t, 
TUESDAY 22nd AUGUST 2017
VIDEO OF THE DAY
Bell end! As Big Ben bongs out we find ideal stand-in
CLANGER: Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt
Patrick Blower
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Latest Jonathan Pie
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Your Daily Giles
“Comforting to know that what she decides on Thursday can wrap up our destiny for the next few years"
© Carl Giles 1979
Today’s classic cartoon
David Myers ©Punch Archive
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Cartoons
Larry, Punch
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Hector Breeze
Schrank on Barcelona
Banx
McLachlan
Whyatt
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Viz
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Lord Drone on a night out
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Daily Drone moves to new HQ
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One for the Ladies
Our Tuesday hunk
Go on … only five quid a kiss
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All Our Yesterdays
A swift half in 1954
Man in pub, Leeds (That soda syphon looks tempting … it could squirt that bowler off, no probs)
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Cock-up of the week
The only word we can think of is ‘UNCLUTTER’, how about you?
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Jonathan Pie on North Korea
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Jonathan Pie on Trump
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One in the Eye No 102
Volume 15: 1986
History of the Daily and Sunday Express as told 30 years ago through the columns of Private Eye (Lord Drone does not necessarily agree with the sentiments expressed although, from memory, they seem reasonably accurate.)
New readers: The Eye referred to the Express as the Getsworse, the Getsmuchworse, or the Getsevenworse or sometimes even worse than that.
UPDATED AUGUST 3, 2017
Street of Shame
Kelvin MacKenzie, editor of the Wapping Liar, is still proving to his loyal staff that he did not hit the intellectual heights at Dulwich College.
He said at a Fortress editorial conference recently: “Did anyone see Gandhi the other week?” They all said they had. “Wasn’t it crap?” said MacKenzie, “all those wogs in every bloody scene. Bloody boring.”
MacKenzie offered his industrial editor Tom Condon another £5,000 not to desert the Wapping Liar for the Daily Shah.
Said Condon: Kelvin, I am leaving because I cannot stand you or the paper any longer.
MacKenzie: What do you mean Tom, you cannot stand me? What have I done to you?
Condon: Kelvin, you are a liar, a cheat and a bully.
MacKenzie: But Tom, I’m not as bad as I used to be.
Condon: This me you are talking to, not a Sun reader.
FACT: MacKenzie passed one O-level at Dulwich College. It was not in English.
* Drone note: Kelvin in fact went to Alleyn’s School in Dulwich.
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Champagne corks popped amid scenes of wild exuberance at the grim Manchester office of the [Daily] Star as rumour spread that its editor, Oriel graduate and unknown man Lloyd Turner had “got the Express job”. Sounds of merrymaking echoed through the Northern Lubyanka as Turner celebrated with his seedy henchman Ray Mills and drunken Scotsman Andy Carson.
The euphoria did not last long. To the consternation of tired and emotional Star hacks, it was revealed that the job had actually gone to dynamic whizz-kid Nick Lloyd.
Despair has now set in among Turner’s jaded hacks who must brace themselves to receive yet more excitable memos urging them to “keep one foot in the gutter”.
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4th April 1986
Street of Shame
George G. Ale and Jean Rook, the only remaining star names on the Daily Express, have applied for redundancy under the generous new terms (three weeks’ pay for every year of service, plus contract) offered by the half-witted United Newspapers chairman David Stevens. Each of them should clear £100,000.
Old hands at the Getsworse recall the last bonanza back in 1972 and marvel at the shining truth which emerged from that free-for-all has now been forgotten – i.e.: that those keenest to flee can get other jobs and those left, who can’t, are useless.
18th April, 1986
Street of Shame
Heartening news for ageing hacks comes from the Daily Getsworse. The paper, under the dynamic command of Nick “We want to be the paper Fergie reads” Lloyd, has attempted to rid itself of its most ancient and crumbling pensioners and thrown itself into a frenzy of redundancies. The fate of these old timers, however, has been encouraging.
First to leave the ship, Andrew Harvey, ballasted with a pay-off of £80,000, has now resurfaced at The Times. where he has a pleasant and well-paid job as picture editor.
Retired pop columnist Judith Simons (age 61) has just been drafted on to Shah’s Today to help struggling pop editor, 25-year-old Martin Townsend, keep in touch with the “young scene”.
Meanwhile Victor Davis, decrepit chief show business writer, who left the Lubyanka with a payment of £60,000, has also found new employment. After a weekend off he has surfaced at the Mail on Sunday as showbiz editor, replacing the tired and emotional Hilary Bonner. It remains to be seen who will take on Bernard Shrimsley (CoG), Sir Larold’s chief toady, for whom the future is looking black.
*****
The Star’s seedy deputy editor Ray Mills is in trouble with the cleaning staff at the grim Manchester Lubyanka who are fed up with finding wastepaper baskets half full noxious fluid after the drunken oaf has relieved himself in his office.
The final straw came early one morning when they opened the door to find the fat slob slumped snoring open-mouthed in his chair, flies undone, a steaming wastepaper basket between his legs … and his by now flaccid member still held loosely in his grimy hand.
Meanwhile, like rats leaving a sinking ship, the Star’s drunken hacks are falling over themselves to grab the redundancy money being offered by their provincial masters from United Newspapers. They are desperate to distance themselves as far as possible from the pathetic rag before Oriel-educated Lloyd Turner (who he?), who never tells a lie unless his lips move, manages to close it single-handedly by taking the already dismal circulation plummeting to even greater depths.
*Ray Mills, who died in 2006, strongly denied this story, and we reprint it not to sully Ray’s memory as he was a decent chap, but to illustrate the sort of antics that DID occur in the old days – Ed
MORE LATER
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Is this the longest headline word?
Well is it? NIGEL GRIFFITHS, formerly of the Evening Standard and now on the Daily Express, certainly thinks so. He spotted this corker in the Sunday Express which was “slavishly copied” by the Daily Mail a day later.
We tried to contact Lord Drone for his comment on this important matter but he was busy playing The Temperance Seven’s Greatest Hits on his hydrodaktulopsychicharmonica.
(Spellchecker bursts into flames).
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An important new book about Daily and Sunday Express cartoonist Carl Giles was launched on Tuesday at the Political Cartoon Gallery in Putney, south-west London. The gathering was addressed by former Daily Express executive editor ALAN FRAME – and the Drone was there too.
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All hail the 10-year lunch
LUNCHES, especially long ones, were one of the best-loved features of old Fleet Street.
And when one retires there is only one important thing to do – have lunch with erstwhile colleagues. That is just what a group of former Daily Express senior journalists have been doing for the past 10 years.
The venue, as regular readers of the Drone may have noticed, has been Joe Allen in Exeter Street, Covent Garden, London. But now an era is at an end and Joe’s is moving round the corner to Burleigh Street, just off The Strand. The move coincides with the 10th anniversary of the World’s Greatest Lunch Club.
ROGER WATKINS chronicles the history of the club and reflects on the valued colleagues we have lost
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Towering changes at Blackfriars
There have been huge changes on the south side of Blackfriars Bridge in London since Express Newspapers vacated Ludgate House in 2004. In this view, seen from Blackfriars Road looking north towards the bridge on 9th June 2017, Ludgate House can be seen behind the bus stop.
Opposite Ludgate House is the 170-metre high One Blackfriars skyscraper, still under construction and in the right foreground is the new headquarters of United Business Media, former owners of Express Newspapers.
Ludgate House is now boarded up ready for demolition in preparation for the huge Bankside Quarter redevelopment between the old Express HQ and the Tate Modern.
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Joe Allen’s new home revealed
NOW: The Joe Allen’s new premises on 15 June
THEN: The new premises before work on the conversion began
The Drone’s favourite restaurant Joe Allen is to be moved brick by brick to a new venue 40 yards down the road from its current site in London’s Covent Garden, the Evening Standard has revealed. The new site is in Burleigh Street on the corner of The Strand in premises formerly occupied by Daawat Indian restaurant, pictured above.
Joe Allen is now closed and will reopen in Burleigh Street in September.
ALAN FRAME laments its demise.
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What a week working in journalism does to a man
DAY ONE: George Osborne is all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed as he arrives to delight us all editing the London Evening Standard
ONE WEEK LATER: And reality is already kicking in
The Times Diary reports
Gentleman Journalist
George Osborne, the best paid trainee on Fleet Street, is still not quite sure what some of his staff do. Introduced to the Evening Standard's art director, responsible for the look of the pages, Osborne assumed he was the successor to Brian Sewell and asked what he thought of the Hockney exhibition at the Tate. He probably thinks that the chief sub editor is there to write pieces about the renewal of Trident.
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Who put the lights out?
NOTHING stopped the Daily Express in 1972, not even the miners’ strike. It was the year of constant power cuts instigated by Prime Minister Edward Heath to cope with the lack of coal to fuel the power stations. And as the clock hit 4.14 on a winter's afternoon the Express news sub-editors slaved away by gaslight. Lord Drone recalls that the gas lamps on the ceiling were still there when the Fleet Street office was vacated in 1989.
Who’s in the picture? We put a few names to faces HERE
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Farewell to Fleet Street
Fleet Street was full of journalists for the first time in many years when the London Press Club held a long lunch to mark the departure of the last newspaper from the Street of Broken Dreams. Watch the YouTube video of the event above and read the Guardian report
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Life After The Front Page
This rare and previously largely unseen film, unearthed in the annals of Lord Drone, recalls the grand old days of Fleet Street. It includes interviews with Ann Buchanan, of The Sun and Daily Mirror; Clem Jones, from the Wolverhampton Express; Eric Todd of the Manchester Evening Chronicle and The Guardian; and George Bell and Ted Townshend of the Daily Telegraph.
The film, which was made by students of Goldsmiths College, University of London, in 1999, also includes someone called Alastair McIntyre (who he – Ed?) who addresses the public from the Daily Express offices in Blackfriars.
Runtime is 16 minutes.
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The Crusader Years 1900-1990
Only in the Drone: This video was supplied to Express staff in 1990 and is now published on the web for the first time.
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