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The walls of the Private Eye office in Soho tell you everything you need to know about Britain's famous satirical magazine.
Shots of famous covers that have outraged and offended.
Angry correspondence pinned to the notice board from the aggrieved subjects of public mockery.
An email from the artist Grayson Perry thanking them for a lunch that he barely remembers.
Copies of legal threats, including one from Winston Churchill's family.
Included in Randolph Churchill's angry framed letter of February 1963 is a line referencing his plans to write a biography of his father.
"Your suggestions that I intend to omit or gloss over unpleasant alleged episodes in my father's life are abominable," the letter says.
Private Eye has been offending the rich and powerful in Britain for over 50 years and the magazine has never been more popular.
"Our circulation is around 250,000 which is the highest it's ever been," editor Ian Hislop said.
"We're having an amazingly good run, partly because a) public life is very funny in this country and; b) life is very uncertain and people are looking for some indication for what's going on.
"I don't know if we're providing it, but we're having a go."
Photo:
Ian Hislop says jokes and journalism fill the pages of Private Eye. (ABC News: Steve Cannane)
Hislop took over as editor 30 years ago from Richard Ingrams, one of the magazine's founders.
"Private Eye does two things, it tries to make jokes about what you know and then tell you what you don't know," he said.
"There's always two sections of the magazine, there's jokes and there's journalism."
Picking fights with those with deep pockets
The journalism is often agenda setting.
The G20 meeting held this weekend in Hamburg is discussing global tax evasion, an issue that was subjected to increased scrutiny after Private Eye hired a former tax inspector over a decade ago.
"Richard Brooks noticed that a lot of small people pay tax, but a lot of rich companies pay no tax at all and this annoyed him," Hislop said.
"So we brought him over to the dark side as we call it — and probably ruined his life — and we turned him into a really excellent financial journalist.
"What was a bee in his bonnet, sitting in his bedroom, headed the G20 agenda two years ago, so it's a fairly major achievement for him."
Not Private Eye — the Daily Mirror attack
Over the years Private Eye has made a habit of picking fights with people with deep pockets, something that can prove a costly experience under the British libel laws.
One of the magazine's most famous run-ins was with the former Daily Mirror publisher Robert Maxwell.
Maxwell hated Private Eye and at one stage managed to get it pulled from the newsstands before forcing a number of his journalists to publish a smear sheet attacking the magazine called Not Private Eye.
Private Eye's then proprietor was the legendary comedian Peter Cook of Pete and Dud fame.
He saw an opportunity to resolve the situation while having fun at Maxwell's expense.
"He said, 'I bet the journalists who are putting together this attack on The Eye don't want to do it'," Hislop said.
"Then he said, 'I'm going to send round a case of whisky to the Mirror'."
After giving the hacks enough time to rip into the whisky, Cook caught a cab to the Daily Mirror building with Hislop and demanded that they visit Maxwell's office on the fifteenth floor.
"They [the journalists] were in Maxwell's office trying to put together this magazine," Hislop said.
"They've got a dummy of it, which I stole. I put it in my bag and said to Peter, 'Lets go'."
Getting the last laugh
But Cook was far from finished.
He rung up the catering department and ordered food and booze at Maxwell's expense.
Cook then rang the proprietor in New York to tell him where they were and how he was paying for it.
Maxwell was furious and eventually sacked one of his editors, John Penrose.
"Johnny betrayed me," he later said.
"He flung opened the gates of the moat and they swam the fortress. He must be fired."
After they were kicked out of Maxwell's office, Hislop took the dummy copy of Not Private Eye to the newsagents who had barred his publication.
"I said this is an appalling attack on us, you can't stock this and not sell us and so I did a deal with Smiths where they would sell both," he said.
"After Peter Cook, we always called it his raid on St Nazaire, it was the equivalent of our finest hour. It meant Private Eye was back on sale."
Private Eye as it often does, had the last laugh.
After Maxwell died it was revealed he was a crook who had taken money from his workers' pension fund to keep his companies afloat and to boost their share price.
Private Eye had been right all along to go after him.
Topics: arts-and-entertainment, company-news, information-and-communication, journalism, media, human-interest, united-kingdom