NEWSLETTER

See all articles by this contributor

IAN HISLOP - PART 1

INTERVIEW BY ANDY CAPPER
PHOTOS BY ALEX STURROCK



For those of you without taste or eyes, Private Eye is a fortnightly satirical newsprint magazine that contains more actual news than all the other British newspapers they made during the two weeks it takes to put their issue together. In fact, it is one of a very small number of news publications that remains worth a shit.

Not only is it consistently hilarious, informative and subversive, it wields a mighty punch. Private Eye has acted like a sharpened pin to the whoopee cushion of incessant lies and deceit that has become the common currency of modern British politics. Its relentless and savage satire remains perhaps one of the truest checks on UK executive power. Without the magazine’s fortnightly needling, the spin of Blair’s authoritarian 90s rule may well have slickly skated into the imperious presidential model of government that smiling Tony always seemed to have such a massive hard-on for.

It is no coincidence that, as the longest-serving editor of the magazine, Ian Hislop is the most sued man in Britain and that the magazine keeps a “fighting fund” on hand to payroll the endless litigation they face.

We met him in his offices in Soho and drank tea with him while staring at all the amazing stuff on the walls and trying to concentrate on asking the questions. (He has a piano in there on which they play Mozart while they’re coming up with jokes). He is my hero.

Vice: So what is the day-to-day of doing this job? I’ve always been fascinated by how Private Eye works. It’s so consistent.

Ian Hislop: Nearly everybody works somewhere else. The journalists tend to have other jobs, and most of the writers do as well. The week before we go to press people turn up in batches really and the journalism tends to get done in there [the main office down the corridor] and the jokes tend to get done in here [his personal office]. The jokes are collaborative. There are usually three or four people doing it.

Who’s in charge?

Essentially me.

Which other papers do your journalists work for? Do they write under different names?

A lot of them don’t admit they write for us, which is fine.

Why do they write for you, though?

I think it’s about the mischief really. And they can write stories they can’t write in their own papers really because most of the national press have some other agenda depending who owns them or how friendly they are to the people you’re trying to write about.

Who owns you guys now?

We used to be owned by the comedian Peter Cook (Bedazzled, Derek & Clive) but then he died and he left most of the shares to his sisters and to his wife.

So it’s still completely independent.

The rest of the shares are owned by a sort of rag-bag of people that Peter borrowed money off in the 60s, so people like Jane Asher and Dirk Bogard, but he died so it’s now his nephew. It’s a pretty odd bunch.

When Private Eye was started, what do you think was its purpose? Was it set up to be a counter-culture magazine?

Well, no. It was started by a group of friends who went to college together. They thought they were funny, they made each other laugh and they thought: “This is better than working.” I think that’s what it was about. No one consciously starts a counter-culture because they’re not aware of being counter-culture, it’s just what they are. I think they were basically bolshy and quite rebellious people. Most of them didn’t have fathers. They’d either died in the war or died early and the sons didn’t get proper jobs and so they thought, “We can do this.” The essential component was making each other laugh and then as it developed [founder] Richard Ingrams said, “We don’t only want to make people laugh we want to tell them things that they didn’t know”, so a sort of journalism culture attached itself, mostly because they had this brilliant man called Paul Foot. He was a very good journalist.



He was the guy who really brought the journalism into it?

Yeah, and sadly he’s not with us any more.

Who’s taking care of that now then?

I had to hire three people to replace Paul. One is a man called Richard Brooks, who is absolutely brilliant. He used to work for Customs and Excise and we lured him over to the dark side because most journalists are illiterate financially. He isn’t but his record on public finance is just fantastic. He’s done some extraordinarily good stuff. I don’t want to be that specific, but a lot of the best columns we run are by people outside the office. We run a health column that is entirely written by pissed-off doctors.

So your contributors are mainly people who have contacted you with dirt on people and you’ve kept them on as contacts.
Absolutely. There’s the local council column that is written by local journalists who can’t get stuff in their own papers so they send it to us. Council advertising is quite heavy and you know what you can’t get in, but all that stuff comes from them. The TV column is also written by an insider.

Is he a secret insider?

Yes, and he would definitely be fired if they knew who it was.

Ha ha. Who is the person who writes from inside of the Houses of Parliament?

That’s a couple of people. Most of whom we don’t say who they are.

And so how many is your core team of contributors?

About 20.

And that’s in the UK only. Have you ever thought of exporting Private Eye in to different countries?

No, we’re not like you. We stay inside this country. It’s what we do well. We know this place. We don’t sell outside.


CONTINUED
IAN HISLOP | 1 | 2 | 3 | >

< PREV

MORE FROM THIS ISSUE

NEXT >

POST A COMMENT [SIGN IN] Hi, in case you haven't heard, you can now sign up to become a "member" of Viceland.com, which entitles you to all sorts of amazing benefits like pictures and a nickname. Click here to make your own profile. You can still comment if you don't, but you gotta do it all 'nonymously.

Name:
Comment: