Meeting Matt: Matthew Pritchett, the award-winning cartoonist
When Matthew Pritchett first started submitting topical cartoons to the Daily Telegraph, the paper was still ensconced in its beautiful Grade Ii-listed art deco headquarters in Fleet Street. Pritchett was fresh out of art school — Saint Martin’s — and had decided to try his luck as a self-employed cartoonist. “You didn’t have to interview well, or dress well, to be successful,” he told me. “But you needed to be able to tell a good joke.” He laboured for a couple of years as a freelancer, placing cartoons in magazines like Punch, the New Statesman and the Spectator until the Telegraph offered him a full-time job in 1988. “Someone in the accounting office realised they would practically save themselves money if they put me on the payroll,” he said. By this point his cartoons “were showing up in various corners of the paper, including the Sunday edition”. Since then he has hand-crafted nearly 10,000 cartoons for the Telegraph, and in 2018 will celebrate his 30th anniversary with the paper. Pritchett, known to his many fans as “Matt”, joined the paper shortly after it ditched Fleet Street for an office tower in the Docklands. More recently the paper has operated out of a sleek, glass-encased complex in Buckingham Palace Road next to Victoria Station. There is something rather telling about the Telegraph’s journey from EC4 to SE16 to SW1. Back when Matt was a freelancer, some journalists were still using manual typewriters. Today, everything is digital.
There should be “some sort of compromise between the old ways of doing things,” he muses, “and the constant pressure to produce fresh content.” Technology can help keep quality broadsheets in business, he suggests, “as long as the technology is easy to use. Here’s the Telegraph — click once. An online paper is cheaper to produce — no ink, no drivers, and no printing presses. But you have to make things as easy as possible.”
Matt and I recently chatted about newspapers, cartoons and current events over Earl Grey at the Telegraph office. He has an easy laugh, an affable manner, and a fondness for old films, the Muppets, Parks and Recreation, and Second World War documentaries.
“I can’t bear comedy that wants to tell you how clever it is,” he says. “You must never forget to be silly.” His own goal is to “understand the news and then do something silly with it”.
Growing up, he and his sister Georgina were encouraged at dinner to “tell a story about our day. The idea was to make everyone laugh.” He still tells funny stories, but he is not one of those compulsive joke-tellers who rattles off one-liners and never lets anyone else finish their sentences.
The storytelling gene seems to run in the family. Their paternal grandfather, V.S. Pritchett CBE (1900-1997), was a prominent short-story writer, essayist and memoirist, while their father, Oliver Pritchett, is a successful newspaper columnist and satirist. Their mother, Joan Pritchett, is the author of numerous non-fiction books about animals and rural life in England; for many years she wrote under a pseudonym, Josephine Howarth. Her books include Horsemasters: The Secret to Understanding Horses (1983), The Country Habit (1987), Not All Grannies Knit (2007), and, most recently, An Inconvenient Dog (2016). Meanwhile, Georgina Pritchett has become an established comedic writer for television whose credits include The Lenny Henry Show, Miranda, Tracey Ullman’s Show and Veep. (“Thank God my sister can’t draw!”, her brother jokes.) Matt’s two eldest children are at art school, and they are starting to create their own comics. He confesses that he is “…living through them to some extent. Their work is a bit feminist, and looks current.”
Matt’s own work is neither avant-garde nor old-fashioned. He excels at creating deceptively simple, one-panel cartoons
that are of their time but timeless. He starts not with the image but the punchline. “Once I have the joke,” he explains, “I work on the drawing. I always know that it will work if I have a good joke.”
“What has changed most over time,” he says, is not his technique but “my news sense — after doing it for so long you learn what is important about the story.”
As the Telegraph’s resident “pocket cartoonist” his readily identifiable cartoons often appear on the front page, but not always. He has “a good memory for jokes” but “sometimes worries about whether someone else has told the joke before.” When it comes to comedy he says: “I don’t want to get too cute, and I don’t want to tell too many husband-and-wife jokes. I try to avoid having two people respond to something they have seen as they walk by a newsstand. That’s been done to death. I’m not good at caricature, and feet are impossible to draw.”
I asked Matt if he was indebted to the tradition of English satirical printmakers like James Gillray, Thomas Rowlandson and George Cruikshank, but he politely demurred. Many of his favourite cartoonists, it turns out, are associated with the weekly New Yorker magazine — gifted mid-century commercial artists like James Thurber, Peter Arno, Lee Lorenz and Charles Addams. He describes their cartooning as “the pinnacle of the art form”. He praises the work of Gary Larson (“Farside”) and also that of Bryan Mcallister, the post-war cartoonist whose minimalistic cartoons still occasionally appear in the Observer.
He has nice things to say about the French cartoonist and children’s book artist Jean-jacques Sempé, who usually goes by the name Sempé, and who has recently been drawing cover illustrations for the New Yorker. He similarly recommends the work of a twenty-something political cartoonist who publishes under the one-word alias “Bob” and who was recently hired by the Telegraph. Matt insists that he has “absolutely no interest in producing a graphic novel” but admits that “a long time ago I did a cover for a magazine” and says that “I’d be interested in doing more of those.” When it comes to cartooning, the important thing to keep in mind, he emphasises, is that space is at a premium. On the one hand “you have to squeeze a ton of information into such a small amount of space”, but on the other hand “you don’t want readers to have to overthink things. It’s a tricky issue.” Matthew Pritchett has received numerous honours and awards for his cartooning. He was awarded an MBE in 2002, and the following year the Observer included him in their list of the country’s 50 funniest people. He has been named Cartoonist of the Year by the British Press Association no fewer than five times — 1996, 1998, 2000, 2008 and 2009 — and he received the Cartoon Art Trust’s Pocket Cartoonist of the Year award in 1995, 1996, 2005 and 2013. In addition, Granada TV’S What the Papers Say Awards named him Cartoonist of the Year in 1992. While newspaper cartoons are often said to be ephemeral, hundreds of Matt’s cartoons have been reprinted in book collections and, more recently, day planners. At this point his gentle one-liners and delightful linework have become an integral part of the Telegraph’s brand. More than a decade ago, an art editor at the paper told him that they could start to run his cartoons in colour, but he quickly shut down the discussion. “Colour often makes cartoons look a bit childish,” he suggests, “and I much prefer to work in black-and-white.” When I asked him how he keeps things fresh, he joked, “four children and distractions”. He then paused, and admitted that “the advantage of doing topical cartoons is that there’s always something new to respond to. You have to be aware of what’s going on around you. I survive by being optimistic. Things can get better. It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that everything was better in the past. I generally adhere to a kind of dogged optimism.”