Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1998, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a cartoonist brought up in North Wales, he didn't start drawing seriously

until he enrolled in a correspondence course run by a certain Percy V Bradshaw. He got his first big break with private eye when his distinctive

style savage caricature conveyed through ballooning bodies and wild ink blots became highly popular.

With the American journalist Hunter S Thompson he

collaborated on Gonso a form of reportage he's reluctant to define but which took

him all over the United States. Now an established illustrator and author with a

string of publications behind him he says I use my work to exercise fear. Maybe I'm

just an old-fashioned coward. He is Ralph Steadman. So all that savagery and grotesque

distortion and so on is your aggression. It's a fraud.

a savage front actually just to make people think that I actually I'm in control and I'm not in

control of anything.

But what are you frightened of?

That's why people have fear, you know,

and particularly psychological fear because they don't know what they're frightened of,

but they just know they're frightened of something. And what I try to do is to draw it in some of the more extreme

kinds of drawing which I do. I do some drawings now called knee jobs and just let my pen draw and whatever comes out I

guess is what I'm afraid of.

But it's people's knees.

No, I have it sitting on my knee. Mindy, there are knees drawn.

I thought you were doing legs these days.

...