Thirty years ago, Richard Ingrams, 84, created The Oldie. Sixty years ago, he set up Private Eye. Craig Brown salutes his hero
Our founding father
COURTESY OF CHRIS BEETLES GALLERY, LONDON / WWW.CHRISBEETLES.COM
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ark Boxer once drew a caricature of Richard Ingrams dressed up as a schoolboy, wearing a tiny cap, sitting down with his hands lodged awkwardly between his legs, his mouth set in one of those upside-down smiles, like an upturned U, and a steely, unforgiving look in his eyes. ‘Caricature is a serious thing,’ wrote one of Ingrams’s favourite authors, G K Chesterton. ‘It is almost blasphemously serious. Caricature really means making a pig more like a pig than even God made him.’ Mark Boxer’s caricature seriously accentuates some of the key components of Ingrams’s character: his intransigence, his priggishness and what his enemies invariably term his ‘schoolboy’ sense of humour, though this, in my experience, is a term employed only by those for whom all humour is a mystery. It is his sense of humour that defines him. Every year before COVID struck, Private Eye put on a show at the National Theatre. The key performers would remain onstage throughout while Richard and I sat in the wings together, awaiting our little moments in the spotlight. I used to love sitting there in the semi-darkness alongside this figure who was one of my early heroes, hearing him chuckling along, ever hungry for the next laugh. Back in 1998, he delivered the eulogy at the funeral of our mutual friend John Wells, and spoke of their days writing Dear Bill and Mrs Wilson’s Diary together. They were, he said, among the happiest of his life. Arthur Smith once wrote that laughter is a tiny escape into happiness. I imagine Richard would agree with this. Satire too often employs humour as the servant of politics, as though the comedian’s highest aspiration should be comedy without jokes or, if you prefer, 14 The Oldie March 2022
comedy without comedy. But, for Richard, the jokes have always been paramount. When his Oxford contemporary Dennis Potter attacked, in Isis, one particular play for being ‘uncommitted’, Ingrams printed a parody in his own magazine of a suitably ‘committed’ review of the Marx Brothers A Night in Casablanca. ‘The basic failure of the film,’ he wrote, ‘is due to the fact that it fails to assert the merits of a selfdeterminising stratocracy. ‘The point is so often sacrificed to some very irrelevant frivolity, and consequently the nihilistic tendencies of the virtually self-appointed seneschal are constantly being overstressed.’ Over the next 60-odd years, he dedicated his own peculiar genius to the notion that nothing is so sacred as to be beyond a joke. He warmly remembered his friend and mentor Claud Cockburn asking Willie Rushton, ‘Who’s the person who nobody’s got a bad thing to say about?’ Off the top of his head, Rushton suggested Albert Schweitzer. ‘Right, we’ll have a go at Schweitzer,’ replied Cockburn; and they did. Ingrams often followed this random method. Was this fearless – or ruthless? Mark Boxer’s caricature depicts something glacial in his eyes. People talk of his thick skin. He is both immune to criticism of himself and carefree in his criticism of others. Auberon Waugh once asked Christopher Logue if he was afraid of Ingrams. ‘So I said, “Yes, certainly. I’m
Richard Ingrams by Mark Boxer
afraid of Ingrams because I think if he thought that I’d done something wrong and he had to condemn me to death, he’d do so without a second’s thought. He’d regret having to do it, but he’d do it, and that would be the end of it.” ’ And Auberon said, ‘You know, I think you’re completely right.’ His biographer, Harry Thompson, identified in Ingrams what he called a ‘relentless capacity for revenge’. This might be overdoing it, but he certainly relishes a feud. That gentle, sweetnatured actor, the late Jonathan Cecil, who cornered the market in playing upper-class twits, first noticed this
