His transition to front-page cartoonist began with another howler. The paper printed the wrong date below its masthead. Disaster! Rarely has Tunbridge Wells been in a state of such foaming outrage. The then editor, Max Hastings, penned a grovelling front-page apology. It was decided the pill might be sweeter if a cartoon was attached: Matt’s “I hope I have a better Thursday than I did yesterday” amused both Hastings and the readers. When the great Mark Boxer died in 1988, Matt had become a shoo-in to replace him.

If he got there through vigorous competition, like an old variety comedian who has to make them laugh to pay the bills, then his continuing reputation depends on a high output and wastage rate — about six jokes a day go to the paper’s night editor, of which two or three are then sent to the editor. More than four-fifths of his work ends up in the bin.

This would send many people into despair. Matt says, “I am always so thrilled that one has got through that I forget all the ones which have fallen by the wayside.” How does he get the ideas? By deciding on a broad subject and then thinking of, say, 10 jokes on petrol prices. The “rubbish” is shaken off in the process. “It’s very rare that the first one gets through. It’s often the very last one. I think of it as being a bit like colonic irrigation.”

The drawing depicts just enough to convey what needs to be said and no more, as with Mel Calman of the old Times or Matt’s personal hero, the French cartoon genius Sempé. But like them Matt has to get inside the skin of an ideal reader and subject, to come up with “people the readers will sympathise with”. So does that classic Matt couple actually exist — the pair poised somewhere between Meldrew and Hancock, peering out at a batty, inexplicable world? Oh yes, he says, they do. But they don’t know that they’re his inspiration, appearing daily on the front of the Telegraph.

So there you go: inspiration, but perspiration first. And the lineage? Matt points out that his grandfather wrote short stories, his father writes columns, and he makes a living on eight or nine words a day. “My children will be mime artists.” See? Not even a drawing with that one.