Nationally acclaimed cartoonist puts a face to higher education at Pembrokeshire College

Who’s Pete Dredge

Born in Nottingham at an early age I was fed on The Eagle comic during my early school days (rather than the more anarchic Beano and Dandy) where giants of the illustration world, Frank Bellamy, Frank Hampson, Harry Bishop and Martin Aitchison rubbed pages with cartoonists such as Thelwell, John Ryan and Fiddy. Wonderful stuff!

Later I was introduced to Punch magazine. I was fascinated by the cartoon drawings and although the humour probably passed over my head I was hooked. Art college followed school and then a spell as a graphic designer. Fed up with paste-up I submitted a bunch of gags to Punch and they accepted three on my first attempt! Difficult to recapture that feeling of euphoria but it proved to be a life-changing moment .That was 1976 and things started to take off for me.

I can remember watching Punch's new editor, Alan Coren, being interviewed by Ludovic Kennedy on BBC 1's 24 Hours ..."are we likely to find the same old cartoons in the new Punch, Mr.Coren?" asked Kennedy. "Oh no, I recently bought a cartoon by a cartoonist called Dredge...two seedy, dishevelled looking blokes staggering along the road...one says to the other "Don't look now but your flies are done up!" Unfortunately didn't have a VCR in those days but my chin never recovered from hitting the floor.

That same year I started submitting comedy sketch ideas to BBC TV's Not The Nine O'Clock News and they accepted some material too. One of the sketches featured on a record album the BBC put out which went to number one but it was a thrill just putting words into the mouth of Pamela Stephenson (as well as Mel, Rowan and Griff of course!) Work in Private Eye, Mayfair, Penthouse, Men Only, National Lampoon and Radio Times followed and was capped off in 1980 with my first Punch cover! Surely I couldn't maintain the pace of success achieved in these first four years? Well, no I couldn't! Things settled down and cartooning became very much the day job.

Enjoyable but a means to an end when it came to paying the bills etc. (but still infinitely better than anything else I could think of!)