Introduction by - Martin Townsend (Editor Sunday Express)

Every Christmas, when I was growing up, my mother would unfold a large and, as the years went by, increasingly tattered poster-sized cartoon and pin it up in pride of place over our mantlepiece.

It showed a young, photography-mad Prince Andrew leaning out of a window of Buckingham Palace and taking pictures of a furious Santa Claus being menaced by the Queen's corgis.

That cartoon never failed to make us laugh. It was my first introduction to the work of Carl Giles, who has continued to make me laugh to this day.

For a budding young journalist his work was - and is - an object lesson in how to find humour and common humility in great and sometimes grim events.

Giles fans all have their favourite characters - with ferocious Grandma usually top of the list. But I like the bit-part players too: from the urbane spivs and collapsed drunks to the hatchet-faced vicars and mewling babies. Then there are the settings: the cluttered front rooms and kitchens, the untidy suburban gardens, the fuggy saloon bars and down-at-heel seaside hotels.

It is almost a lost world now - but Giles immortalised it and the scenes remain as fresh and funny today as when they were first drawn. Indeed, when we decided to begin running a series of classic Giles cartoons in The Sunday Express magazine the post-bag from admiring readers was bigger than ever. Often imitated, never bettered, Giles remains the cartoonist's cartoonist. God bless him.

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Notes

The collection this year is split into themed sections and has 5 spot the difference cartoons