Alex Masterley, the cartoon cad of a banker, has been sacked by the Telegraph. Robert Bathurst, who acted Alex on stage, talks to his creators, Charles Peattie and Russell Taylor
The Alex cartoon strip, which has been satirising the City financial world five times a week for 38 years, has been axed by the Daily Telegraph.
With an archive of over 8,500 strips created by Charles Peattie and Russell Taylor, Alex has poked fun at, and in many cases anticipated, every Big Bang, Boom, Crash and Crunch in these last four seismic decades, through the eyes of Alex Masterley: a materialistic, status-obsessed, Boomer banker, wholly unreconstructed by change and progressive opinion.
The strip, right to the end of their time in the Telegraph, has retained its bite. Charles Peattie, who draws the cartoons, as well as writing the jokes with Russell Taylor, tells me, “I’d say our faces didn’t initially fit at the Telegraph”, which published ‘Alex’ for 33 years, “but we developed a good relationship with the readers.”
Taylor said, “I always like the fact that no-one knows whether we’re from the Right or the Left. That sums up ‘Alex’, because we don’t know either. We’re just taking examples of ridiculous behaviour and pointing them out to people”.
Not being City people (“If you drive a Porsche, you can’t laugh at people who drive Porsches”) Peattie and Taylor have relied on informants to tell them about the latest scams; secret Deep Throat sources who met the writers, as often as not, over a long lunch.
One of these is former broker Malcolm Graham-Brown, who emerged from the shadows for me and paints a Bacchanalian picture of City life in the ’80s: “Lunch was a proper part of the business day. You’d slide away from your desk at about 11.30 or 12. At James Capel, we had ten magnificent dining rooms and a butler. Everybody had to have a Kümmel after lunch and I know someone who got up from a long lunch and went straight out to dinner. The fun has gone out of the City.”
The ‘Alex’ strip, he says, was “an absolute legend – the first thing you turned to in the paper”.
The City may have changed but Peattie and Taylor have remained consistent.
Peattie: “We’re sceptical about a lot of stuff.” From the start, they have been iconoclasts, resistant to any orthodoxy. “When we started, we were slightly mocking what would now be called liberal sensibilities.”
Taylor: “In the mid 80s, it was quite shocking to be obsessed with money and status. It was all Greenham Common and the Miners’ Strike. The fact that Alex was materialism personified was weird, and that was what was funny about him.”
Peattie: “People started copying behaviour in the cartoon and we thought, “We’re not satirising; we’re just giving them ideas.””
The cartoon strip has, literally, been on the money, presaging spectacular downturns which rocked the financial world.
Peattie: “We were doing jokes about subprime mortgages for about a year before it crashed in 2008. It was what people were telling us. They were saying ‘It’s all going to go wrong but there’s nothing we can do about it.’”
Taylor: “They thought no-one else heard about it but they were all saying the same thing.”
Peattie: ‘It feels, currently, the same with the American debt.”
The archive of ‘Alex’ strips stands as a social document of the past four decades.
Taylor: “Back when ‘Alex’ started, the City was a mixture of public school boys, ex-military and East End traders.”
Peattie: “The traders have been replaced by machines.”
Taylor: “And nowadays it’s just quants (analysts); everyone has to have at least two degrees.”
Their targets can unsettle.
Taylor: “Everybody hates Compliance. Everybody hates HR but they’re too terrified to speak out”
Peattie: “There’s a lot of double standards, which is where the humour comes from. I wouldn’t say that’s why they got rid of us. I’d say part of it is that we have a sensibility which is not really like that of a big tech company, which is what most people aspire to nowadays. They like things that are safe, that they’ll be comfortable with.
“We do Boomer humour, I suppose, and they don’t like Boomers.”
I ask how Peattie defines Boomer humour: “The opposite of jokes that promote an agenda, which is what people like at the moment.
“Everybody’s taking sides and they like jokes that quite clearly take a particular line, which is approved by whoever’s paying for it.
“There have been complaints about ‘Alex’ over the years but our editors have mostly supported us and ignored them. We’ve never said the right things but now, with corporate progressiveness, if they think you’re being a bit off-colour, they’ll take against it more than they did back in the day. The Telegraph wouldn’t like jokes about HR because they’d think we were mocking something which they adhere to or uphold. I don’t think the current management likes our sort of humour, which is subversive and it’s not safe.
“If you’re going to make a joke that’s slightly subversive you want people to think about whether they approve or not. As a satirist, it’s better to be like that than just crowd-pleasing. Otherwise, what’s the point?
Robert Bathurst played Alex in a solo stage show with cartoon animation.
The Alex archive is at www.alexcartoon.com
