60 Years Of The PMC - We Don't Like Satire

Originally posted on 24 August 1961...

Since this blog began over ten years ago, we've had a never-ending stream of questionable publications claiming to be 'satirical' cross our desks. Often these pernicious rags are little more than schoolboy comics or student rant sheets, but few so insiduous, so inadvisedly crass and offensive as the sorry offering we received the other day, which calls itself the 'Private Eye'

Founded by Oxbridge just-about-graduates with evidently nothing better to do, the magazine if you can call it such, claims to take an askance view at the week's news, to uncover wrong-doing and to poke fun at pomposity. So far so good, but just how do these people think that they are imbued with some kind of divine right to send up their elders and betters is anyone's guess. What do their parents think about it?

We at the PMC have every faith that our politicians and our élites behave honourably at all times, and have no need to have their every move pried into by these delinquent would-be journalists.

We fully expect that the pubication will bomb; magazine publishing is an expensive busines and we can't see it surviving in the cut and thrust of the modern marketplace. This is nearly 1962 for heaven's sake, the world is on the edge of nuclear annihilation, morals seem to have broken down everywhere, and pouring out more of this dirge just serves to provoke people. It simply can't stand up for more than a few issues, not in a field saturated with  publications such as 'The Penny Review', 'Beg your Pardon?',  'Stiffer's Weekly',  'Just For A Rag',  'The New Statemen', the list goes on...We certainly can't see it ever holding a candle to the inherently superior 'Punch', not ever.


No, our prediction, and we are seldom wrong (witness our 'colour TV by 1963' piece), is that it will fall foul of the burgeoning libel laws in this country, thus bankrupting itself and returning to the antediluvian ooze from whence it emanated.

The Leopard