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‘Private Eye at 50’, surrounded by elderly gents in greatcoats.

A Fortnightly Review of

Private Eye: The First 50 Years

18 October 2011 – 8 January 2012
The Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Studio Gallery
Free admission.

 By Michelene Wandor.

 

PRIVATE EYE IS NOW my only regular ‘journalistic’ reading. Once upon a time, I had a daily delivery of The Guardian. As the years passed, I found myself shouting at the newspaper for its frustrating arts coverage, and finally decided to decamp to The Independent, the newest kid on the daily block, with its sparky good intentions. Gradually, I became bored with its arts coverage, and finally allowed myself to admit that I never got round to finishing reading a daily paper anyway. Too many of the neatly folded sheets remained neatly folded.

Until the last few years, I’d only read Private Eye occasionally. With what remained of my need for printed topicality, I began buying it fortnightly, and now am a regular subscriber. It is the best purveyor of news there is. It is the best debunker of pretension, lying, corruption and empty celebrity available in Britain. It obviates my need to scream at the TV or radio (well, to some extent), because it does the critical shouting for me, with research and investigative revelation. And it is the wittiest thing going, infinitely funnier, even than Have I Got News For You?, on which PE editor, Ian Hislop, is a mainstay, and Mock the Week, the sometimes funny, but over-prepared comedians’ (yes, mostly male) comments on the week’s events.

Private Eye was born in the satire boom of the early 1960s, when nothing was sacred. This laid-back exhibition of images from its first fifty years, nestles in two interconnecting rooms at the V & A, conveniently on the route to the wonderful café. Lining one high wall are covers, each of which catches a chilling moment in recent political history. There is a young Tony Blair, dark hair waving over his head, visiting an elderly person in hospital. Blair has a huge grin, reassuring the patient that ‘there’ll be a spin-doctor along in a minute’.

THIS EXHIBITION FOC– USES BRILLIANTLY on the necessity of the cartoon, in the best meaning of that term, or the snapshot, often on the cover, accompanied by a pithy caption. Always chilling. Always spot on. It’s more than cynicism, as the brilliant recent purloining of ‘Downton Abbey’ shows. This has become the regularly featured ‘Downturn Abbey’, with all our politicians taking pride of cartoon place in the crumbling pile which is British politics.

In 1975. (Click to enlarge.)

One salutary reminder in the neat black and white frames is of the multifarious skills of two of our most important entertainers of the past half century. Both early cartoonists, one (Willie Rushton) no longer with us, the other (Barry Humphries) still very much so. The exhibition has three ‘installations’. A small glass case holds a ‘production desk’, with pens, scribbles – all the ephemera one might expect. At the other end, is the editor’s office, with a battered grey leather chair which apparently once belonged to Private Eye nemesis, Robert (‘the ‘bouncing Czech’) Maxwell, who also floats in cardboard effigy above a larger glass case, complete with scattered copies of the magazine from over the years, T shirts, other mementoes and, for some reason I haven’t yet worked out, rubber bands. By the editor’s desk, stands an almost lifesize cardboard T. Blair as the Vicar of Albion.

I spotted a number of elderly gents in greatcoats peering at the cartoons, perhaps trying to spot their earlier, more famous selves. Perhaps most disappointingly, no-one was laughing out loud, as I do at every page when I read each new edition in the privacy of my kitchen. Perhaps that is the secret of the magazine’s success: it is entirely dependent on plucking the public (nothing and no-one is sacred) and uncovering all the hollowness for each of us to enjoy cathartically in private.

The risks it has taken are recorded in documentary detail in the accompanying book, Adam McQueen’s Private Eye the First 50 years: An A-Z. It has taken a leading part in exposing scandals, even where it has provoked the ire of the law. The exhibition gives one the quick, witty and piercing fix. There is also The Private Eye Annual 2011 (ed. Ian Hislop). Or if you’re just too comfortable to remove yourself to the V & A to see the exhibit, ask for a subscription and the magazine will come round to see you.

Museum information: Private Eye, the first 50 years (V&A website).


Michelene Wandor’s two most recent poetry books are published by Arc Publications: Musica Transalpina (a Poetry Book Society Recommendation), and The Music of the Prophets. She performs with the Siena Ensemble and reports regularly for The Fortnightly Review.

 

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