The Launch of Private Eye

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Sue MacGregor brings together the group of cartoonists and writers responsible for the launch of Private Eye magazine. On 25th October 1961 a scrappy magazine containing six pages of jokes and cartoons, printed on yellow paper, appeared in coffee shops in London's South Kensington. More than fifty years on Private Eye, is Britain's bestselling current-affairs magazine and copies of the rare first edition, which cost sixpence, are now worth over a thousand pounds. "In the beginning, if we had an aim, it was to provide an alternative to Punch, which was then like the Bank of England," says the Eye's former editor Richard Ingrams. Private Eye's early covers had great shock value. Gerald Scarfe made his name there, depicting Harold Macmillan posing naked in the chair associated with Profumo Affair model Christine Keeler. He later drew Harold Wilson kneeling behind Lyndon B Johnson in support of the Vietnam War, pulling down the president's trousers and licking his bottom. The magazine quickly built a reputation for breaking stories that other papers would not print, taking on the rich and powerful and risking expensive libel actions that threatened to close the magazine down. Reunited to look back on the launch and development of Private Eye are its two first editors Christopher Booker and Richard Ingrams, long time cartoonists Barry Fantoni and Gerald Scarfe, and publisher Peter Usborne. Producer: Emily Williams Series Producer: David Prest A Whistledown production for BBC Radio 4.