A man of many talents, Barry Fantoni, the Jewish illustrator, cartoonist, Pop artist, musician, poet, playwright and actor, has died aged 85. He died at his home in Turin, Italy.
Born to an Italian father and a Jewish mother of French and Dutch descent in 1940, Fantoni grew up in London’s East End. His father was a watercolour painter and his mother a skilled musician, from whom he gained his ability to play varied musical instruments.
He won a scholarship at the Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts to study painting aged 14, and during his schooling there from 1954 until 1958, when he was expelled, he formed the first jazz group, a film society and led a drama group.
In 1963, his first cartoon was published in Private Eye, and he became a stalwart of the magazine’s editorial team over the next five decades. He retired from the satirical magazine in 2010, telling The Independent, “It was just time to leave. The establishment isn’t even worth puncturing anymore.” Not only did he create the magazine’s cover scores of times, but he was also in the team responsible for conjuring the magazine’s jokes.
Ian Hislop, Private Eye editor and star of Have I Got News For You, paid tribute to Fantoni as a “brilliant multi-talented writer, artist and musician”.
He said, “He was an integral part of Private Eye’s comic writing team from the early days in the Sixties and I hugely enjoyed collaborating with him when I joined the magazine later on. He created formats and characters and jokes that are still running and he was for a long time the voice of the great poet and obituarist E J Thribb. So farewell then Barry.”
Fantoni was also a cartoonist for The Times and a caricaturist for Radio Times, capturing British personalities including Sir Bruce Forsyth and DJ Tony Blackburn. He wrote scripts for the BBC’s satirical programme That Was The Week That Was, hosted by David Frost.
His 1963 painting entitled The Duke of Edinburgh in His Underwear was displayed in a West End gallery, and the stir it caused was his first foray into fame. Fantoni quipped that the artwork would be described as “East End Jew Mocks Duke”.
In 1967, the Daily Mirror said of him: “Barry doesn’t so much know what is in – he decides it.”
His 2019-published memoir, A Whole Scene Going On: My Story of Private Eye, the Pop Revolution and Swinging Sixties London, told of his encounters with the celebrities of the 60s. It discussed his lifelong friendship with The Kinks’ Ray Davies, with whom he auditioned at a Soho club and met again at art school and socialised at parties and jazz shows.
In an interview with the JC, Fantoni said: “We were playing that old rock and roll song Money. I looked at him [Davies] as he sang and thought to myself: ‘You’ve got what they are going to pay for – the looks, the voice and the talent’. One day a bit later on, he called me up and said he had formed this band called The Kinks.”
Later, Paul McCartney would drop by his studio to talk about painting and play his harmonium, and Fantoni was said to have been present when the Beatle first heard The Kinks’ Indian-influenced See My Friends and suggested his band do something similar. The Beatles’ song Norwegian Wood followed.
Marianne Faithfull worked on songs with him, The Who guitarist Pete Townshend asked him about a vintage Cadillac for sale, and he taught Malcolm McLaren at Croydon Art School.
Fantoni won the title of male TV personality of the year – before Cliff Richard, Tom Jones and Mick Jagger – after hosting the BBC music show A Whole Scene Going On in 1966. Showcasing trends in the arts of the time, the programme featured Twiggy in her first TV appearance, The Spencer Davis Group, Pete Townshend, The Kinks and The Pretty Things. It drew 16 million viewers per week. Of the BBC executives’ decision to make him presenter for their new music show, he called himself “the bloke with the big conk and the long hair who looks a bit like Ringo Starr”.
After retiring from Private Eye at the age of 70, he left London to live in a town house in Calais where he wrote a detective novel about the world’s oldest private investigator – the Jewish Harry Lipkin.
Of his wish to write his book, he told the JC: “I always harboured an ambition to develop the verbal side more than the visual side. If you paint a picture, that’s it. There’s only one of it and you have to go a long way to see it. But if you write a book, it can be in China tomorrow. That’s very thrilling to me — being able to communicate with the world rather than just the people next door.”
The inspiration for his novel originated from the Nightingale House Jewish care home in Clapham, south London, where his mother lived for the last months of her life.
“I used to visit her there every day like a loyal Jewish son,” he told the JC. “I organised some friends like Stephen Fry, Ian Hislop and Helen Lederer to go and talk to them and I spent quite a lot of time chatting to the residents. There was a man there. I can’t remember his name but he was about Harry Lipkin’s age. He was from the East End, talked incredibly loudly and frightened people slightly. I admired him – he had a spirit and a strength and a resolution. A lot of people get depressed about being in a place they know they will not leave until they die. But this man hadn’t given up yet. So Harry, the 87-year-old reprobate, was born.”
The character, Fantoni said, “contains a lot of what I think about the world”.
He also said that his hero could be his riposte to the UK’s dismissive attitude towards the elderly.
“The Jewish community values older people and so do the Italians. When I’m in Italy, cars stop for old people and they are served first in restaurants. But in the UK that’s not the case. You walk down a street in London and people don’t even notice you’re there,” he said.
