Thirty years of laughs Valerie Grove, our radio reviewer since the first issue, recalls the birth of The Oldie and the three joyous decades that followed
Oldie launch at Wheeler’s, 1992 Back row: John Mortimer, Larry Adler, Roy Greenslade, Carmen Callil, Miles Kington, Naim Attallah, W F Deedes. Front row: Jennifer Paterson, Candida Lycett Green, Richard Ingrams, Beryl Bainbridge, Harry Enfield
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n 1991, a caucus of middle-aged public-school chaps half-jestingly set about launching a magazine with what seemed a terrible name, The Oldie. (‘Why not Old Bastard?’ suggested one reader.) Actually, John McEwen the art critic – now our Bird Man – says the idea came to him in a dream: a magazine for elders, called not Saga but Sage. Richard Ingrams, late of Private Eye, and Alexander Chancellor, late of the Spectator, met over a pub lunch. They were taken with this notion: an antidote to the cult of youth; a riposte to all things new-fangled – ‘the ugly debris of the 20th century’, as Ingrams put it. Auberon Waugh and Patrick Marnham came on board. Stephen Glover, co-founder of the Independent, was approached for advice about backers; he became their fourth investor. Nobody was over 54, but all were photographed donning their reading glasses. Ingrams’s anarchic spirit prevailed. The Oldie (despite protests from some potential buyers) was to be the name. Two feminist publishers (Carmen Callil of Virago and Liz Calder of Bloomsbury) threatened to launch a rival to this all-male enterprise, to be called The Crone. But Ingrams was already recruiting a harem, starting with Germaine Greer, Candida Lycett Green, Beryl Bainbridge 28 The Oldie March 2022
and the Spectator’s in-house cook, the jolly, smoking, motorcycling Jennifer Paterson, soon to become one of the Two Fat Ladies on TV. ‘Pound three hard egg yolks…’ began her recipe for a hollandaise sauce to adorn Ingrams’s fish-finger suppers. There was a launch party at the Groucho. The husky-voiced Emma Soames, then deputy editor, recalls the early days in a chaotic office, where everything was ‘totally unprofessional’. ‘There were no brainstorming meetings – there were no meetings! I would say, “Shouldn’t we produce a dummy?” and Richard would say, “What for?” But he had a commendably clear idea of what The Oldie was about, and every news programme and paper clamoured to interview him.’ Auberon Waugh claimed, in his Rage column, that the single event that propelled The Oldie into existence was the memorial tribute to Freddie Mercury ‘an ugly and untalented, possibly unpleasant Persian singer from Zanzibar’. Everyone knew that Bron’s splenetic bark was far worse than his bite, but Tim Rice rightly leapt to Mercury’s defence anyway. ‘Congratulations on producing the most pathetic magazine ever published,’ wrote Julie Burchill. Ingrams proudly made this the lead letter in the second issue. He also printed A N Wilson’s letter in the form of an Augustan ode (reprinted in
the Old Un’s Notes in this issue), imploring The Oldie to carry on the ethos of Private Eye and rage at the follies of the world. Many readers shared this expectation – hence the first issue’s sales of 100,000 – ‘but it was never intended to be Eye Mark II’, says Ingrams. Still, a 2012 issue he edited did feature an Eye-like exposé, by Miles Goslett, of the late Jimmy Savile’s crimes and misdemeanours. Instead of publishing exposés, The Oldie specialised in venerating the venerable and traditional, deploring neologisms of modern life – in the first issue, a bewigged judge asked, ‘What is “Heavy Metal”?’ It welcomed readers’ tales for slots such as I Once Met (chance encounters with famous people) and Not Many Dead (trivial news stories about celebs, eg ‘Singer Billy Joel gashed his finger on the lid of a tin of beans he was opening for his dinner’ – Daily Mirror). In the first issue, Jilly Cooper produced her list of pin-ups: ‘I really wanted to include Richard [Ingrams] – the most beautiful man ever, don’t you think?’ she says now. Invited to give us her pin-ups again for our 400th issue, in 2021, she included just one repeat: Andrew Parker Bowles, the ‘blue-eyed brigadier who was incredibly brave in the Army – and rode in the Grand National’. Ned Sherrin boldly became Ned the
