Page 94, the Private Eye Podcast.

Hello and welcome to another episode of page 94.

My name is Andrew Hunter Murray, and this week we are having a special tribute episode

to the late great Christopher Booker.

Booker of course was the first ever editor of Private Eye.

He was a towering figure on the British satirical scene in the 1960s and beyond, and he was

private eye's longest running contributor ever putting

well over 50 years into jokes and journalism for the magazine.

We're going to be hearing from Booker himself later in the episode as he was interviewed about 10 years

ago by Adam McQueen for the official history of Private Eye, but first here is the magazine's

current and third editor Ian Hizelop talking about just what Booker was like.

Christopher was really quite a serious person who was very funny, which again sounds contradictory,

but it's fairly good for a satirist. I joined the I in the

80s it was very well established there was a well established writing team

there people who've been at school together or known to each other in the 60s. So it was all very daunting but I think

Christopher essentially viewed my arrival with some amusement and provided I

could make him laugh which I did and occasionally suggest I knew something

about something which given that he knew rather a lot about rather a lot of things more

or less made it okay for me to be there and over the years I got

to know him a lot better and I very much enjoyed writing with him as part of that

team. We ran some tributes in the magazine this week and Barry

Fantoni said well it was like going down the pub and Christopher had said

...