Barry Fantoni, artist, jazzman and supplier of Private Eye gags and cartoons for half a century

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22-05-2025

Barry Fantoni, who has died aged 85, was a prominent member of the pop art movement in the early 1960s and played a significant role in the early success of the magazine Private Eye.
In 1966 he became a national figure as the lead presenter on BBC television's A Whole Scene Going, a programme about pop music and fashion. The Sunday Telegraph critic Philip Purser regarded the existence of the programme as 'an abject admission of failure by the BBC', but Melody Maker voted Fantoni television personality of the year, above Mick Jagger and Tom Jones. In 1967 the Daily Mirror declared: 'He does not so much know what is in, he decides it.'
A newspaper profile of the time referred to his 'peculiar face, which suggested… an honest, humbling, shaggy, bearlike simplicity'. Its dominant feature was the majestic nose: '[it] projects, it greets people; if noses could smile, his would.'
Fantoni was multi-talented, presenting himself at various times as an artist, comedian, actor, novelist, playwright and poet, as well as a part-time jazz musician. But he was also possessed of multiple identities that appeared at times to be at war with each other, a conflict that prevented him from concentrating his talent effectively.
From 1963 he contributed spiky pocket cartoons to early issues of Private Eye, and in 1965 his caricature portrait of Terry-Thomas, in which the popular actor was shown standing by a stage door 'looking dissipated, drunken and dissolute', led to libel damages for 'a grossly impudent and unwarranted attack'. Undeterred, Fantoni next painted a portrait of the Duke of Edinburgh in his underpants that caused a stir when it was exhibited in a West End gallery.
Richard Ingrams, editor of Private Eye, described Fantoni as a brilliant self-publicist who had just walked into the office off the street from a very different background to the world of the privately educated Oxbridge graduates who had founded the magazine. Fantoni became the paper's expert on pop music, television and football, taking editorial interests beyond Haydn, Shakespeare and cricket.
Ingrams was also tolerant of Fantoni's unorthodox office manners. The editor once entered the room to find his cartoonist rolling around on the floor with one of the secretaries. Ingrams made no comment; he just stepped over them, sat down at his desk and rang down to reception to request a cup of coffee.
At Private Eye Fantoni also wrote the obituary verse column of 'EJ Thribb' and co-wrote, with Ingrams, the mock romantic serials of 'Sylvie Krin'. Once, while watching Match of the Day, he heard the celebrated television commentator David Coleman say: 'For those of you watching in black and white, Chelsea are in the blue strip.' This led to the 'Colemanballs' column, which listed inane or ridiculous comments made by sports commentators.
Fantoni was a shrewd businessman (he made £90,000 out of the 'Colemanballs' book, probably the only Private Eye contributor ever to profit from republished magazine material) and he was never one to undersell his talents. In an interview in 1968 he said that 'Ralph Steadman, Gerald Scarfe and Alan Aldridge are the only other three illustrators in this country worth talking about.'
Later that year Nude Reclining, a group portrait of a judge, a cardinal and a general reading a pornographic magazine, by an unknown artist called Stuart Harris, was exhibited at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition; it was in fact the work of Fantoni and Willie Rushton and was subsequently sold at Christie's for 80 guineas.
Shortly afterwards Fantoni designed the set for a production of Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound, featuring two crashed cars, a concrete mixer and a selection of bath tubs and beer barrels.
Barry Fantoni was born in east London on February 28 1940. His father was Peter Fantoni, a watercolour painter of Italian descent who had designed De Havilland aircraft parts during the Second World War; his mother, Sarah, was Jewish.
Barry was educated at Archbishop Temple School for Boys, a notable Church of England grammar school in Lambeth, and aged 14 went to Camberwell School of Art, from which he was expelled four years later for 'unruly behaviour'. It later emerged that his expulsion had followed an exhibition of his portraits of members of the faculty, 'naked à la Toulouse-Lautrec', but with additional erections.
He went to work for Barrie's of Brixton, a menswear shop, then took a job as a part-time instructor at Slade School of Fine Art. This unhappy period ended when he walked into the Private Eye office in 1963 and launched his career as a popular celebrity. His first task at the magazine was to repaint the managing director's door.
In 1969 Fantoni's career as enfant terrible of the metropolitan pop scene came to an abrupt halt when, under the influence of Christopher Booker – himself under the influence of Malcolm Muggeridge – he experienced a sudden conversion to Christianity and announced that he had started to pray for members of the Royal Family. Fantoni said that he had been 'in the hands of the Devil' when he had previously attacked them.
In 1972 he married a former convent girl, Tessa Reidy, who was the editorial secretary at Private Eye, and for six years he edited the parish magazine of St Martin-in-the-Fields. Inspired by the work of Stanley Spencer, he painted a giant canvas depicting 'Jesus passing through Brixton Market' and in December 1970 his 7ft portrait of Beethoven was exhibited in the Festival Hall.
By 1982, when The Private Eye Story, an authorised history of the magazine, was published, Fantoni's religious period was over and he objected to the book on the ground that it portrayed him as 'a Jewish sex maniac and halfwit'.
From 1983 to 1991 he was Diary cartoonist of The Times. 'I was told that doing a daily cartoon would kill me,' he later said, 'and it very nearly did. It is hard work being funny.' He relaxed at weekends with a jazz band in which he played the saxophone and the clarinet, two of the 13 instruments he claimed to have mastered.
In 1991 he collaborated with John Wells, his Private Eye colleague, on Lionel: the Musical, a celebration of the life of the cockney Jewish composer Lionel Bart. Fantoni later commented that every word spoken on stage had been written by him, since John Wells knew nothing at all about either cockneys or Jews. The cast had a difficult first night when the performance was interrupted by the real Lionel Bart, who leapt on to the stage shouting violent objections, and the show closed after eight performances.
Following the death of his father in 1986, Fantoni forged a new identity as a born-again Italian and spent some time teaching at an Italian art school, a period which led to his styling himself as 'Professor Barry Fantoni'. His first play, Modigliani, My Love, a meditation on the suicide of the artist's model Jeanne Hébuterne, opened in Paris for a brief run in 1999.
In 2010 Fantoni announced his retirement from Private Eye after nearly 50 years as a contributor and, having separated from his wife, moved with his new partner to 'a town house' in Calais. This was in fact a converted repair garage just outside the town centre, where he concentrated on writing detective stories and on the study of Chinese horoscopes, a subject on which he became a leading expert. Fantoni did not speak French and, as a vegetarian, was distressed by the local cuisine, most of which he regarded as 'rubbish'. But he made friends with a nearby café owner who provided him with fried egg and chips on demand.
When the town began to fill with migrants seeking ways of breaking through UK border controls, Fantoni's initial dismay was replaced by optimism. He had thought of leaving France, but 'with all the millions of English-speaking UK therapists, priests, film-makers, door-to-door salesmen, shop fitters, librarians and prostitutes coming to aid the migrants, we might decide to stay,' he said. In the event he moved to Turin in 2016, taking a small apartment overlooking the River Po and readopting his Italian identity.
He spent his final years developing the character of Harry Lipkin, 'the world's oldest private detective', an 87-year-old retired cop who lived in Warmheart, Florida, and resembled a Jewish Philip Marlowe. (''You can't threaten an 87-year-old man with death,' I growled through my dentures.') In the person of Lipkin, a Jewish-American private eye imagined on the banks of the Po and originally inspired by a resident of the Nightingale Jewish Care Home in Clapham, south London, where his mother had spent the last years of her life, Fantoni finally reconciled the numerous strands of his personality.
In 2019 Barry Fantoni published a memoir, A Whole Scene Going On. He is survived by his partner Katie.
Barry Fantoni, born February 28 1940, died May 20 2025
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