Tuesday 27 July 2010

Guardian's Steve Bell bites the 'bourgeois, SDP-loving crapsheet' that feeds him

The Guardian's brilliant Steve Bell writes about being a cartoonist in the paper today and is as controversial as his daily drawings.
Bell writes: "It does require a certain arrogance to sit in judgment over the great and good, as well as the not so good and the less great who rule our lives, but I've had a political agenda as long as my arm since I was in flared trousers, and have never been expected to express any point of view other than my own.
"The fact that I've been trusted by the Guardian to do it for so long is something for which I am eternally grateful. Yet the very nature of what I do compels me to not only bite but despise the hand that feeds me. I've worked for the paper from the days when I regarded it as a bourgeois, SDP-loving crapsheet. In some ways nothing has changed, except that nowadays the SDP-lovers would be considered far too leftwing."
Bell's article previews six new cartoonists the Guardian is to showcase over the summer. He says: "Political cartooning has no strict career path and no particular age or gender limit, in spite of the obvious fact that all the leading newspaper practitioners are white, male, middle class and getting on a bit. The six we chose are the best we know of. They range between 19 and 48; three women and three men and with an uncanny ability to think, draw, make a point and even have a laugh. Doing all these things simultaneously and hitting a deadline is more than a little challenging."

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