>What's the Al Fayed-owned version like? I've never seen it.

Sorry Jon, didn't spot this when whipping up and down the threads list.

Old version crap towards the end, but even the century old issues work very well. Check out the 1897 annual. It's great, if filled with dodgy jokes about foreigners. Really early issues were similar and as good as Saki.

New version is evil. Fayed bought it to show his funny side. Didn't work, but 'Private Eye' made that jibe before issue 1. The original editor was sacked alarmingly quickly and he gives copies away at Harrods. Hundreds of them. It's worse than The Tatler.

His influence on the mag is usually remarked upon in snipey tones by PE. There was a case last year where Punch printed a memo by Hislop which had been weeded out by Fayed's bin-checker supreme. Punch printed it, not realising it was an immediately binned first draft of the memo.

Something I was arguing with Al the other week...

The Sellars/Yeatman "1066 & All That" stuff (and the little-known folow up, "And Now All This") are all brilliant, surreal and subversive and should be rescued from the clutches of the Ned Sherrin brigade. "1066" is definitely not a few cosy jokes about how crap school history lessons are, it has a go at self-glorifying imperial history etc, which comes across in their other books ("Horse Nonsense", a piss-take of the hunting fraternity. They also did "Garden Rubbish", which wasn't so good). Anyone agree, or care?

I think 1066 was and is fantastic. Never read any of the others, but I shall look out for them.

In fact, I am inspired to read it again when I get home..
I usually move on from there to a book of john glasham cartoons which also makes me laugh.

We used to get Punch in our school library. This was towards the end. It was horseshit.
When it folded, we got Private Eye, so there is some good in the world.

Private Eye is going the same way. I can see it surviving indefinitely beacsue of it's reputation, yet becoming a byword for unfunny bollocks. Exactly like Punch.

There is the scene in the Malcolm Muggeridge-scripted Peter Sellars film "Heavens Above" (early 60s? Eric Sykes has a minor role in it) where the Sellars character and another have to sit in a waiting room, and the choice of reading matter is Punch or the Church Times. Sellars says "There's no choice, is there?" and picks the CT, which he chuckles at, whilst the other person reads Punch in silence. MM was a former editor who gave up trying to make it into a decent, relevant comedy review mag.

Private Eye's current issue made me laugh out loud 3 times!