Readers' favourite Alex Cartoons
Every Monday we are featuring an all-time favourite Alex cartoon suggested by a reader. This week's choice is from February 1993.
The sometimes fractious relationship between the City and the Arts is something that we’ve enjoyed exploring in the cartoon over the years.
When people of our generation started our careers in the 80s it was relatively easy to get well-paid jobs in either of those fields. You just had to have a friend from school or university who worked as a commissioning editor on a newspaper or as a trader on a bond desk. They could offer you a job with a minimum of formality and the interview - if there was one - was often conducted over lunch. So the career you ended up in was largely a matter of luck, contacts and chutzpah. Nowadays it’s a rigorous scientific process. You have to know exactly what you want to do from the age of about sixteen. Then you need to jump through the various hoops: doing summer internships, amassing academic qualifications, applying for graduate programs etc. You have to really want the money badly to put yourself through all that. By contrast back in the 80s the qualifications you needed for a job were only academic in the sense of not being of any practical importance. When we give a talk to a City audience we often start by asking people to raise their hands if, when they were young their ambition was to work in finance. It’s amazing how few hands go up.
Opera is the crossover point between the City and the Arts. As a cultural experience it should really be the preserve of those of us who went down the Arts route in life, but actually it’s mainly the followers of Mammon who can afford to go and see it. Worse still, for the City guys it’s just a way of demonstrating their wealth and status. Or sometimes they use it as a sheer test of competitive machismo to prove that they can sit through five hours of Tristan and Isolde or Tannhäuser. If they were honest (but they’re not, we have to do that bit for them) they’d probably admit that their favourite part is the interval, when they can drink champagne and network.
We like to portray City people in the cartoon as unabashed heathens, but at least they’re pragmatic heathens. If you work in the Arts you have to pretend that you like modern operas (the ones without any tunes), whereas in banks the corporate tickets to the Harrison Birtwistle opera are the ones that traditionally get fobbed off to the juniors. We should take this opportunity to apologise to Harrison Birtwistle for years of being rude about him in the cartoon. We have nothing against his music (to be honest we’re not sure we’ve ever heard any of it). It’s just that he’s got a funny name and it has become our shorthand for a serious, intense, “squeaky-gate” (ie atonal) composer. Philip Glass also has a funny name and has fulfilled a similar function in the cartoon, whereas other modernist composers like John Adams and Terry Riley have been able to avoid our satirical flak by virtue of having boring names.
The sort of corporate entertainment depicted in the above cartoon has been largely outlawed by compliance since the introduction of the Bribery Act fifteen years ago. Many clients aren’t even allowed to accept the gift of a £20 Alex book these days, so what chance they can accept a £200 seat in the stalls at Covent Garden?
We’ve always enjoyed doing jokes about snobbery and classical music, with its strict protocols about things like not clapping between movements of a symphony or after arias in serious operas, seems fair game. And, yes, we know that modern Wagnerian productions rarely feature people in horned helmets, but it’s a bit of cartoon shorthand. In reality the Vikings didn’t actually wear helmets with horns on in any case. Such things were apparently invented by a nineteenth century costume designer for the singers to wear in Wagner’s operas.
If you have a suggestion for a favourite cartoon please email us.
Alex September update
The continued absence of Alex has moved a couple of readers to turn their hand to poetry. Firstly we received this sonnet from poet Alexandra Wilde bemoaning the vanishing of her namesake from the Daily Telegraph.
A Sonnet to Plead for Alex's Safe Return
I have looked in hope but, alas, in vain
For Alex to feature in our lives again
But now I’ve had this happy thought
That he could once again be brought
Back from those far-flung secret mews
To delight us with his sardonic views.
It may be an old, pre-used conceit
But from so long ago, could it bear a repeat?
And instead of affirming that nothing was real,
It was just a bad dream - all quite surreal!
Can some benevolent avatar
Transport him home from that nightmare star?
And not to confuse with words more general:
Please bring him back from that place ephemeral.
Another reader, Matthew Demwell, chose to communicate his choice of his all-time favourite Alex cartoons in the form of a pastiche of Rodgers and Hammerstein. Can you identify the cartoons referred to?
My Favourite Strips
Alex scolds Clive for his korma malarkey;
Ditched rice wine makes Orientals feel sarky;
Coughing up fifties as uncalled-for tips;
These are a few of my favourite strips.
Fun interruptus results in head-banging;
Vince is perplexed by some sly rhyming slanging;
Clive’s not resigned Bridget’s signed his cheque-slips;
These are a few of my favourite strips.
When Alexit’s
Worse than Brexit,
When I’m feeling sad,
I simply remember my favourite strips
And Fabergé makes me glad.
(Even though she’s not in any of them.)
Our Monday Readers’s Favourite Cartoon is proving a popular feature, so if you’ve got a suggestion for a strip that you feel should be included, do email us (it doesn’t have to be in the form of satirical verses).
We’re putting together some additional material for our forthcoming book the Best of Alex 2025, explaining what happened to the other characters in the cartoon following Alex’s disappearance from the Simulation. We think it’s going to be rather fun and a book that people will want to own to complete their collection of Alex annuals. We will be listing it for pre-order on our website in mid September, so please do register your interest in advance if possible, as this will give us an indication of how big a print run we should do.
Alex July update
Now that the hospitality season is over, Alex has taken himself off to his villa in the South of France for the rest of the summer, but we his creators have been keeping busy with various side hustles.
There’s been quite a demand for commissioned Alex cartoons for special occasions. In fact if you’re celebrating a milestone event (50th or 60th birthday, retirement, work anniversary etc) it’s almost unseemly NOT to be given a personalised Alex cartoon by your friends as a souvenir. So, if you’ve got such an occasion coming up, have word with your loved ones and get them to contact us... But give us a few weeks’ notice.
Charles is still working with various AI programs to try to get them to produce an animated version of Alex. The problem with AI is that it has a mind of its own (well not quite or it’d already have taken over the world and eliminated us humans) and has a tendency to endow Alex with sideburns and stubble, perhaps confusing him with Gary Bloke?
Talking of which, the Celeb cartoon, featuring the undoubted national treasure Mr Bloke, makes its reappearance in Private Eye in the current issue in a new three-frame format.
Charles is also undertaking other cartoon commissions, including redraws of classic Alex strips. These are original artworks but on the reverse side it states that they are hand drawn copies by the artist of the strips as they were originally published (to distinguish them from original artwork already sold). So if there’s one you’ve always wanted to own place your order here. Current price per redrawn strip is £250.
Russell is writing his weekly substack blog on aspects of the business and corporate world that amuse him. Last week he wrote about summer interns being replaced by AI, this week he shares his thoughts on Ozempic. He’s also planning on writing a humorous history of the City of London and he’s doing a bit of ghost-writing on the side. So if you have recently retired from a successful career in the City and have memoirs that need licking into shape you know who to contact.
We’re also toying with the idea of bringing back the Alex cartoon behind a paywall. So we want to use this opportunity to do a quick survey. Would you be prepared to pay for Alex? And if so, how much? Do let us know.
And of course there’s the Best of Alex 2025, which we’re planning to bring out in the autumn, once we figure out how to make up for the shortfall in material (thanks, Daily Telegraph)..
Or if you're just feeling nostalgic for Alex and want to read all the old cartoons you can start here.
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.
Alex May update
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
