The Oldie

The Oldie is a monthly magazine launched in 1992 by Richard Ingrams, who for 23 years was the editor of Private Eye. It carries general-interest articles, humour and cartoons, and has an eclectic list of contributors, including James Le Fanu, John Sweeney, Thomas Stuttaford, Virginia Ironside, Melanie McDonagh and Raymond Briggs. It is sometimes regarded as a haven for "grumpy old men and women" – an image it has played up to over the years with such slogans as "The Oldie: Buy it before you snuff it", and its lampooning of "yoof" culture and the absurdities of modern life (even though it has for many years had its own internet column, by "Webster"). Many regard it to be the spiritual successor to Punch magazine.

Despite being called The Oldie, the magazine often stresses that it is not an age-specific publication, and does seem to have many readers in their twenties, thirties and forties. It has similarities to Punch, Viz, The Spectator, Private Eye, and The New Yorker.

Richard Ingrams writes: "After editing Private Eye for over twenty years, I decided in 1992, along with a group of friends (Auberon Waugh, Alexander Chancellor and Stephen Glover), to launch The Oldie. The aim was to produce an antidote to youth culture but, more importantly, a magazine with emphasis on good writing, humour and quality illustration. Almost twenty years later, The Oldie can well claim to be a success story, attracting some of our best writers, illustrators and cartoonists.... We provide all you should expect from a quality monthly magazine – reviews of arts and books, great features, independent opinions – as well as some things you might not expect, such as our I Once Met column, where readers write about their encounters with the famous or infamous, Still With Us, which catches up with people you might have thought were dead, and our World’s Worst Dumps slot, where readers reveal their most horrific travel tales." The Independent on Sunday said this about it: "The most original magazine in the country... The Oldie′s eclectic embrace of human variety is a monthly rebuke to the formulaic, celebrity-led concept of features in our newspapers and magazines."