In 1992 I was the magazines editor of UK Press Gazette, the journalists' newspaper here in the UK, and covered the decline and closure of Punch, which was then owned by United Newspapers.

A combination of circumstances led to the magazine's demise. One was that United Newspapers was heavily focused on is daily paper assets, the Express titles, and its highly successful weekly magazine Auto Express; other UN assets were starved of funding, relatively speaking, and United was at heart very much a newspaper company, not a magazine publisher. Another was that Punch had already been through several relaunches – the most recent of which had rather pathetically acknowledged its popular status as a magazine most commonly encountered in dentists' waiting rooms by holding the relaunch party in a dentist's waiting room - and, although still a prestigious name (a lot of publicity shots distributed at the time made much of its opulent boardroom with a life-size statue of Mr Punch outside), its well known editor Alan Coren had stepped down a few years earlier and not been adequately replaced; circulation was dipping to around 30,000, and its remaining readers were ageing, making it a less attractive proposition for advertisers. It had lost confidence in itself; a final ad campaign, with the slogan "Not as funny as it used to be - FUNNIER!" was perceived as frankly desperate. It was also a weekly title, and hence very expensive to publish; at the time of its closure, it was losing £2m a year. As such, it was no longer considered worth investing heavily in.

By far the most significant factor in Punch's closure, however, was that it its editorial content was generally perceived as dated. It was a text magazine, albeit with a generous sprinkling of cartoons, attempting to compete with more modern and very different types of humour. The previous few years had seen a spike in the popularity of scabrous political satire, in the shape of the Spitting Image TV programme, and the 1980s had also witnessed the birth of a new and highly successful type of humour magazine, the adult comic. Of these, by far the most successful was Viz, a hugely irreverent (indeed rude) title, based not in metropolitan London but in Newcastle. By 1990 it was the third best-selling title in the country with a circulation of almost 1.5 million.

Again, I have some personal experience to draw on, since by 1993 I had become publisher of Viz, and so - with some caution, because I appreciate that personal anecdote is not welcome here – I can be fairly confident that it's possible to argue that Viz's most popular characters, such as Johnny Fartpants, Buster Gonad and his Unfeasibly Large Testicles, the Fat Slags, Sid the Sexist and Billy the Fish, were satires of a very different comic tradition to the one that Punch drew on – the DC Thomson comic titles Beano and Dandy were key inspirations. Its humour was also far more explicit, hard-edged and "near the knuckle" than the sort of thing that Punch, with its middle class audience and Mercedes Benz advertisements, would ever have considered publishing. It had vastly greater appeal to a younger generation of readers who would never have purchased Punch, and for a few years was pretty much compulsory reading for British students. I also think that Viz's bimonthly schedule made it easier for the comic to maintain a high quality; its infrequency meant there was a sense of keen anticipation among its readers when a new issue was due.

For contemporaries, Punch seemed terminally dated and unfashionable long before its eventual closure, which surprised practically nobody.