Classic Cartoons: Alan Parker

NOT ALL cartoonists are cartoonists. Some are ordinary people whose doodles have turned into fully-fledged jokes. Some are film directors, like Alan Parker, who find the production of small pictures, in dry conditions, on a minimal budget, with absolutely no outside caterers, therapeutic.

Parker's cartoons, often drawn during meetings, in the margins of letters and scripts, express his true feelings. He sends the most insulting to their subjects and is often surprised, the next time he visits their offices, to see them framed.

"The ruder the cartoon, the more they seem to like it," he says.

Some of the less libellous have been published by the British Film Institute in Making Movies, in which Parker ridicules cinema money-men, film technology, fellow directors, actors and Virgin Airways' balloon-heavy in-flight entertainment (see above), reserving a special bile for agents and critics.