Every Monday we feature a favourite Alex cartoon selected by our readers. This week’s offering is from 1989.

Thanks to Rob Miller for selecting this cartoon about opera: an art form which Timothée Chalamet recently dismissed as something that is kept alive, but no one cares about any more. Though Timothée had to quickly retract his comments we feel that the Alex cartoon has done little to contradict his view over the years. Although the bankers in our cartoon were regular opera-goers, they were cultural ignoramuses (or should a proper snob say ignorami?) who rarely went there for artistic enlightenment or even enjoyment. Vince, the Essex money broker, was the ultimate example of this corporate boorishness.

This cartoon was from the late 1980s when bankers still had some pretensions towards sophistication, even if their primary reason for attending the opera was because it was astronomically expensive and they could claim it on their expenses. Opera prices have only climbed since then and the answer to Vince’s question about whether his score (£20) would be enough is “no”. Today at the Royal Opera House bar it might just buy him a small glass of house wine.

The City has largely given up on its aspirations towards cultural refinement in recent times (we doubt that Alex would bother to even pretend that he knew how to read music) and people tend to take any clients who are still allowed to accept hospitably to pop gigs instead. These are almost as reassuringly expensive as the opera and have the advantage that the attendees might genuinely enjoy the music. Though corporate types might be out of place in the auditorium at Covent Garden, some of their offspring could well be in the orchestra pit, as classical music is so poorly paid that it’s only children from moneyed backgrounds who can afford to make a career of it.

Puns, like the ones here, don’t make a joke in their own right: after all it’s just a linguistic coincidence that two words are pronounced or spelled the same. But a good pun or two (or three, in this case) can help make a neat link between opposing concepts: the ostensible reason why people attend the opera (music) and the real reason (drinking).

Russell is a classical music lover and regularly attends concerts, as it’s one of the few places he can go where the age profile of the audience makes him feel young. He has even been known to take a score (a proper one with musical notes in it), but normally he’s too embarrassed to open it for fear of looking like a pseud.

This cartoon features in our forthcoming book “The Best of Alex 1987 - 89”. To be kept updated on publication details please join our mailing list.

If you click on the strip above you can read the cartoon in its original 80s context .

If you’ve got any suggestions for a favourite cartoon for future inclusion please email us. And do tell us if there’s a particular reason why it appealed to you.