Page 94, the Private Eye podcast.

Hello and welcome to another episode of Page 94. My name's Andrew Hunter Murray and I'm here in the Private Eye office with Helen Lewis and Adam McQueen.

This is your welcome episode to Page 94. That's right. After 150 episodes, we have decided to record a show explaining basically what the podcast is. We're going to be hearing

a little selected cuts. We're going to be finding out what this private eye magazine we keep talking

about actually is as the summer holidays end and we all get back to school. We need some good reading

to do basically and that's what private eye provides. And it's in no way like when American

comedies just do a lazy clip show because it's summer and everyone's on holiday.

It's not that. Definitely not. Can I ask you, well, the obvious question about why it's called page 94, which is why isn't it just called the Private Eye podcast? Why was that tossed out so early?

Because in Private Eye magazine, all the jokes, no, not all of the jokes, but a good few of them each issue end with continued page 94. But actually, it was just a very easy way of finishing off a joke when you don't really have a punchline for it. And it started way, way back. I can remember, because I wrote the 50th anniversary history of the magazine, turned up all sorts of correspondence, one of which was the original letter from Richard Ingrams, who was then the editor, inviting a young whippersnapper Ian Hislop to start contributing. And one of the bits of advice he gave was like, if you think the jokes are getting too long, just put continue page 94 and that's fine. So it's always been a part of it. So second question, Adam, why is Private Eye called Private Eye? Similar reasons, slightly lost

to history. There were a lot of names considered for it. So Private Eye has been going since October

1961. It was always going to be fortnightly because at that point they didn't think the founders of it

who were some guys called Christopher Booker, Willie Rushden and Richard Ingrams, didn't think

they would make enough money off it to be able to make a living out of it. So they had to have proper jobs in one of the two weeks. And basically that is how it's continued. We do one week off and then we all go off and do other things in the rest of the time. So that put pay to one of the ideas for a title which they came up with, which was The Flesh is Weekly. So spirit is willing, but the Flesh is Weekly. It's a slightly weak pun, and it didn't work because it was fortnightly anyway. The British letter that was considered, the Yellow Press, which was partly because the yellow press was sort of an old, very old, sort of early 20th century phrase for kind of like tabloidy, trashy journalism, but also mostly because the first business manager, Peter Usborne, had ordered a load of yellow paper, and it was going to be printed on that. So it was a very basic idea for that. And then, of course, it's been going for 64 years now, nearly 40 of them under the leadership of Ian Hislop, who took over as editor as an incredibly young age of, I think, 26 in 1986 on the 25th anniversary.

Right. So what we're going to do at this point in the episode is we're going to play in some of

those clips of old episodes that you can discover for yourself, but that we wanted to bring right

back to the topsoil to the surface. Adam, this is one which features you. It is you and

Maisie talking about the I's famous fortnightly

lunches and what sort of shenanigans go on at them. Adam, here's you. I asked Richard Ingrams,

who was the editor before he and his lot, what the thinking was behind starting up the round lunches.

And what he said, we didn't know anyone and we didn't know anything. And it was a way of getting people along just to talk to them and tell them stuff. And people have this weird idea that journalism happens by a sort of process of osmosis that you just kind of learn things and pluck them from the air and put them in. But of course you don't. I mean, you do need sort of insidery type people to come along and tell you stuff.

And it's not quite a case of kind of official secrets being swapped over the cheeseboard or anything.

It's really a case of building up a kind of network of people who might not necessarily come along with five perfectly formed stories for you, but might know a bit of gossip from within the BBC or the House of Commons or the Labour Party or wherever. People turn out and they're a bit nervous sometimes and they say, what's the purpose of these lunches? And you say, it's all right, it's not a networking opportunity or anything really, really terrifying. Basically, we're going to get you drunk and you're going to tell us stuff and we're going to put it in the magazine, at which point they look even more nervous and you've got them exactly where you want them. It's an essential journalist activity for the magazine is what we're saying. Eating lunch and drinking enormous amounts of booze is an essential journalistic activity for any magazine. I can't think of many other places which do it quite as religiously.

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