Many years ago, I was asked to provide holiday cover for a political cartoonist at a British Sunday newspaper. This was during a gloriously busy news week. Edvard Munch’s iconic painting The Scream had just been stolen from an Oslo museum (a regular occurrence, it seems); and Sir Mark Thatcher had been taken into custody for his alleged role in an attempted military coup in Equatorial Guinea.
As one of my rough ideas for the week’s editorial cartoon, I drew Sir Mark’s doting mother, the former Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, as the howling central figure of The Scream. She was holding a newspaper emblazoned with the headline, ‘Mark Thatcher Arrested’. (Whenever you can mash two news stories together in one cartoon, it’s a good morning’s work.)
Upon receipt, the comment editor called me, chuckling.
‘This is BRILLIANT! Absolutely tremendous,’ he said. ‘But, er…we can’t use it, of course.’ When I asked why, he explained that the newspaper’s readers held Mrs. Thatcher in such deep affection that they couldn’t risk upsetting them with such a cruel drawing.
I always found the chasm between what you would like to draw and what a newspaper will let you get away with deeply troubling when I was cartooning for the national press. My mentor, Roger Law (co-creator of Spitting Image), once wrote about a crossroads moment in his career when he learned ‘the difference between an aspiration and an ambition.’ It was while tiptoeing through the minefield of internal press politics that I came to understand what he meant.
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