Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
A cartoonist whose sharp wit has satirised all walks of life for six decades, and who is now cartoon editor of The Spectator.
On the island
Eight records
In conversation
Presenter asks
6:39Is it your aim when people look at one of your cartoons to make them laugh out loud and move on swiftly, or do you want them to smile and think?
I want to buy it. Uh I have no idea. Other than the fact that I have a morbid fear of um boring everyone witless and uh hopefully um they will get the joke.
Presenter asks
7:01How much do you think cartoonists should be concerned about offending people's sensibilities?
Well, there's a limit what you can do. I mean now if you can't draw them. Certain things, and you can be killed by it. I mean, it adds a certain frision to your drawing. However, I'm not that sort of cartoonist. I try to keep you amused, like laughing or telling jokes in the air raid shelter.
Presenter asks
10:21What are your earliest childhood memories?
Mine's sort of blank up until uh the war starts, really. I can't remember much about it, though we did live. In Hampstead, round Museum Street, and um I was a Londoner born in the sound of both bells, what are you supposed to do?
The keepsakes
The book
George and Weedon Grossmith
It's about a family lived in Clapham or somewhere, and it's hysterical, and it hasn't aged at all.
The luxury
I'd have a painting kit, so I could learn to paint properly, and I'd have a critic fly over and then review it. It's a stunning drawing, first painting the colour in the corner and the neon sign written backwards saying bum.
Presenter asks
15:18During the war you were also sent for a time to Devon, where your grandmother lived, because it was meant to be safer there. How did that go?
How did that go? I was evacuated. I mean, not in the colourful way of standing around with a box with a gas mask in it, and I was at Waterloo Station or whatever it was. And I went to stay with my grandmother. I was um on the beach one day. It did on the beach is very difficult because they covered it on scaffolding and laid bombs all over the rather place. … I climbed through the scaffolding and barbed wire. It was a lovely day. And I sat there on the beach and there were a few people around me, and a couple of soldiers. And they saw the aeroplanes coming towards us. And they said, Ah, they're two of ours and I said, Wee, like that they separated and machine gunned us all and cannon fired us all and I didn't know anything other than to run, so I got up and ran and climbed through the barbed wire and the scaffolding. And all this noise around, I couldn't figure out what it was like, and it was shrapnel. And you know, they'd bombed the place, and it was considered more dangerous to be in Devon than it was to be in London, so I came back to London.
Presenter asks
17:57So much of your work is filled with this brilliant, luxurious detail, the small bits of life. If you were to pen a little cartoon snapshot of life in Brighton at that time, in the early 50s, what would be in it?
With a mixture of people, the criminals and the things that they did to each other and I mean, I got a job in not a job, but I sort of th in the club. There was a billiard hall upstairs and they gave me shilling to go out and get them sandwiches'cause often they go into mammoth card games which would last twenty four hours and um every now and then they'd beat someone up.
Presenter asks
27:16When you said you're a romantic, you've said you're neurotic — did work tend to always take precedence?
I've got to be careful, I apris thing is that first of all, women may become attracted to you because you make them laugh and they say, Oh, I love his drawings. I do little drawings for them. And then you get married to them. Editor says, I want this drawing by five, and you've got to do it by five. And they say, I thought we were going out. I thought we were going to the theatre or cinema or whatever it is. And I say, I've got to do this drawing, get it in. Well, why don't you ring the editor up and say, You haven't got time, you're going out. … But I mean, there are three people that are married with a cartoonist. The cartoonists are not funny necessarily, you know, they're not giggling or laughing. I mean, they're the sad side of it, the depression side of it, because I don't think there's any f fun without you being depressed at the same time. You've got to know the difference between the two. I mean, depression is the adverse side of people giggling all the time.
“The last thing I should have become was what I became, a cartoonist.”
“I had no relationship with my parents at all, and that was normal, I gather. I mean, my father did not hug me, we did not high five, and we did not get together and go out together and laugh like drains watching whatever football. I was sort of thrown out of the house at eight in the morning and told to come back at six, and that's the way it was.”
“Early war years to me, I had some friends and all the rest of it. It was unfortunately, it sounds awful, but it seemed fun.”
“I'm the most romantic man you ever met in your life. … I'm completely soppy. Absolutely, completely, absolutely, certifiably mentally soppy. If you show me d bambi, I'm on the floor sobbing. I I I dumbo.”
“If I'd become a contemporary British artist, I wouldn't have had to do anything. So you took a blank canvas up and then rude word in neon written backwards. In other words, it's stunning.”