Comic Strip Presents The Hunt for Tony Blair - review

Laughter, they say, is the best medicine - Nostalgia's pretty good too. Weave the two together...

I watched Comic Strip Presents The Hunt for Tony Blair (2011) on Saturday, and since then, I've rewatched it a few times - it's just that good. It works on so many levels - political satire (crude, but hilarious), an exercise in nostalgia (the soundtrack! the cars! the lighting!), lush cinematic orchestral score, funny dialogue, quality screenwriting and directing...

For my readers who don't know the Comic Strip Presents, this well-established British comedy series goes back over 35 years to the days when Channel 4 was launching and fresh young comedy was much in demand. Through my 20s I'd be watching series after series, the comedy of my generation. While output is flagging (just three specials since 2010), quality clearly isn't.

The soundtrack was selected to evoke the period encompassing the years 1958-1962  (with one outlier, Herman's Hermits' I'm into Something Good, 1965). Conjuring up my earliest childhood memories of the BBC Light Programme - songs by Adam Faith, Helen Shapiro, Billy Fury, Max Bygraves - and the orchestra of Norrie Paramor. A well-chosen soundtrack is crucial for creating the period mood - what's happening here is fascinating, because the Blair era is being physically shunted back 40 years - the cars, the clothes, the props and of course the music are taking us back to the 'never had it so good' times of Harold Macmillan. The mix of the soundtrack and the cars of the era on an appropriately dressed set sent me blissfully back.

Comic Strip regulars Nigel Planer, Rik Mayall, Jennifer Saunders, Robbie Coltrane, Peter Richardson (who co-wrote and directed this episode) are present as are Harry Enfield and John Sessions - in other words, an all-star cast is about to entertain us.

Steven Mangan's portrayal of Tony Blair (prime minister from 1997 to 2007) is comically convincing. Unrelentingly optimistic and self-justifying, even in the darkest moments, Blair's breezy, first-person voice-over commentating the action provides an extra layer of comic surrealism. The Blairisms come thick and fast, laid on with a trowel directly from his autobiography, A Journey.

The final shot begins by referencing the opening of Sunset Boulevard - Tony Blair floating face-down in water -  before the final twist (literally) as the dead Blair turns over to float on his back, hands behind his head, with a smug, self-satisfied smile on his face. Also heavily referenced is the 1935 Alfred Hitchcock version of The Thirty-Nine Steps, all music hall and steam trains.

For me, the biggest laughs came from watching Jennifer Saunders playing Margaret Thatcher in the style of Gloria Swanson playing Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard. When Tony Blair enters Baroness Thatcher's mansion, she's watching films of her speeches and the victorious British armed forces in the Falklands, while her butler Tebbit (played in John Sessions in the style of Eric Von Stroheim) runs the projector. Jennifer Saunders had played Margaret Thatcher in a Hollywood style in a previous Comic Strip episode (GLC: The Carnage Continues), but this performance is superb.

Peter Richardson does a splendid George W. Bush playing a mafia boss, leaning on Tony Blair to support him in the Iraq War, aided by a brutish Donald Rumsfeld.

Another comic high spot comes when Tony Blair runs into a drunken socialist (Ross Noble) in a railway compartment "Come on Tony! Let's hang the bankers from the lamp posts! Let's get the workers out on strike!" "Well, if you'd read my book, you'd know that I'm not really a socialist" "You're the man that stole my party! TORY Blair! TORY Blair!" "Just shut your drunken left-wing mouth!" Little did Peter Richardson realise in 2011 that just a few years later, it would be the extreme left-wing end of the Labour party that would be in opposition to a hapless, hopeless Tory government.

Filmed in black and white with low-key lighting, foggy streets of old London town (well, Devon, actually), The Hunt for Tony Blair is, I think, one of the greatest of the Comic Strip Presents shows, up there with The Bullshitters, A Fistful of Travellers' Cheques, Five Go Mad in Dorset, Bad News on Tour and More Bad News. Watch it here:



This is political satire done as a surreal conceit; you can get away with much in this format. Now, imagine for a while something done like this in Poland, about a Polish politician - say, Donald Tusk. Can you imagine it being as witty, as sharply done as this? British humour is an essential part of the nation's soft power, the ability to mock oneself

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