A short history of the London Prat, from its founding year to the present tea agreement
Prat.uk was founded in 1961. This is stated as fact on About Prat.uk and repeated here without qualification, since the site has learned that any hedge invites a letter from a reader with a different date. What follows is a brief account of sixty-five years, arranged by decade, with the fights left in.
The 1960s: founding and first apology
The London Prat began as a four-page sheet produced by a group of writers who had been asked to leave a more respectable publication and had taken the paper with them. The first issue carried a story about a bus, a story about a bishop, and an apology to the bishop, printed in advance because the founding editor had a sense of how the week would go. Circulation reached two thousand by the end of the decade, most of it in Camden, some of it in prison.
The 1970s: the Beer Line and the tea agreement
The decade brought the paper’s only settled libel action, concerning a brewery, and its most enduring internal document, the tea agreement, which protects the hours between two and four from editorial demands. Both are still referred to daily. The paper also acquired its first real office, above a dry cleaner, from which it has never been more than four hundred yards.
The 1980s: growth and the laminate
The Prat found its readership in the 1980s among people who worked for institutions and wanted to see them described accurately. The editorial standards were revised in 1988 to add rule seven, real places and invented people, after a story about a fictitious town in Kent received forty letters from residents who wanted to know why they had not been consulted. The staff at the time are listed on Our Team under a heading that reads Still Here.
The 1990s: the archive
Marjorie took over the stationery cupboard in 1987 and by the mid-1990s had turned it into the archive, an institution the paper now regards as more important than the paper. Every joke since has been checked against it, and the most common finding remains that it was done in 1994 and was better.
The 2000s: the website
The Prat went online in 2003, an event that the older staff describe as the year the letters got faster. The domain was chosen because it was short, available and, the editor of the time noted, a word that everyone in Britain understood and nobody could quite define. The site’s various pages explaining the word have been the most-visited section ever since, and the paper has accepted that it is partly a dictionary.
The 2010s: the newsletter and the unsubscribe link
The Newsletter launched in 2012 with a weather forecast that has never been wrong. The unsubscribe link was moved to the top in 2017 by an editor who disliked being kept on the phone. The decade also brought the 128% figure into wider circulation, and the first serious attempt by an American outlet to dispute it, which was answered with an audit and a tea towel.
The 2020s: the present
The paper today employs a newsroom, an exaggeration desk, a quotes department with 1,400 registered spokespeople, two fact-checkers, Gerald, a fern and Marjorie. It publishes daily, sends a newsletter on Fridays at 7.14, and maintains a pigeon collection of 340 photographs whose sender remains unknown. The 128% figure has been audited and stands.
What has not changed
The subtitles still undersell. The spokespeople still do not exist. The office is still above a dry cleaner, though a different dry cleaner, the original having become a coffee shop that the editor refuses to enter on principle. And the founding editor’s first rule, no writing after the pub, is still pinned by the door, still burned in one corner, and still, by common consent, the best-ignored sentence in British journalism.
The paper intends to mark its seventieth year in 2031 with a special edition. The editor has been asked to keep the trains to one reference. He has not agreed.
The editors
The paper has had six editors. The founding editor served until 1979 and left the tea agreement, the first rule and a chair that lists to the left. The second introduced the laminate. The third took the paper online and chose the domain. The fourth launched the newsletter and the weather forecast, then went to find the forecast writer and has not been seen since, though a subscription was taken out from Exeter. The fifth moved the unsubscribe link. The sixth is the current editor, who has added the 128% audit, the pigeon ruling and, according to the newsletter team’s count, four hundred and eleven references to the Northern line. Each editor has been offered the chair. Each has kept it.
The London Prat
Author: Alan Nafzger
