Book of the week 6/10

So, farewell then Barry Fantoni’s 1960s, So eventful – you forgot.

This could have been a poem by the brilliant EJ Thribb, Barry Fantoni’s most famous creation for Private Eye; sadly, it’s also the hugely frustrating problem with this book.

As a memoir which claims to be an inside story of a cataclysmic decade, this quickly degenerates into a random selection of often indistinct memories, score-settling and prejudice that makes Fantoni’s claim to be at the true revolutionary centre debateable.

The sad thing about reading this is just how conservative a lot of this “alternative” gang were; really not much better than the Establishment they claimed to ridicule. This 1960s is a place where “girls were really just there to do the admin” and Alan Bennett’s entire oeuvre is reduced to “dear Alan’s plays about homosexuality”.

No wonder the incredible Dusty Springfield, disparaged here as unlikeable and “a rather frightened and plain looking girl with a bad temper and a desperate need to be loved”, didn’t pass muster. Never mind her huge talent. In a decade that saw such huge advances for equality this is remarkably reactionary stuff.

Revenge is rife: “A man called Tariq Ali once told me he was a contributor” is just ridiculously insulting to someone who helped define activism in the UK.

There is a curmudgeonly, bitter quality about much of this book that is an acute reminder of how the often brilliantly incisive humour of Private Eye could (and sometimes they still can) degenerate into a cynicism that seems to be pervasive.

Yes, Fantoni was a great cartoonist, a legend in the Eye offices and hung out with Paul (McCartney), Ray (Davies) and Jimmy (Page), first names he frequently drops.

We learn that McCartney didn’t like to be a passenger in a car and hear about the time Jimmy Page first took acid with Jeff Beck while Jimmy’s mum made tea and cheese sandwiches downstairs.

There’s a charming story about a disastrous lunch with an art critic which saw vegetarian Fantoni served sliced ham with an egg by the critic’s furious wife – her guests were three hours late due to dyeing some boots purple.

Yes, Fantoni was there at some groovy happenings. But it’s hard from this memoir to really see his participation as being anything other than a footnote to a lot of other footnotes – in a decade that has already been excessively chronicled. Review by Murray Chalmers

A Whole Scene Going On by Barry Fantoni, Polygon, £16.99