posted on 08 Mar 2016

Bell's Eye by Steve Bell

The greatest satirists seem to be able to capture the spirit of the age and are capable of shaping the cultural landscape as well as reflecting it. Often their work survives when other art forms fall away and get forgotten. The drawings and etchings of artists, cartoonists and satirists like William Hogarth, George Cruikshank, David Low or  Michael Ffolkes all seem to distil the politics of their period, capturing them in a way that by-passes the propogandists and historians who seek to shape the past to suit themselves or their paymasters.

For me, no political commentator captured the sheer dismal horror and twisted comedy of the Thatcher years better than Steve Bell. His daily cartoon strip in The Guardian was the must see, first read part of the newspaper and I swear it helped keep me and my friends sane during these years of madness and deep depression.

When we first discovered Bell's Maggie's Farm it was as if we'd not only found a friend who understood us but someone who was able to turn all those things we were saying and thinking into drawings that stripped the mask from the faces of the scumbags who'd taken over Downing Street. After all who couldn't see Thatcher was a swivel-eyed loon, Tebbit was an undead weasel and Heseltine a narcisistic, brainless male model? We could and now, thank God, so could Steve Bell. His work steered us through the whole dismal and politically tragic decade of the 1980s in the UK with excellent side swipes at the deadhead across the Atlantic - Ronald "The Great Communicator" Regan -  thrown in for good measure. 

Bell's work had another flowering of real greatness and significance when he documented the limping tragedy of John Major's unexpected government from 1992-97. There will never be a better summation of just how hopeless Major and his cabinet dimwits were than what is captured in Bell's depiction of the hapless Prime Minister with his underpants on over the top of his trousers.

Bell is, of course, still working and plenty young enough to have more success but I somehow feel that wont happen - he was born to document the Thatcher years and he did it phenomenally well. I don't think anyone really got to grips with Blair but the Cameron government belongs to Martin Rowson and who knows what's coming next?

Terry Potter

March 2016