Private Eye

I've been a regular reader of 'Private Eye' magazine for over seven years now, and have seen numerous price hikes over that time. However, at £1.20 for each fortnightly issue, 'Private Eye' still provides probably the most laughs per pound of any magazine, or indeed newspaper, on news shelves anywhere in the country. Founded in the early 1960s, kept alive by funds from Peter Cook (of Pete and Dud fame) and Richard Ingrams, and still carrying with it something of the air of that time, 'Private Eye' is undoubtedly the journalistic home of contemporary British satire. This doesn't always mean that its contents are always funny, in fact, some ...

With a four hour train journey ahead of me I reached into my bag to retrieve my CD player fro some soothing tunes to ease the boredom, then TRAGEDY, bugger, bugger and double bugger! I'd left the bloody thing at home. I had a huge selection of CD's but nothing to play them on, making them about as useful as, well, CD's with no CD player I suppose. The prospect of a four hour train journey without any music wasn't a very enticing prospect, especially as I was travelling by Virgin Trains, so the probability of the journey extending beyond four hours was pretty high! There was nothing else for it, I went for the next best option, a quick trip to ...

I have a been a long-time devotee of the esteemed organ that is Private Eye, not just for the sheer depth of satirical amusement that lurks copiously and nonchalantly under its cover, but also for the wonderful manner in which it takes the current affairs of the present day and manages to present them in such a manner that the salient points are distilled and explained in order to eradicate, or at least lessen the ‘spin’. The magazine is almost the brakes on the wheels of the political and social comfortable elite, frequently turning those wheels and the car that it represents into a nice, satisfying skid. Particularly satisfying when that happens to be Lord ...