Political satire on Irish TV may be hit and miss, but in Britain it's going through a resurgence, writes Stephen Armstrong
Rory Bremner is feeling rusty. He is just back from holiday with his family and now he is being asked to let loose with some satirical barbs and cutting-edge humour.
"When you're off with your children, the world sinks to the size of their nappy, then you get back and you suddenly have to start thinking about George Galloway," he says. "I can hear the gears creaking and the cogs snapping as I try to crank myself up."
Bremner is cranking himself up because he is on day release from Channel 4 to be a team captain on BBC2's new satirical panel show, Mock the Week. Devised by Dan Patterson, the creator of Whose Line Is It Anyway?, the show is a blend of quick quip questions and answers, impressions, mini-sketches and stand-up.
His casting is a result of coincidence - Patterson was renting office space from the performer's production company, Vera, and Bremner was looking to stretch his comedy muscles.
"Bremner, Bird and Fortune is very, very well researched," he explains. "When it works best, there's a mixture of things that make you laugh out loud and also make you turn to your partner and say: 'I had no idea that was true.' But there are some people who find it too demanding in that it has a seriousness of content. Like any good satire it has space to breathe and arguments and points of view. This show is the opposite. It's a sprint as opposed to middle distance. I wanted to put myself back into just being funny, just doing one-liners. I wanted to challenge myself."
Mock the Week makes its debut at a time when British TV satire seems to be regaining something of its lost self-confidence. Since the late 1990s, when a new type of dark comedy came to the fore, pioneered by The League Of Gentlemen and Ricky Gervais, political comedy has been limited until now to Have I Got News For You? and Bremner, Bird and Fortune. For a nation that has prided itself on mocking its leaders, this was a worrying lacuna.
Two weeks ago, however, Armando Iannucci produced the first three parts of The Thick Of It on BBC4 - an eventual six-part cross between The Office, The West Wing and Yes, Minister. At the same time, ITV piloted Not Tonight With John Sergeant, based around a spoof TV news programme and co-hosted by rising comic actor Katherine Jakeways.
On Mock the Week, Bremner is joined by Scottish comedian Frankie Boyle and host Dara O'Briain, who has risen to prominence in Britain after guest-hosting Have I Got News For You?. There is also a pool of stand-ups who will appear two or three times during the series, including old hands Jeremy Hardy, Jo Brand and Andy Parsons, as well as a new generation of political comics such as John Oliver and Andy Zaltzman.
WITH BARELY 10 days to go before the first recording, the team are still sorting through around 15 different games for the show. Patterson is cautious about revealing material from the pilot in case it does not make the final cut, but he has enough confidence in two slots called Wheel Of News and Phone Call. In Wheel of News, images from the week's events spin in front of the six nervous players, then grind to a stop on, say, a picture of George Bush. The first comic to think of a gag steps up to the mike and delivers it, only being allowed to sit down when they get a laugh. If there is no response from the audience, they are condemned to remain standing, furiously working up fresh satire to feed the hungry crowd. Last one up is the duffer. In Phone Call, teams have to mock up a phone call between figures of the day for a quick-witted exchange with one player detonating an improvised bombshell. In the pilot, Frankie Boyle's John Prescott phoned Bremner's Blair and during the call Blair told Prescott he was running off with his wife. Boyle spluttered to a suitably incandescent conclusion but it did seem an incredibly demanding role - writing gags in seconds flat, doing impressions and even a little impro acting.
Patterson admits the show will be hard work. "On the upside, there's very little space for stand-ups to deliver on television these days," he says. "It's not easy to punch your weight on very established shows. On this, you get time to do your bit. It's a good place for stand-ups to find a voice."
SATIRE, LIKE COSTUME drama, is one of those genres that sets British television above its cousins in the US or continental Europe. That Was The Week That Was, Not The Nine O'Clock News, The Day Today and The 11 O'Clock Show not only delivered quality topical satire, they also allowed new writers and performers to move on to the small screen. But since the demise of Spitting Image and the rise of New Labour, there has been a gap.
"To some extent it was the problem of the change in administration," Bremner says. "Nailing New Labour was like nailing jelly to the wall. They were very slippery, very difficult to pin down because as soon as you thought you'd got hold of them, they moved the goalposts. It was the same with the old generation of satirists when Thatcher came to power. You have to learn a different language."
Happily, it appears that the satire moratorium is coming to an end. "It does appear that television has suddenly gone politics crazy. . . I'll admit that party politics is a turn-off for many people, but I think there is an appetite for political debate about the big issues, the environment, immigration and the war," Iannucci says. "That's why George Galloway gets so much air time."
Dara O'Briain, who has been doing stand-up in Britain for eight years (and is performing at the Smithwick's Cat Laughs Festival in Kilkenny this weekend), says there has also been a grassroots resurgence.
"Stand-up has become re-politicised to a great extent," he says. "There was a huge gap in the late 1990s when you saw character comedy and sketch shows on the live circuit doing clever, surreal stuff. Audiences just weren't looking for anything political. Political comics tend to reflect the times and they do better when the issues are big. Talking about immigration and freedom of speech lends itself far better to comedy than discussing the pros and cons of the public/private finance initiative in health-service catering."
Bremner agrees. "What doesn't work, and when Spitting Image fell on its face, was when you just do graffiti," he says. "Graffiti is shouting 'Bush is a moron!'. Satire hopes to explain why. If you do it badly, it comes across as really smug - clever guys in suits - which on a bad day is the criticism we level at ourselves on Bremner, Bird and Fortune . . . You have to make sense of things before you make nonsense of them."
He believes the future of television satire is fairly assured. "We have two men in a tremendous hurry - Blair, to restore his reputation and create his legacy, and Gordon Brown in an equal hurry to create the kind of party he wants to lead into the next general election," he says. "This clash between the two of them will be extremely interesting. You've also got the debate on Europe and the conflict in the Conservative party." He pauses for a moment. "Although that is all fairly difficult to do in one-liners."
Mock The Week is on BBC 2 tomorrow at 10.40pm