Talk:Recurring jokes in Private Eye

message: "The school is sometimes referred to as "the Eton of the West Midlands", the joke being that the West Midlands are not regarded as a place where such a school is likely to be located." Must be news to Rugby... —  iridescent (talk to me!) 16:26, 28 August 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: "The Eton of the West Midlands"

message: Under "Tired and Emotional" it is said a trio of Labour MPs including Bevan & Crossman sucessfully sued the "Spectator". Has the name of the third member of the trio been lost?? Hugo999 (talk) 12:29, 28 November 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Tired and Emotional

message: "The Financial Services Authority is invariably referred to as "The Fundamentally Supine Authority" in reference to its reluctance to act and its seemingly chummy relationship with the industry it is supposed to regulate, often contrasting its performance with the swift and draconian methods of its United States counterparts."
:In the USA, persons such as the Enron directors, Conrad Black and Michael Milken and the three errant Barclays Bank bosses have been swiftly dealt with and despatched for long terms of imprisonment.  Contrast this with the slow and drawn-out proceedings in the U.K. particularly the Guinness share-trading fraud including the remarkable recovery from Alzheimer's disease made by leading protagonist Ernest Saunders.
:It is not an "interesting assertion"; it is, in fact, "fact".  Guy (talk) 16:11, 6 July 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  FSA 

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thread_title: An image on this page may be deleted

message: While the character may bear comparison with Lennon and Jagger, as the article states, the name is clearly a reference to Iggy Pop. Why this isn't mentioned is anyone's guess. --81.156.177.239 (talk) 02:03, 9 January 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Why?  Because Spiggy Topes made his first appearance in Private Eye in 1964 -- long before Iggy Pop was even a gleam in James Osterberg's eye.  70.27.0.43 (talk) 06:44, 6 November 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Spiggy Topes 

message: "The Grauniad" refers only to the typos, not the lower-case masthead logo. It was called the Grauniad long before the realtively recent change to a lower-case mast. 122.167.66.200 (talk) 06:50, 25 April 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Grauniad 

message: The article says this originally comes from Spitting Image caricaturing Esther Rantzen, but it is a lot older than that. I have before me a reprint of book of W. Heath Robinson's, "Wangling War Films How to Make and Fake Them (1915) in which Plate V "The Queen of the Harem. A Pathetic Incident at the taking of Constantinople" has in foreground a man, looking through a window and crying, at his feet a bag marked "onions". Si Trew (talk) 18:12, 5 January 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Takes out onion" 

message: So Polly Toynbee is Polly Filler, erm? No. Apart from the name Polly they have nothing in common. Who let this rubbish through? Have you read The Daily Mail Private Eye? You're fired.--77.99.177.87 (talk) 23:53, 17 March 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: I have always thought that Polly Filler's cap pic was Anne Diamond, though that seems a little unlikely because of libel laws etc. Of course the name is a pun on Polyfilla (spackle), just as articles are signed by Phil Space, and so on. Am I missing the point here or are you?  (cont'd Wikipeda p. 94) Si Trew (talk) 15:26, 14 July 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: Polly Filler has nothing to do with Polly Toynbee. She is a parody of witless self absorbed lifestyle columnists who write about their own lives, or idealised versions of them, and constantly refer to the incompetence of their male partners. She is utterly devoid of self awareness. Toynbee certainly has her critics (and indeed is often mocked in Private Eye) but this is about as far from her journalistic style as it's possible to get. I've no idea who the woman in the byline photo is but it's not Toynbee. --Ef80 (talk) 00:15, 27 June 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Compare and Contrast 

message: If they're in-jokes, they recur.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.189.103.145 (talk) 14:26, 14 July 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: An in-joke can be a one off. The essence of an in-joke is that it contains references that are not explicitly understood by the wider public.  You may make one such joke.  It doesn't have to be recurrent.  So the title is apt.  Davidpatrick (talk) 01:42, 15 July 2011 (UTC)
thread_title: tautological title

message: An omission, I humbly suggest are the menu cards that accompany meetings of world leaders, the G8, G20 etc.
"A selection of deserts, accompanied by coffee and humbug" and so on.
I know I should write it up myself - but I couldn't match the style!
And (unrelated) regarding the 'graffiti banner' (as I like to think of them) so kindly appended by someone in the Wiki-world regarding original research, can we not just reference the issue numbers where examples of each item appear? It doesn't have to be the first occasion - just one or two. 
217.73.23.163 (talk) 20:33, 16 July 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: Both good ideas. Martinevans123 (talk) 20:23, 8 June 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Menu cards? 

message: "(modelled on and sometimes directly applied to Ken Livingstone) " - I'm certain that references to Spart precede Livingstone's time in the news, and his style when quoted was clearly that of a post-1968 revolutionary pseudointellectual, not the rather down to earth persona affected by Livingstone. 81.174.245.208 (talk) 17:43, 9 March 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: I have been a Private Eye reader since 1971, and I remember Dave Spart's arrival.  He was nothing to do with Ken Livingstone, but a parody of the archetypal Trotskyite splinter-group member. "Spart" is a reference to "Spartacist".  Deidre Spart and Cedric Spart were the female and gay counterparts.  It was only later, several years I believe, that Ken Livingstone rose to greater prominence and was satirised as "Ken Leninspart".  I have a large collection of Eyes from the seventies and early eighties so I'll check the dates on a rainy day. Sasha (talk) 08:37, 12 July 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Dave Spart 

message: "Recurring in-jokes" might not have been ideal but "memes" is far, far worse. David G (talk) 00:20, 14 December 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree completely. They aren't memes by any stretch of the term.  For a brief moment, the page was renamed "Recurring themes and in-jokes in Private Eye" which I think is the best. --Meanderingbartender (talk) 09:08, 16 December 2020 (UTC)
replies: text:  I agree. "Recurring themes and in-jokes in Private Eye" is a better title. Pinging  who made the recent page move, who might like to join this discussion. Poltair (talk) 11:19, 16 December 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: I also agree. The point about memes is that they spread through the wider community. That might be true to a limited extent of one or two of the jokes here ("tired and emotional", The Grauniad), but not of the vast majority. They are in-jokes – allusions that would be meaningless to the uninformed outsider, but that are immediately recognisable and meaningful to regular readers. Personally, I don't think "themes and ..." is necessary either: I can't see any entries here that relate to themes but not jokes. GrindtXX (talk) 19:25, 16 December 2020 (UTC)
replies: text:  I'm not that fussed either way but I think they can be considered memes as the formats evolve from year to year, even if only within the confines of the Eye. Crookesmoor (talk) 22:01, 16 December 2020 (UTC)

text: Unless there's any dissatisfaction, I'm going to request the page be moved to Recurring in-jokes in Private Eye. Need an admin to delate the page as there's already a redirect. Meanderingbartender (talk) 14:40, 11 January 2021 (UTC)
replies: text:  I would be satisfied with that page move. Poltair (talk) 18:43, 11 January 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Terrible title 

message: An ex-pat, now located elsewhere in the world, I have recently rediscovered the Eye and still enjoy it immensely. Might I suggest a few that seem to be missing? 
-  The Graudian: The Eye, if I remember correctly, used to use this spelling of that newspaper's title because--in spite of its excellent writing--The Guardian was often guilty of dreadful typos. [Ah! I've just spotted this referenced above]
-  '..eyes passim': There is a reference here here to Private Eye's use of this phrase. I'd be curious to know exactly what it meant
--24.87.154.112 (talk) 20:34, 15 December 2020 (UTC)
replies: text:  "A Latin word meaning ‘widely scattered’, used in scholarly notes with the sense ‘throughout’, to indicate that the word or expression referred to occurs so often in a given text that references to specific instances are needless." - from [] Bonusballs (talk) 19:07, 11 January 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Possibles? 

message: :The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion. 
The result of the move request was: Moved to "Recurring jokes in Private Eye"   (t · c) buidhe 11:37, 5 February 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: Memes in Private Eye →  – Per discussion above. Meanderingbartender (talk) 11:22, 29 January 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Requested move 29 January 2021