November 23, 1991

A Punch in the Eye 

Eric Ellis, London 

The usual tenner, please, for the name of the vulgar Lord, spied lurching through Soho tired and emotional after 30th birthday jollies, who could lose his title for lavatorial behaviour?

And a fiver for the crusty old fart, 150 if he's a day, necking trendy foreign lagers and swanning around London's nightclubs?

Of course, discretion forbids us from going on but ...

DISCRETION, of course, never forbade Lord Gnome of Private Eye and his bitter rival Mr Punch anything, let alone bollocking Britain's great, good and the not-so-good in their scurrilous columns.

Like the time in 1986 when the Eye splashed on disgraced Thatcher minister Cecil Parkinson with the cover-line "No more cock-ups", an allusion to Cecil's affair - and resultant offspring - with his secretary Sarah Keays.

Or when Mr Punch rifled through the rubbish of The Sunday Times newspaper's parvenu editor Andrew Neil and found an accusing container of Clinique bronzing lotion.

This year the Eye and Punch celebrate 30 and 150 years respectively of keyhole-peeping, tastelessness, humour and abuse.

Rivals for the laughs and minds of the British public, they virtually invented modern satire by taking potshots at a pompous society and excavating the private lives of the rich and fatuous. Both are uniquely British institutions in that they - the Eye more so than Punch - exploit national hang-ups about class, sex and status.

Incorrigible, the both of them, they wouldn't exist anywhere other than Blighty.

The director Jonathan Miller, once described the Eye's editorial conference as like watching naked, anti-semitic public schoolboys in a changing room, flicking wet towels at defenceless victims.

"They're quite appalling, our readers," says Private Eye's editor, Ian Hislop.

He should know. He's rather appalling himself, he admits, because he's read the Eye for most of his 31 years.

"Our owner Peter Cook said I was a rent boy for Richard Ingrams (Hislop's predecessor and Eye inspiration)," says Hislop. "I vehemently deny the charge but, of course, I can't speak for Richard."

It's that sort of smutty schoolboy humour that sells 210,000 copies a week and keeps an average of 12 libel suits before Eye lawyers at any given time.

Readers are overwhelmingly male, 25 to 40 years, prefer Rugby to soccer, boxers to briefs and lager to ale; the sort who snigger when they hear the word "penis" on TV. Most live in London, many are city types, but an uncomfortably large amount are in media and government.

"We have a definite view on matters, always anti-government but anarchic, vaguely anti-establishment," says Hislop. "I suppose it's a quite jaundiced, suspicious, cynical view of people's motives.

The Daily Mail's wicked gossip writer, Nigel Dempster, or PrattDumpster as the Eye knows him, used to be an Eye contributor until a big and public falling out with Ingrams and, by extension, Hislop.

Today the exchange between the three is pure vitriol, degenerating into one of London's most durable feuds.

Ingrams: Nigel Dempster is bonkers. If I met him now I would spit in his face.

Dempster: May Richard Ingrams rot in hell, just so long as he arrives there holding the hand of Ian Hislop.

Hislop: Nigel Dempster is nuts. It's quite clear from what you read in his column.

Banter like this greases the wheels of the Eye and makes it compulsive reading for those who matter, or rather, think they do.

With its sloppy layout, intended spelling errors and print that comes off on your fingers, Private Eye cultivates a clubby environment where the reader feels as if he, and he alone, is privy to the naughtiest of secrets.

Once readers would devour the Eye privately but never admit it publicly. These days, Eye titbits are proffered at dinner parties by guests wanting to be seen with their finger on the pulse of London life. Private Eye has become respectable.

"Well, sort of respectable," contends Hislop. "I guess if you've been around as long as we have now, we must be seen as something of an establishment. That disappoints me to a certain degree."

The magazine officially got under way in October 1961, a crude scandal sheet "taking the piss", as Hislop puts it, out of the selfimportant media and literati.

Today the Eye plays a key role in the British media, a grateful recipient of material too hot for the dailies to touch. Notable scoops include the goings-on at BCCI, "the drug bank", and the dubious Al-Fayed takeover of Harrods.

A lot of people have come and gone through the Eye's doors - the Greers, the Waughs, the Dempsters and the Humphrieses.

"(Barry) Humphries wrote for us before he began advertising coffee and being a drag queen. Germaine Greer wrote about gardening, I think (under the byline Rose Blight)."

Private Eye is always being sued, more often than not by the late Robert Maxwell, or Sir James Goldsmith, who legend has it whipped off 64 writs in one year, which helped the Eye's circulation enormously.

The Eye held the record for libel damages when in 1989 Sonia Sutcliffe, the wife of the Yorkshire Ripper, was awarded Pound 600,000 ($A1.3 million). An appeal reduced that to Pound 60,000 and saved the paper from bankruptcy.

"We wear our writs like war wounds. It's like displaying your scars," says Hislop.

The Eye has also developed its own vernacular, claiming to have given the world the term "tired and emotional" as a euphemism for drunk, and the famous"most remarkable resemblance ... could they in fact be related?" routine. "Shurely shome mishtake" is another Eye classic.

Editors the world over will dispute this, but the Eye also pioneered the now widely used editor's interpolation.

The lunch should never be underestimated in the evolution and contents of both titles.

At the Eye, lunch, or "the old crappola" as it's known, revolves around the Coach and Horses pub in Greek Street, Soho, best known as the second home, if not the first, of Jeffrey Bernard, the permanently sozzled and frequently unwell Spectator columnist.

It's in the Coach's upstairs room that much of the Eye's information and inspiration is sourced in boozy, strictly off-the-record affairs where a 5 pm finish is considered a major disappointment.

It was here that one of the Eye's most appealing euphemisms, the verb "to discuss Ugandan affairs", was coined when a guest regaled the table of how, at a particularly boring party he once attended, the hostess suggested he meet a"fascinating" Ugandan diplomat who had fled Idi Amin's regime.

He trotted upstairs to his room, only to find the chap in flagrante delicto with a female hackette of his brief acquaintance.

If at all possible, lunch is more of an institution at Punch where invitees gather fortnightly in the magazine's private dining room. The gravity of the Punch lunch is such that the table it was held around for 140 years is now displayed in a London museum.

Tattle here, too, is strictly off-the-record. After exercising their intellects, guests must chisel their initials into the table. Margaret Thatcher was the first woman to do so, in 1975. Chiseller-diners range from Mark Twain and William Thackeray to the Prince of Wales and, only last month, Dave Gilmour of the rock band Pink Floyd.

A number of initials are etched beneath the table because that was the only view visible after one memorable meal.

In the past 30 years, lunch has been about the only thing memorable about Punch, which has seen its 100,000 circulation in 1961, when the Eye was founded, dribble down to a present 30,000.

Punch's problems are best understood when comparing the magazine's circulation to its readership. It may sell 30,000 each week, but it is read by about 250,000.

"Yeah, yeah, yeah," says Punch editor David Thomas. "I know all the stories about dentists' waiting rooms and, yes, I admit, they're partly true, but we are changing.

"I want this magazine to be fashionable, to be hip, but, above all, I want it to be smart, to be funny."

A former writer for The Face magazine, Thomas is not cast in the traditional, tweedy Punch mould. He's young - 32 - wears Armani and flamboyant ties (but not striped shirts), spawns designer children and before becoming editor hadn't actually read Punch.

Herald: Admit it, you're a yuppie. Punch has gone yuppie.

Thomas: What's a yuppie? An advertising term. We've always had yuppies or their sort. In the '60s they were called Young Meteors. If anything I'm worryingly illiberal. I admit I was a Private Eye reader.

He actually sees himself as going back to Punch's true beginnings, with an emphasis on good writing and progressive scepticism.

"The sacred cows nowadays are liberal ones," Thomas says. "No-one's poking fun at the liberals. Private Eye is totally preoccupied with the Establishment.

"These are the people who live on Campden Hill, purport to shrug off their upper-middle-class privileges and say, 'Yes, we should do more for the poor, for immigration and so on' to make themselves feel radical. But if a black moved in across the street, in their heart of hearts they'd be outraged for the property prices.

"They hated Thatcher because she allowed people to rise out of their background and live in nice houses and drive nice cars."

Having said that, Thomas picks up the week's Punch, which features a cardboard cut-out, Barbie-Doll-style guide to "Essex Girl, the materialistic Child of Thatcher".

"Well, anyone's fair game, really." Indeed.