Mad Mag
PS
I simply can’t remember now how I got involved with Mad magazine (probably applied to them for a job), but in the mid-eighties I wrote a couple of satirical comic strips based around TV shows (Minder was one, The Young Ones another), both of which were illustrated by the splendidly talented Dave Stoten who I believe went on to work on the TV show Spitting Image. We never met; the editor simply put us in touch, I think there might have been one phone call, and after that I just wrote the stuff and sent it to him by Royal Mail. It sounds positively Victorian now.
The idea for the comic strips came from the American version of the mag, I think: how to shut down an entire long-running franchise with a single final episode. I did all the words and drawings myself this time (because the illustrator always got paid four times what the writer did, probably because they had to do four times the work, just like lyricists and composers), and I thought the likenesses here were pretty good. But the editor didn’t go for them. I think he feared some kind of copyright infringement. Probably they just weren’t funny enough. Ah well, worth a try.