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Private Eye

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Private Eye is a boring load of old crap printed on dead trees since like 100 years ago, which Britfags think is edgy and 1337 because it keeps getting sued for publishing bullshit. This is a clever scam by the editor, since on the weeks it doesn't get sued, its braindead readers conclude that everything in the latest edition must be incontrovertibly true.

In fact it is made of 50% unfunny, 50% fail, 25% boring and 90% unfunny boring fail cartoons. Private Eye represents the parish newsletter of the British media, members of which leak and gossip to it about each other all the time. As a consequence, reading it is a bit like overhearing one of those conversations where the speakers are all in on a private joke and you are intrigued by trying to figure out what they are on about. However, once that riddle is solved it becomes painfully obvious that they are talking about mundane SNCA and you lose interest.

History

"Are you enjoying that sandwich?" - lolololol

Private Eye was started in the 1960s by a bunch of oh-so-daring posh students, and printed waspish sallies about the aristocracy (of whom they were jealous) and the ghastliness of modern working class people (whom they despise). For several decades Private Eye was also virulently anti-Jew and anti-gay, but being the cowardly wretches they are, any trace of such offensiveness is now long-buried and forgotten.

One of the early people involved was drunken coke-addled wifebeating weirdo Peter Cook, famous for saying "Are you enjoying that sandwich?" to "Arthur" from the Arthur movies. You know the one, little guy, played the piano sometimes when he appeared on chat shows, dark collar-length hair. Anyway, Peter Cook and him recorded an LP consisting of just them swearing at each other for 90 minutes. It was hilarious, everyone said so. But that was later on. You had to be there, obviously.

And Cook was mixed up in That Was The Week That Was, which was some kind of TV satire show in the early 1960s and obvs was the most amazing thing evar to an entire generation of middle-class kids that grew up eating spam in air-raid shelters. How we laughed. "HA, HA," we went. So you had a weirdo who talked shit, involved in a TV show that was shit, resulting in a shit magazine.

The Eye has about 40 pages (A4) and 200,000 sales per issue

The only reason Private Eye ever became successful at all was because in about 1963 the British Government tried to cover up a big scandal involving a Cabinet Minister who shagged a call-girl who was also screwing a Russian spy. Since it was a new publication and no-one knew much about it, Private Eye was rumored to contain cryptic clues to the truth of the scandal, and printed occasional nudge-nudge, wink-wink, references to the story. In fact, no-one on Private Eye knew what the fuck was going on but over-egged their coverage to pull in the punters. The legend of a fearless, cover-up-breaking, muck-raking investigative journal was born.

Also, it has the word "Private" in the title, which led old-school news vendors to believe it might be porn in some way, so for decades after launch it was relegated to the top shelves in display racks, safely out of the reach of children. This only added to its slightly dodgy air of mystery and enhanced its appeal to the naive.

The Eye (as its dozens of mouth-breathing readers call it) has traded off this aura of 'underground knowledge' ever since. But if you ask a reader to name the last big story (or even the last significant story) that was ever broken exclusively by Private Eye, they won't be able to think of a single one. Except perhaps their shock-horror exclusive in which they came out in support of the MMR-causes-autism bullshit, which they had to retract a few years later when it turned out that they didn't understand what they were on about. No story that has ever appeared in Private Eye has achieved anything.

Funding

Private Eye manages to keep going because it has some of the steepest advertising rates in Britain and has never moved fully online. The website is just a teaser for the print edition. If the magazine had to settle for online ad prices, it would fold next week. Whenever it gets sued, Private Eye loses, and has to resort to begging spare change off its readers to avoid bankruptcy. Oh yeah, there was one time someone threatened to sue and Private Eye got their lawyers to put the words "Fuck off" into a formal letter to him. They still go on about this today.

Satire


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Private Eye has a cover that is famous for putting speech-bubbles onto stock photographs like a retarded high-schooler, producing oh-so-hilarious oldmeme results that are so unfunny that you have to wonder whether the unfunniness might be the joke. It isn't.

Inside, there are pages of spoof news stories, which together comprise a devastating onslaught against the hypocrisy and vanity of the national press. Of which they are part.

Investigative journalism

The brief appearance of a character who is a Private Eye journalist investigating the JFK assassination was probably the most far-fetched thing in Oliver Stone's entire movie.

Despite the long-lived rumor, the origins of which are lost to history, there isn't any investigative journalism in Private Eye. There are half-baked news stories that go slightly beyond the usual superficial coverage of standard newspapers, but this is only because Private Eye is a fortnightly instead of a weekly, so there is time for even the fat-assed hacks of Soho to make some phone calls, go down to the cuttings library, and eventually come up with something that looks like it took concentrated effort.

But most of the time, Private Eye's journalism consists of reading the papers and "joining the dots," like it's some kind of retarded invisible crossword. The example seen here is wholly representative, consisting of one part reading the newspapers attentively, one part google, one part cuttings, and another part carefully-disguised speculation. The end result of this glorified cut-n-paste job is something pretty mundane that seems more complex than it is, and consequently takes three attempts to read before it makes any sense. By which time you have convinced yourself that since you shelled out so much for the magazine in the first place and you've now put in so much effort to understand it, it must be rewarding, because obviously you couldn't possibly be stupid enough to have wasted good money to read about pointless crap.

Most Private Eye writers operate under pseudonyms. Contrary to popular belief, this is not because they are afraid of being sued (a pseudonym won't stop a lawsuit). It is because they are ashamed of themselves for writing such drivel. And so they should be.

Ian Hislop

Hislop reaches for his buzzer during the picture round

A short bald nerd with a voice that could be used to illustrate the concept of 'wanker' in any language. He has edited Private Eye for around 50 years and shows no sign of stepping down. Mainly because he is an attention-whore and if he retired he would immediately lose his position as a team captain on BBC panel show Have I Got News For You, on which he acts in a condescending manner and tells unfunny jokes that he prepared long in advance because all the panelists see the questions about 24 hours before the recording (and still can't come up with a good gag between them).

This show has been running constantly since the fucking 1990s and Hislop's appearances on it are probably the reason that people still remember to buy Private Eye (which is too cheap to take out TV ads, and which strangely seldom attacks the BBC). When he's not editing Private Eye (which must take about ten minutes) or appearing on TV (at £17k a pop), he makes dreary documentaries about the stout spirits of soldiers in the First World War, or the reputation of the British Empire. Because that's the sort of subversive edgelord he is.

See also

External links


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