Author interview and book reviews
Private Eye Annual, Private Eye Productions, £9.99
There can be no doubt that 2020 was a year most of us want to forget. Between the Covid-19 pandemic, the Brexit debacle, and civil unrest at home and abroad, there didn’t seem much to laugh about.
But Private Eye editor Ian Hislop has managed to retain his sense of humour – and satire.the team captain on the political panel show Have I Got News For You, reveals: “on the whole, I’m an optimist. Our essential job is to find humour in an extraordinary time, because people are looking to us for a release.”
Editor of the Eye for 34 years, he relishes his place at the tip of Britain’s satirical spear, delighting in skewering public hypocrisy, corruption and ineptitude.
No amount of experience could have prepared him for 2020, and it has been a tempestuous year for the Private Eye team. “the biggest challenge was coming out at all,” says Hislop. “hoping the printers had staff, hoping the Royal Mail could deliver, hoping someone was going to a supermarket to buy us.”
The offices closed before the first lockdown, and his staff joined the rest of the country at their kitchen tables, trying to produce a magazine over Zoom.
“We all had to learn a huge amount of technology very quickly, but that meant most of us were living the same sort of lives as our readers, which helped in a sense.”
The problems weren’t entirely technical, as catastrophic global pandemics are not funny. “covid is not essentially amusing,” concedes Hislop, “but the attempts to deal with it are.
“This government of all governments, and this prime minister of all prime ministers, were not imagining that statesmanlike responsibility would be their keynote.the PPE scandals, the chumocracy, the extraordinary failure of test and trace. when the government is overcounting the amount of PPE it’s providing because it’s counting pairs of gloves twice – even in the middle of a crisis, that’s funny.”
Across the pond, Donald Trump has been an inexhaustible source of content for the Eye, but his attempts to cast doubt on the results of the US election triggered more than a few sense of humour failures.
“Even then,” says Hislop, “something usually comes along to rescue you. Giuliani’s hair dye running, for example – you’d have to have a heart of stone not to laugh. Real life is so terrific.”
Sales of Private Eyes have already rebounded, and the end-of-year annual looks set to provide a boost.the book is in two parts – BC, before coronavirus, and AD, anno Dominic Cummings.
“The biggest challenge,” says Hislop, “is to overcome people’s relatively recent decision that anything in the mainstream media must be untrue, while anything they read online from someone’s bedroom is clearly absolute fact.”
Mainstream media and publications like his own have never been more important.
“It’s all worth doing because public life could be better,” he says. “if nobody made the effort to point this stuff out, I fondly believe the world might be a worse place.
“The great thing about journalism is it makes you concentrate on now, and my guess is that I’ll look back at this year and think it might have been one of our finest hours.”