser on Twitter, with Claudio Yacob looking fierce in a mock-up of The Silence of the Lambs poster.

“It’s as much to keep me interested as anything else,” the 53-year-old living in Ironbridge, Shropshire, told the Express & Star. Born in West Bromwich, he’s been a fan all his life, but he’s been running the award-winning programme for nearly two decades now.

“We’ve done a lot of different things over the years,” he explained. “We were the first Premier League side to go to 100 pages.

“The historical stuff at the back is always interesting. But every year you run out of things to do so it’s always a bit of a challenge to think up new ideas. Next year we’ll be back with more of the same crap.”

Self-deprecating humour is Bowler’s forte, so he was blown away by all the praise thrown his way.

“Everybody normally ignores the programme!” he said. “But it took off after Christmas. The James McClean one of The Smiths went really well and then the Sex Pistols one, the Buzaglo one, that got people going.”

For January’s FA Cup game against Derby County, Bowler referenced the club’s famous humiliating day in the competition, when Tim Buzaglo scored a hat-trick for non-league Woking at The Hawthorns.

“Then we did the Blur one a couple of weeks after that,” said Bowler. “That was when it really went berserk.

“I don’t know when I first had the idea. We’d done the Sgt Pepper’s thing three or four years ago and that seemed like a good idea so it went off the back of that.

“Dark Side of the Moon seemed an obvious one, and then it just grew from there.

“The funniest one I thought, was the Bruce Springsteen one. (Club photographer) Laurie (Rampling) got a bloke in his gym to put a cap in his back pocket. I liked that one.

"I did like the Buzaglo one, I thought that was quite funny. The trouble is I can’t remember what we’ve done now because I’m already thinking about next year.

“Because we’ve done this, people are interested, The One Show are interested in getting us on! So now we’ve got to do something big.”

After coming up with a good idea, one of the main problems is encouraging the players to pose. There are very few show-offs in Albion’s experienced squad, and some of them can be difficult to talk around.

“You know the players as well as I do, the players don’t enjoy anything! It was a lot of work, but the best ones, like the McClean one, was out of something he had already done.

“That just makes it so much easier. The Blur one was dead easy, they didn’t have to do anything for that. Jonas did Aladdin Sane because he knew he was leaving, I don’t know if he’d have done it if he was still in the dressing room. But in the end, they all come around.”

The Blur and Bowie covers were two of the most successful, and plenty of supporters have expressed a desire to get them as posters.

“It’s not as straightforward as that unfortunately because, for assorted reasons, Trinity Mirror, who have done it this year, will not be doing our programme next year.

“Although it’s my idea, Colin Sumpter, the designer, it’s his intellectual property too. So I can’t see that they will see any value in it considering they’re not doing it anymore. But maybe next year’s (will be).”

If next season's efforts are released as posters, no doubt plenty of fans will jump at the opportunity to get their hands on them.