THE EYE AT 50 BLOG

A late word on the late Keith Waterhouse Posted by Adam Macqueen, 17th September 2009

Keith Waterhouse only wrote one thing for Private Eye, for issue 73, published on 2nd October 1964. It was a piece about opinion polls just ahead of the election Harold Wilson was about to win, co-written with his regular collaborator Willis Hall and entitled “What is a Don’t Know?”

I’m not going to give you the text of it here. But I am going to give you this telegram, which for many years has been pinned to a noticeboard in Richard Ingrams’ – and subsequently Ian Hislop’s – office.

OVERNIGHT INGRAMS PRIVATE EYE 22 GREEK STREET W1 =
YOUR PAGE 4 REPRODUCTION OF KHALIL SHABIS LETTER BRINGS YOU DOWN TO LEVEL OF PETERBOROUGH DAILY TELEGRAPH WHICH REGULARLY HAS BIG LAUGH AT INABILITY OF ARABS TO SPEAK ENGLISH STOP HOW IS YOUR ARABIC = KEITH WATERHOUSE +

(God alone knows why it’s come out sideways… New technology baffles pissed old hack.)

Issue 73 also featured the first flexidisc – fixed to the cover over a photograph of Alec Douglas-Home on the toilet with a speech bubble saying “Put that record back AT ONCE!”, the very first appearance of Spiggy Topes and the Turds, as introduced by Maureen Cleavage, and the launch of the Stuff Your Own Quintin Hogg cushion kit. It’s rather a good one…

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What I believe the young people call the information superhighway Posted by Adam Macqueen, 28th July 2009

Aw. Sweet. In the edition of 4 November 1994 – longer ago than you might have expected – beneath the heading “Access for Anoraks,” came the announcement:

“The Eye is happy to receive submissions for the letters page via e-mail. Please mark these ‘FOR PUBLICATION’ and send to strobes@[an email address that doesn’t exist any more]”

The letters page in the following issue carried several missives appended “via compuserve” and “via demon.co.uk” where it usually says “London” or “Devon”. Most of them from people complaining about being called anoraks.

Nowadays, of course, it’s all about “tweets” like this:

schiaparelli: I see Private Eye refers to “Tweets” with heavily ironic inverted commas. This is the TIP of the ‘why I cancelled my subscription’ iceberg.
3 days ago from web · Reply · View Tweet

mumoss: Why does Private Eye feel the need to put the word ‘tweets’ in quote marks? It’s a legitimate term when talking about Twitter, FFS.
1:08 PM Jul 24th from web

The answer, of course, is “specifically to annoy people like you.”

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Private Eye Till I Die Posted by Adam Macqueen, 22nd July 2009

Michael Jellicoe, a “life time reader” of Private Eye, passed away earlier this year. His partner, Naomi Wright, sent us these photos of his coffin, which was decorated with his favourite things in life…

Clearly a man of impeccable taste.

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Black and white and read all over Posted by Adam Macqueen, 24th June 2009

Here’s a rum do. Ian Burrell, of the Independent, gets it bang-on about about the Eye’s digital strategy (or pointed lack of one).

But – writing just a couple of months back – he refers to the mag’s “monochrome presentation”. And when I mentioned this to someone else who probably looks at the magazine as regularly as Burrell does, his reply was “it is still black and white, isn’t it?”

Private Eye has been printed in colour for more than a decade now. Here – lovingly fished from a bin by me in the knowledge that they’d come in useful at some point – are some of the practice covers produced in March 1998 as the mag prepared to wave goodbye to black and white forever…

Next week: how much hacks on the Independent enjoy the Secret Diary of John Major and Jeff Bernard’s racing column in the Eye each fortnight…

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Vicar demands more fucks Posted by Adam Macqueen, 22nd June 2009

Reverend George Pitcher misses the point of a joke and takes issue with the Eye’s last cover in his Daily Telegraph blog here.

Just to prove there’s no no-fuck policy, a quick reminder of December 1993.

And to prove there’s no objection to buggery in the Eye office either…

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Hack falls to floor at Eye lunch shocker Posted by Adam Macqueen, 4th June 2009

A nice account of one of the fortnightly Private Eye lunches at the Coach and Horses in Soho from Iain Dale here.

Yes, alright, I’m only posting that because he says nice things about me…

The rather peculiar entry for Private Eye on that ever-reliable site Wikipedia states with some confidence that the lunch is known as “The Old Crappola”. They provide a reference for it and everything, so it must be true. Despite the fact that no-one at Private Eye has ever heard of the phrase…

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The big stories, 22 years ahead of their time… Posted by Adam Macqueen, 13th May 2009

See that baby being flourished by the Labour hierarchy as what they hope will be an election-winning tool? That’s Georgia Gould, of Erith and Thamesmead candidature fame, that is…

Reports I will be identifying every bystander ever to appear on the cover of the magazine are thought to be exaggerated. Although I’d love to hear from anyone who’s ever found themselves with an unexpected claim to fame courtesy of the Eye…

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Private Eye on Mastermind Posted by Adam Macqueen, 9th May 2009

Private Eye 1990-2008 was the specialist subject of one contestant on last night’s Mastermind on BBC2. Viewers in the UK should be able to watch it on iplayer here for the next week.

I knew more answers than he did. But I didn’t know all of them. Should I be worried?

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Hello fans (as opposed to Hello! fans) Posted by Adam Macqueen, 30th April 2009

Came back to the day job last week after a month away – when I’m not working on the history of Private Eye that is the point of this bit of the website, I’m an active part of its present, writing for sections like Street of Shame, Media News, Books and Bookmen and compiling the Number Crunching column – to find, as is usual, an enormous pile of correspondence from readers waiting for me. Some of it was nonsense, some of it would have been useful if it had arrived three years earlier (eventually, people will notice we’re not running the Solutions column any more), much of it was fascinating, and a few bits and pieces became the basis for things in the latest edition of the magazine.

One email in particular stood out. The guy had signed off “PRIVATE EYE TILL I DIE”.

I chortled a bit, shared the flattery with a couple of my colleagues, then moved on to the next one on the pile. That one concluded:
“YES! I am a Subscriber.
NO! I will never Cancel!”

Now I can’t be certain about this, but I suspect that people who send thoughtful and perfectly-punctuated whinges in to the Guardian letters page or phone up the Sun‘s shop-your-mates-for-cash news line don’t feel the need to express quite this level of loyalty and appreciation at first contact. In fact, I don’t think most of the other publications currently being used to line budgie cages, make firelighters or line train seats cross the nation inspire feelings quite like this.

I’ve long had the impression that regular Eye readers – and subscribers in particular – feel themselves to be part of a gang. An in-crowd who rejoice in knowing who Brenda is, why sex must be referred to as Ugandan discussions, and who go through life with one eye open at all times for opportunities to obliquely refer to Andrew Neil in a vest. It’s there in the spontaneous opening of wallets when the magazine was threatened by monsters like Maxwell and Goldsmith. And it’s there in the disappointed, almost parental tone of more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger of those cancelled subscription letters.

Am I right? How would you describe your relationship with the Eye? How long have you been a reader? Have you abandoned the magazine in the past, and what brought you back? And what – if anything – would make you swear never to pick up another copy again?

17 comments »
From the vaults Posted by Adam Macqueen, 30th April 2009

This is the Fritzl-esque space where much of the Eye’s past is stored. Everything from the background workings on scandals of yesteryear…

to lovingly-curated reader contributions…

to frankly terrifying figures from the past…

Goldsmith lived for many years in the main editorial office, frightening visitors. Richard Ingrams made his cardboard debut – alongside an equally two-dimensional Ian Hislop, Reverend Tony Blair and others – at the Eye’s 45th birthday party. I’ve been spending quite a bit of time going through old files in this dusty cellar recently. These make me jump out of my skin with frankly pathetic frequency…

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