David Quantick is a novelist and satirist, having written for many TV and radio shows, including Veep and The Thick of It.

The most famous part of this section is when he goes to the Academy of Legado in Balnebarby, where the world's top scientists are employed in extracting sunbeams from cucumbers, softening marble to make pillows, and best of all, uncovering political conspiracies by examining the excrement of people they suspect.

And pretty much that prefigures the internet, that last one.

which is entirely devoted to examining the excrement of suspicious faecal to determine their unsuitable opinions.

David Quantick.

I think the reason Gulliver's Travels is so popular is A, because it has that fairy tale element and it is possible to consume large chunks of it as a fairy tale in a Disneyfied world.

But B, it's like a cave decorated with children's toys.

When you go further in, you discover you're in a scary adult world.

David Quantick has written for many satirical shows, including Veep and The Thick of It.

The kind of satire that I like and that I've written on on various shows has anger in it.

It's very easy to be distant and make jokes about saying, ooh, Andy Burnham wears glasses and lives in the north of England.

How droll.

But I think real anger is at the heart of satire.

Not just a desire to change, but a desire to destroy.

It's not there to heal.

Gulliver is interrogated by the King of Brobdingnag, an intelligent, curious and fundamentally decent character, perhaps the only one in the whole book, David Quantick.

Are we talking late 80s, early 90s with Spitting Image?

Yeah, I think 1987, that was my...

I really wanted to be a comedy writer, but I was an enemy writer, and I didn't know anybody.

But I watched the credits of Spitting Image, and I sent them three or four sketches, and they bought one of them.

And I always say at this point, it was so long ago, it was a sketch about President Marcos of the Philippines, and Reagan was in it.

I actually wrote a Reagan sketch.

That's Ronald Reagan for the younger viewers out there.

Tell us why you've chosen that and what it means to you.

Yeah,

I have...

I think you have sort of phases.

They used to say something like, everyone's a socialist when they're young and a Tory when they're older.

I don't know if that's true.

But when you're young, you have this kind of macho thing.

I'll have a fowl, please.

So what else apart from, you know, they fuck you up, your mum and dad?

None of it

happened.

I'm really looking forward to someone posting it as real.

But there are two things I wanted to say.

One is it reminds me of the day today, which I worked on.

If people would say to me, I had it on in the next room and I thought it was Newsnight or Panorama.

And then I heard somebody say something like, the the horizon is disappearing at a rate of 10 miles a day or horses on the underground and you and it's like that if you look at the robocop poster for a second you go yeah okay and then you go what and the other thing is what i'm really proud of is that we both did it with a straight face there are very few actual jokes sorry readers in it you know i think there's a couple of puns i think chris did a bit of norwegian or swedish on the on the bergman poster but it's really they're forgeries they're not parodies

uh and uh david i want to talk to you also i haven't uh well you very kindly sent me the pdf of your your upcoming uh novel the hyena uh but you it was uh 90 minutes ago that i got it so i haven't quite had time to read the whole thing i did i did read the first couple of chapters which i very much enjoyed um do you want to tell us a little bit about the hyena

But it's unusual for somebody from a, a working-class base, that somebody who doesn't have something to fall back on, to take those sort of risks in life, isn't it?

Exactly, and she survives by getting a job as a waitress.

She sort of lives in the service industry, then she works in a hospital.

And she does hit upon a scheme.

But, and also she's a woman as well.

That's a hindrance for many people.

[laughs]

And she hits on a scheme, a very bizarre scheme, to get a man involved.

What was it like being part of that game-changing bit of British TV comedy, and how did you get involved to start with?

It was great.

I did a column in the NME with Steven Wells called Culture Vulture, and it was quite early on in the days of mocking children's television, sort of at the end of the '80s.

It wasn't really done, you know, 'cause there hadn't been enough of it, but it was just taking the piss out of Doctor Who and Thunderbirds and everything else, and we started writing about everything, and Armando read it.

And I genuinely think that Armando Iannucci thought that me and Steven were like 18-year-old acid house punks, and he was a bit, probably a bit upset to discover we were 30 and a bit old to be doing this sort of thing.

But we worked on, on The Hour, and we worked on The Day Today, and we wrote a radio show with Chris Morris called The Lighthouse Keeper, which has never been recorded and is mostly lost, although it was brilliant.

And then Steven went off and did his thing, and then I worked with Jane Busman on...

Uh, tell us about your second scar, please, David.

And then I guess whose idea was it first and how do you approach or did Sky approach yourself? How did the project come

about? Right, we're going back in time.

There's I'm sure you know him.

There's a writer called Kim Newman, who's a brilliant film critic and writes horror novels.

And he has a party, a birthday party every year, like so many people.

And he had this book.

I went one year and he had a box of books in the corner because he got so much free stuff.

And nothing at all to do with like their place in pop culture history and, you know, and the confluence of events that needs to come together to make those events historic.

Yes.

See, I love The Scaffold, but I'm unaw- and I've met Mike McCartney on several occasions.

I was, but I was unaware of this, the significance of this song, because many years ago, I'd been on an event, and somebody was talking about football chants.

And I'm fascinated by football chants, how they're made up.

You know, do they arise from nowhere? Does someone decide? Is there a committee? And somebody said they'd been standing next to someone at a Sheffield Wednesday match who'd been trying to get a chant going, and this is the chant.

"Monday's washing day.

Tuesday's shopping day.

Uh, overall, what does this, uh, magazine mean to you in terms of history really?

I'm sure rat- the ending of rationing had a big impact on the attitudes of the '60s.

I think so, 'cause America had never gone through that kind of lacking thing that Britain had.

And it's interesting that technology evolved, you know, first of all with black and white, and then into color, just because that's the way we think of the world, especially at that time.

And national service as well.

I think The Beatles are, like, one of the first generations to escape national service, which of course Elvis didn't in America.

And it really is a cutoff point.

I also keep thinking of how terrible these clothes must have been.

Mm-hmm.