Listening to the Private Eye editor Ian Hislop paying tribute to Christopher Booker on the Today programme last week was a reminder of how the passage of time has de-fanged British satire. When Booker and the others in the old gang – Richard Ingrams, Paul Foot, John Wells and Willie Rushton – founded the magazine in 1961 with Booker as its first editor the Establishment was a ripe and juicy target. Those were the last years of the Age of Deference; respect for authority and obedience to the law were pretty much universal – a state of affairs which undoubtedly owed much to the country’s wartime experiences. But as the war receded the deference of their father’s generation began to look timid and maybe a bit gutless; unquestioning obedience might be a necessary, even admirable, virtue in wartime but in a time of peace and plenty it began to look craven.
So 1961 was a propitious moment for Private Eye to be born.
And what a time they had of it! It must have been the most wicked fun to put together a magazine whose sole purpose was to ridicule, undermine and embarrass the Powers That Be. It required, too, a measure of courage to seek out and take on rich and powerful individuals and to subject them to relentless, scornful scrutiny.
And when you look at the Eye’s battle honours from those early years you have to say they (mostly) chose the right targets. The long campaign against the scoundrel Robert Maxwell, the dishonest proprietor of the Daily Mirror, showed the magazine at its best; it had intuited that Maxwell was a rogue and stood up to all his costly and dishonest litigation. Vindication came after his death when his true perfidy – which included robbing the Mirror’s pensioners – was laid bare. It was episodes like that – and there are many others – which proved how necessary the Eye was; it devoted itself to uncovering wrongdoing, it did so with an anarchic sense of humour, and the country was a better place because of it.
But what of today? Everything still looks the same: the front cover still carries the little cartoon figure of ‘Gnittie’, the glum looking crusader knight, some of the jokes still show flashes of wit, some of the journalism is worthwhile (some of it is very good, taking on stories that other outlets ignore), but as for the satire, it is for the most part, leaden.
The American humorist and journalist Molly Ivins put it well when she said that “Satire is traditionally the weapon of the powerless against the powerful” and all too often, these days, the Eye seems to have lost sight of that essential truth. The Establishment that was the Eye’s original target has long since disappeared; that world where senior politicians were accorded respect simply because of the positions they held, where there was a traditional (though sometimes hypocritical) morality which held sway in the public realm, that has all vanished. In its place there is a new Establishment with a new, lax moral code but with a novel and rigidly enforced set of ‘correct’ opinions – and this has proved a much more difficult target for the Eye.
The best satire is the product of a sense of burning injustice. Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal is the stand-out historical example. Swift’s proposal that the poor should sell their children for the rich to eat was coruscating hyperbole done to shame the Establishment of the day. As Private Eye reaches middle age what is lacking is any sense of true outrage impelling the attacks.
The last edition, for instance, had a front cover lampooning (yet again) Boris Johnson; but this feels more of an affectionate cuddle than a stiletto attack. Partly, I think, this is due to Ian Hislop’s role as ringmaster and presiding genius of the BBC show Have I Got News for You – interestingly the very programme which helped turned Boris, with his artfully constructed, shambolic persona, into a media darling. In his HIGNFY incarnation Hislop has become a celebrity and that is an uncomfortable coupling for a satirist; he is himself now part of the new Establishment, which blunts his satirist’s edge. From what I know of Mr Hislop he has lived a virtuous life and is the enemy of wrongdoers but in the process he has morphed into that most paradoxical of things – an Establishment satirist.
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SubscribeOf course it’s bite has gone. Its a titter sheet for public school boys who never grew up, who snigger at the poor or the illierate. The bite of Paul Foot has never been replaced, the ethos of Christopher Booker and Willie Rushton long gone. If Capn Bob were alive today he wouldn’t take it seriously. The current editor is now a minor celebrity giggling, smirking and lolling in his seat at his own cleverness, at least Paul Merton manages to maintain a veneer of discomfort. The humour is boneless and aimed mainly at those who cannot reply. See the egregious Dumb Britain column, laughing at the horribly wrong answers by contestants on TV quiz shows. Trying to get a laugh out of the uneducated is not satire, its just taking the piss out of the ill informed. There is no anger, edge or crusade left in the Eye. The silence from Richard Ingrams is deafening.
I stopped subscribing several years ago – you simply can’t have a satirical magazine that is so in step with establishment opinion. The sad thing is that it’s a target rich environment out there but those targets are all off limits. Perhaps a new editor is the answer but they will need to be an outsider themselves.
Good article – it’s true that the best part of the Eye is the reportage in the back pages. As the legacy media fades away, the pages devoted to contemporary journalism look very tired now. As for the satire, it often relies on ancient tropes from its heyday – which aren’t very funny. The Christmas advert section is another idea that looks incredibly stale. I used to read it from cover to cover, but now I’ll just glance through it and forget about it. The funniest thing it has are the cartoons by Robert Thompson –
maybe they should make him editor so Hislop can spend more time with his television career.