Steve Bell: Unspeakable IF...
Sunday October 19
It was obvious even before Steve Bell arrived in Durham that his visit was going to be a success: demand for tickets was so great that the event had to be transferred from the Studio to the main theatre. By the advertised starting time, the queue of enthusiasts filled the foyer, waiting patiently while technicians struggled to persuade Steve's laptop computer to communicate with the theatre's projection system.
The wait proved to be worth while, because it enabled Steve to develop his presentation of his latest collection of Guardian strips, Unspeakable IF..., into a wide-ranging exploration of his files. But first, the unspeakable events of the previous two years, an opportunity for the cartoonist to deliver his best one-liners live before his audience - and for the audience, an opportunity to marvel at the contrast between the savagery of Steve Bell's cartoons and the warmth and good humour of the man himself. Some of the items in his overview of the previous two years - the revelation of John Major's affair with Edwina Currie, the various misfortunes of the royal family - seemed impossibly remote, others - the improbably close alliance between Tony Blair and George Bush - were still regrettably current. Irreverent as ever, Bell matched the death of the Queen Mother with the apparent death of one of his own characters, the penguin whose acerbic comments had enlivened the strip since the Falklands war: "He represented another era...", laments his old friend Kipling, "... of corrosive cynicism and general pissing about.".
The period had in one sense included the end of an era: Margaret Thatcher announced to the world that she would make no more public announcements. Steve Bell touched in his talk on the part Margaret Thatcher had played in his career, from Maggie's Farm (the strip with which he first made his name) to the grotesque extreme to which his depiction of her had evolved. He explained the caricaturist's search for the feature which will identify each victim, and his triumphant realisation that for Margaret Thatcher it was a certain asymmetry of the eyes; and a search through the computer files illustrated this with a series of cartoons taken from different periods of this work, in which this almost imperceptible feature became wilder and wilder, without the likeness to the subject being lost.
Another series of images showed the same development of the depiction of Tony Blair, becoming eerily ever more similar to the image of Thatcher, and yet another demonstrated the difficulty for the cartoonist of lampooning John Major, a man whose outstanding characteristic was his very ordinariness - a difficulty which Bell overcame by attributing to Major an external symbol, a pair of underpants.
Another rummage around the computer produced quite a different series of images: a sketchbook from the 2001 general election. These are a fascinating glimpse of Steve Bell's raw material, not quite realistic portraits, but still full of life and naturalness, identifiably the politicians themselves before they have been processed into creatures of Bell's imagination.
Steve Bell's illuminating talk, part riotous stand-up routine, part revelation of the seriousness with which he approaches his work, set an extremely high standard for the last day of the 2003 Literature Festival; he would be a hard act to follow.
