I met the late Barry Fantoni a few years ago. Splendidly his own man
Private Eye’s Barry Fantoni is in magnanimous mood. “Cartoonists in this country are very good,” he says. “They are as good as they get.”
But then, in a seamless volte face worthy of Eye heroine Glenda Slagg herself, he goes off: “Martin Rowson is rubbish; Peter Brookes? Rubbish; Nick Garland; he’s rubbish - the only joke he’s got is that ‘with apologies to....’ formula.”
So that’s the cartoonists for The Guardian, The Times and The Daily Telegraph dispensed with.
Donthca just love him. Fantoni joined Private Eye in 1963, almost at the birth of the magazine and the satire era. His cartoon the spiky Scenes You Seldom See still decorates the letters page and as EJ Thribb he pens Poetry Corner, the unpoetic tribute to the departed which starts ‘So. Farewell Then....’
“I don’t feel comfortable unless I am having a rage at something,” he says. “I still write letters to newspapers. I just can’t stop.”
Now he is putting himself up for scrutiny - maybe even a rubbishing - by holding a show of his cartoons as well as his landscapes and portraits.
“The show is a reaction to the fact that my mum died last year. She paid for me to go to Camberwell Art College when I was 14 so I thought I would put on an exhibition to celebrate what would have been her 100th birthday.”
Fantoni produced a pocket cartoon for The Times during the Eighties and another for the now-defunct The Listener for 21 years.
“It all started for me when I held an exhibition on New Year’s Eve, 1962,” says the 69-year-old. “The art critic of the Daily Express came for a drink and a story. He had seen in the catalogue a picture of the Duke of Edinburgh in his underwear surrounded by cut out outfits such as a boy scout’s uniform and a kilt.
“These days it wouldn’t raise an eyebrow but by lunch time it was on the front page of the Evening Standard. Shock! What have they done to the Duke of Edinburgh?
“Richard Ingrams, who was editor of Private Eye, saw it and asked me to work there and it’s been virtually the same four or five of us who were there at the start who do the pages of jokes in the middle.
“Private Eye seems to be at its strongest when it attacks the way the media reports stories rather than attacking the institutions themselves. What I find obscene is that the writing is so obviously bogus.
“Most papers are like a weather vane. They don’t have a view, just register where the wind is blowing. Columnists are like Glenda Slagg, incapable of understanding anything much more than PR handouts. They are being paid to write even though they have no opinions at all.”
Do any cartoonists make the grade?
“I think Vicky of The Mirror in the Fifties and Sixties got it right all the time and so did David Low of the Standard. They could draw properly.
“Look at the Osbert Lancaster’s cartoons - they are still relevant, they could have been drawn yesterday. Look at the work of Leslie Illingworth who was at his best in his Punch days. He produced full pages of political comment which, artistically, were as good as it gets. Beautiful.
“The two funniest cartoonists of my generation were Bill Tidy, who did The Cloggies and Larry, who studied painting and drawing and knew you had to make people look funny in cartoons. I like John Husband’s work and I think Michael Heath is exceptionally good. He is observant, he is current and you know exactly who you are looking at when you look at one of his figures.”
But just in case it sounds as if he’s mellowing in his old age he even has a swipe at Private Eye itself.
“The cartoons are funny but I don’t think the drawings are very good. Some are just like hand writing aren’t they? I think you could draw better than that.”
Barry Fantoni: Public Eye, Private Eye Thomas Williams, Old Bond Street 22 April – 22 May 2009