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 2008. My castaway this week is Richard Ingrams. As co-founder and former editor of Private Eye, he is one of the godfathers of contemporary British satire.

Soode's Corner, Dear Bill and Coleman Bowls all originated with him at the helm.

From a privileged and well-connected background, he seems an unlikely outsider.

Yet, he's spent a lifetime pulling the rug from under the feet of the Great and the Good.

It's often proved a risky route, bringing him into conflict with Army recruiting

sergeants, cabinet ministers and billionaire industrialists alike.

Now the editor of the Oldie, he says that he wouldn't know what to do if he stopped working that he

is hooked on journalism you are in your early 70s now you're still contributing to

private eye yes I have been since I gave up the ownership. I couldn't keep away.

Why do you feel the need? Partly because I need the money, but I've always enjoyed very much writing jokes with the people at private

time. And that goes on and I'm part of it I'm not responsible for it

anymore so that's great weight off my shoulders. I think of editors at least the

newspaper editors that I know of being very sort of autocratic and power hungry and terribly

authoritarian and people and yet you don't seem anything like that. What attributes

do you bring to the job? I remember my friend Malcolm Mugger saying that an editor should be like a blind man

tapping his way along with a white stick and I've always felt a bit like that myself

sort of not knowing what's going to be in the next issue and depending very much on circumstances

or what came up and not planning in advance anything.

Doesn't that make you nervous?

It does, but it's more exciting to do it like that.

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