The Satirical Eye
Cartoon historian Mark Bryant looks at the origins of the satirical magazine that has attracted a generation of outstanding cartoonists.
Cartoons have played an important role in Private Eye ever since the satirical journal was launched forty-five years ago. Indeed one of its founders, Willie Rushton (1937-96) was himself a cartoonist and caricaturist, and the first of the magazine’s celebrated court cases was the result of a cartoon attacking Sir Winston Churchill and his son Randolph in February 1963. Like its older rival Punch, which was inspired by Charles Philipon’s Le Charivari, Private Eye was also based on a French model, Le Canard Enchaîné (founded in 1915), but soon developed its own inimitable style. It was launched the same month that Peter Cook and Nicholas Luard’s satirical nightclub The Establishment opened in London’s Soho and a year before the first broadcast of the BBC’s satirical news programme That Was the Week That Was.
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