Readers' favourite Alex Cartoons
Every Monday we are featuring an all-time favourite Alex cartoon suggested by a reader.
This week we head all the way back to 1987 for our classic cartoon. Despite the Alex strip continuing for another three decades, the late 1980s seems to be many people’s favourite era.
This was one of our very earliest cartoon efforts, written at a time when we knew next to nothing about the financial world. The only reason that the Alex strip was about the City in the first place was because the London Daily News - the long-defunct newspaper where Alex began his career - wanted a cartoon about young people living in London. 1987 was the Year of the Yuppie (that’s Young Upwardly mobile Professional Person to you younger readers) and so Alex was born as a banker. A few years earlier and he might have worked in advertising. A few years later and he could have been an environmental campaigner. We’re not sure whether they’d have had the same longevity.
The above cartoon was not, in our opinion, our finest work. In fact we thought it was a little contrived at the time. But apparently the broking desk where the reader who nominated it worked at the time took up Alex’s line as a catchphrase and the expression “I have a good feeling about…(insert name of dud share here)” became a saying on their desk, which would be trotted out (with a wink at one’s team and fingers crossed behind one’s back) on the phone to some gullible client. This was just one of several phrases that Alex has contributed to City vernacular. Other examples will no doubt follow in future readers’ favourites.
Pigson, who Alex is speaking to in the cartoon, was his arch-rival in the early days and was one of those off-stage characters like Mrs Mainwaring in Dad’s Army or Niles’s wife Maris in Frasier, who never actually made an appearance or spoke. He didn’t last long and presumably got fired as a result of constantly being legged over by Alex. Interestingly Pigson worked for a bank called Metro Bank. 23 years later Anthony Thomson and Vernon Hill started an organisation of the same name. In order to head off a lawsuit for plagiarism from Alex, Anthony treated Russell to lunch at The Groucho Club. We’re cheap to buy off..
Clive was at the time of this cartoon just a background character who didn’t even have a name. We were going to call him Graham, but then switched to Clive at the last minute because we liked its air of faded days of empire. A whole generation of Grahams thus avoided the stigma of being associated with such a loser.
We’re not sure why we made the duff company Japanese. The Nikkei Index was on a huge bull run at the time. We just enjoyed making up silly Japanese names. Today with the benefit of Google we can inform you that “yokomushi” is a real word and refers to Noctiluca scintillans, a bioluminescent marine dinoflagellate, also known as “sea sparkle” or "sea fire”. Now you know…
If you have a suggestion for a favourite cartoon please email us.
Alex June update
We’re in the midst of the summer hospitality season and Alex is enjoying his sabbatical a bit too much. In fact we’re having difficulty coaxing him back to work. In the meantime we just want to update you on what his creators are doing.
Charles is working with an animation studio trying out the latest AI-enhanced technology to get Alex into the digital realm and planning a comeback for Gary Bloke in the Celeb strip in Private Eye.
Russell is writing his weekly Substack (that’s a blog to you). It’s mainly about finance, but with the occasional diversion into other topics. This week he’s written about the speeding awareness course he recently attended and sharing a sure-fire way of making sure you never offend again.
You can check it out here.
We are available for cartoon commissions. There seem to be rather a lot of sixtieth birthday parties and retirement bashes (sometimes simultaneously) around at the moment as the Wealth Generation exits the City (rats and sinking ships come to mind). But when the Man (or Woman) Who Has Everything is celebrating a landmark occasion, what can you possibly give them that they don’t already have? A magnum of champagne? They probably own the vineyard.. But how about a personalised Alex cartoon? One with flattering details of their vastly successful life? Who would not want one to hang on the wall of one of their many loos in their villa in Tuscany?
Email us for more details.
And of course we will let you know when Alex is back on games in some form.
In the meantime if you want to read all the existing cartoons (all 8,761 of them) you can start here.
Valuing Alex
It’s just over a month since Alex was terminated and the word is slowly spreading. Sympathetic articles in Private Eye, The Oldie and The Australian Financial Review have helped propagate the news and most people have now woken up to the reality that Alex is not on a protracted Easter break.
Some readers have formed the mistaken impression that we have retired. But that has only happened in the sense that the replicants in Blade Runner were “retired” by Harrison Ford with extreme prejudice. No, Alex is not being put out to grass and will be back in some form, we promise.
We are still receiving dozens of commiseratory emails a week and not just from financial professionals: we’ve even had a couple from priests, telling us how much they miss Alex (clearly they were doing their due diligence on the workings of Mammon).
People have also been buying prints of their favourite cartoons from our website as mementos (Alex isn’t going anywhere, but feel free to do the same). It’s intriguing to discover the odd and obscure jokes that our fans have liked. We’re publishing a selection of them on Mondays on our website.
Nice as it is to know how much our cartoon meant to people, Alex, being a banker, would want to know exactly how much he was worth in hard monetary terms. This set us to pondering on how to value a commodity like Alex. We’ve been talking to a couple of IP lawyers and there’s no obvious formula, but here’s a way of doing a rough valuation.
Among many fans informing us that they have cancelled their Telegraph subscriptions, one person told us how he phoned the Telegraph and explained that he was cancelling his subscription because of their decision to drop Alex. The salesperson responded by reducing the annual sub from £350 to £119. This values Alex’s contribution to the whole Telegraph package at £231 (or about 77%), which says a lot about the rest of the content of the newspaper (Matt being the honourable exception, of course).
Another long-term fan (a member of the House of Lords no less) copied us in on a letter she wrote to the Telegraph saying how much she missed Alex. The letter was neither published not acknowledged. In it the Baroness claimed that Alex is worth his weight in gold. We decided to do a quick calculation. Assuming that Alex (after a lifetime of City lunches) weighs in at about 14 stone, this makes 3,136 ounces. With gold at its current giddy heights of £2,543 per ounce, that would value him at £7,974,848 (*).
So, there you have it, Alex is worth somewhere between £231 and £7,974,848. Any offers (towards the high end) will be considered.
Keep the emails coming. Replying to them is keeping us busy in this (temporary) slack period while we are talking to several media outlets about bringing Alex back in some form. And sign up to our mailing list to be the first to hear when we have some news.
(*) Reader David Crossland, who admits to being retired, has emailed to point out that gold is measured in the heavier troy ounces, rather than avoirdupois, and thus Alex's total weight would be 2,858 ounces, which with the recent reduction in the gold price, would make his total value a more modest £6,953,514. We salute our learned correspondent's pedantry..
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ALEXIT - THE FEEDBACK
Many, many thanks to all of you, who have taken the trouble to write in to us about the end of Alex. We have received literally hundreds of emails, WhatsApps and LinkedIn messages from Alex readers all over the world (plus a few commiserating pats on the back and glasses of vino down at the watering hole). We’re trying to reply to everyone individually, but if we’ve missed any of you out, apologies and we’d like to say we’re grateful to you. It makes a big difference, at this slightly low moment in our careers, to read your kind words and to feel our work has been appreciated and will be missed.
Many of you have said how “bereft” you feel that your mornings have an Alex-shaped gap in them, where he used to accompany your breakfast routine, especially when the rest of the financial news is so grim. For many of you it seems Alex has been an ever-present throughout your careers - some even describe him (we hope, tongue in cheek) as a guiding light, a soulmate or even a role model. This may be hyperbole but we’re both of us susceptible to flattery and shallow enough to love it. One person described Alex’s passing as a “Lady Diana” moment for the City. A bit over the top possibly? But he also said that his ex-boss had tears in his eyes when he heard the news. Making bankers cry? Now that is an achievement..
Some of you have commented that the cartoon captured the "zeitgeist of the City”. We are of the same age as Alex so the idea of him as a generational symbol cheers us up. The Big Bang Boomers, maybe (or the BBBs to coin an acronym)? Lots of people have quoted their favourite jokes (often the rude ones) and told us how phrases from the cartoon have passed into City vernacular. One kind person compared us to Samuel Pepys (though Pepys only kept his diary for nine years). We should let you know that this is all amazingly gratifying for us, especially given that normally writing cartoons doesn’t get much feedback and we sometimes feel like we’re dropping stones down a well and not necessarily even hearing a ‘plop’. So when someone writes to say they liked a joke that we liked, but which never seemed to make a splash at the time, it’s great.
One person described Alex as “the last bastion of truth” - because we are the only people who dare to stick it to the man (we think he means the man in compliance and - invariably - the woman in HR). Another commented “You’ve made so many people laugh almost every day which is surely good for mental health, especially of those in the financial sector.” Nice to know we’re doing our bit for corporate wellness.
One banker, now in his 40s and working on Wall Street, claims that reading Alex in his undergraduate days taught him more about his future career than the finance degree he was studying for. Another tells us that he landed his first job in the City thanks to Alex. When asked why he wanted to work for the bank he was interviewing for, he replied that he wanted to be like his idol Alex and make lots of money. He got the job (we’re not sure whether this stratagem would work in a modern HR-led job interview). He is now retired from a successful career and living in New Zealand. Stories like this might make us feel failures as satirists (as the idea was to put people off mercenary City values) but we’re taking any compliments we can get at the moment.
Additionally many people who have reached out to us (as we must now say) tell us that Alex was the only thing they read the Telegraph for and that they have now cancelled their subscriptions in protest. Whether enough of them have done so to cause the paper to lose more in subs that it saved in our salary is not known. Anyway, Matt is still in there and we’d miss seeing his great work, so we’ll keep reading ourselves. We don’t bear a grudge against The DT. We actually feel we’ve been lucky to have kept the gig going for so long.
And it’s been genuinely touching to see how a character as disreputable as Alex has somehow managed to engender such widespread affection.
Due to the timing of Alex’s departure - right at the beginning of the school holidays - some regular readers may be still unaware what has happened and are assuming that we are just taking our standard two-week spring break. There may be a second wave of outrage when Alex fails to return after Easter.
Please, if you haven’t already done so, sign up to our mailing list to be kept up to date with Alex’s future career plans.
And if you've been away on holiday yourself and this is all news to you, click here to find out what happened.
Or, if you just want to wallow in some unashamed nostalgia over our back catalogue, click here
