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Micheal Heath at his Primrose Hill home |
A Private Eye view of a cartoonist’s world
Private Eye cartoonist Michael Heath talks to Tom Foot about an exhibition to celebrate the satirical magazine’s 45th anniversary
THE cartoonist Michael Heath was evacuated from Bloomsbury to Willow Road in Hampstead during World War II.
A pupil at New End School, he told how he used to scour Hampstead Heath with his dad looking for incendiary bombs.
“We used to pick them up like milk bottles,” he recalls.
With his education disrupted, and without much interest in his lessons, Heath left school and began sending his illustrations to newspapers.
Following stints on jazz mag Melody Maker, radical rag Lilliput and, bizarrely, high-society window Tatler, Heath got a contract at Punch. He has contributed to Private Eye – which celebrates its 45th anniversary this year with a cartoon exhibition at The Cartoon Museum in Little Russell Street – since 1964 when the office was in Neal Street. He is now the cartoon editor at the Spectator.
Heath, who lives in Primrose Hill and was born in 1935, has spent most of his life “huddled over a candle in a dark room trying to think of something funny to draw”.
“I’ve lived off gags for as long as I can remember,” he says. “I work through fear and panic – but so much has changed over the last five years.”
Best remembered at Private Eye for his celebrated strip Great Bores of Today, Heath reveals one of his greatest fears is turning into one.
He continues: “What is difficult about being a cartoonist is you have to keep up with everything. It’s the fashions and the way people talk that is difficult.”
“The job is so much harder now. In the ’60s and ’70s attitudes and clothing were less outrageous. Now everyone is so completely dotty – no one stands out. And it’s hard to depict, say a bank manager, because he is just as likely to be dressed in leathers as the bus driver. Both girls and boys are so skinny too. It is hard to stereotype.”
Heath was a good friend of Jeffrey Bernard – the journalist renowned for his drinking at the Coach and Horses in Soho, and subject of the play Jeffrey Bernard is unwell. One of Heath’s longest running strips, The Regulars, celebrated Bernard’s and landlord Norman Balon’s escapades in the pub. “If I’d kept in with that crowd I’d be dead,” he says, darkly. “My liver and I have separate bedrooms these days.”
He looks back with fond memories of his time working with “confident and outgoing” Willie Rushton, and editors Richard Ingrams and Ian Hislop for Lord Gnome.
Hislop, who celebrates 20 years as editor of the magazine this year, said: “Cartoonists believe that no one reads any of the articles in Private Eye and that the only reason anyone buys it is so that they can look at the cartoons.”
Heath doesn’t make much distinction between the two editors’ eras.
A cartoon about Winston Churchill GDE (Greatest Dying Englishmen) provoked Randolph Churchill to bring the first libel case against the magazine in 1963 forcing the magazine to print a withdrawal in the Evening Standard. Heath says: “Ian has had to be much more careful. People are much more litigious nowadays.”
The exhibition includes illustrations by Ronald Searle, Gerald Scarfe, Steve Bell and Camden’s Ken Pyne.
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