User talk:Cartoon World

Pritchett, Matthew aka MATT (Cartoonist)

Biography

Matt Pritchett was born on 14 July 1964, the son of journalist Oliver Pritchett and grandson of novelist Sir Victor (V. S.) Pritchett. He studied graphics for four years at St Martin's School of Art and, unable to get work as a film cameraman, was for a time a waiter in a pizza restaurant, drawing cartoons in his spare time. He had his first drawings published in the New Statesman.

In 1988, on the death of Mark Boxer, the editor of the Daily Telegraph, Max Hastings, offered Pritchett the job of pocket cartoonist on the Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph. From the start Pritchett worked at a desk in the Daily Telegraph office, submitting half a dozen "roughs" to the paper's Night Editor in the afternoon, and then working up the chosen cartoon as a "finish". He used the signature "Matt". If the main news was particularly bad, the cartoon might be dropped altogether, but he accepted this, noting in 1989 that he was not interested in drawing "'statement' cartoons", and did not like drawing "anything that isn't a joke."

Pritchett describes the subject of his Daily Telegraph pocket cartoons as "ordinary people affected by life", and they have proved very popular. He acknowledges an early influence as the Guardian cartoonist Bryan McAllister, and Pritchett has also been influenced by Sempé and the cartoonists of the New Yorker. When Max Hastings moved to the Evening Standard in 1995, Sir David English persuaded him to offer Pritchett a considerable salary increase if he would move to its sister paper the Daily Mail, but Pritchett replied "Dear Max, Even though the Daily Mail's offer is £150,000 more than I'm getting here, I feel I have to say no because I'm so happy at The Daily Telegraph."

Pritchett's work has also appeared in Punch, Spectator and other publications. In 2001 he was awarded the MBE. By this time he had drawn an estimated 2,500 pocket cartoons for the Daily Telegraph. He still worked at a desk in the corner of the paper's open-plan offices in Canary Wharf, producing up to six roughs a day, from which the paper's editor, Charles Moore, chose one for the next day's paper. "People tell me that my cartoons occasionally make political statements," he said. "But all I am going for is the cheap laugh."

Pritchett's awards have included Granada TV's What the Papers Say Cartoonist of the Year in 1992, Cartoon Art Trust Pocket Cartoonist of the Year in 1995, 1996, and 2005, UK Press Gazette's Cartoonist of the Year in 1996 and 1998. In 2002 he was awarded an MBE. However, he admits that "it's so hard to explain what makes a joke so funny and I'm not always the best judge of my own stuff": "The disadvantage of the cartoon is that you cannot set up a joke like a stand-up comic would. But then, it can be more instant." He uses a fine Profipen felt-tip and occasionally watercolour (up to 1994 also sometimes Letratone). He is married to the fashion designer Pascale Smets, and his sister Georgina was a scriptwriter for Spitting Image.