During an election campaign in which broadcasters are struggling to adapt to the involvement of multiple political parties claiming air-time (six different party leaders will appear tonight across Question Time (8pm, BBC1) and various late-night regional spin-offs), there is one old-fashioned political TV head-to-head. Each week, Ballot Monkeys (Tuesday, 10pm, Channel 4) and Newzoids (Wednesday, 9pm, ITV) compete to deliver satire as up to the minute as television production permits.
Live programmes are normally regarded as the riskiest kind of TV – and that remains true in terms of people falling over or forgetting their lines – but these political satire shows are as dangerous as recorded programmes get. Apart from the risk, in such a fast-moving news culture, of being trumped by a story that might break in the very short gap between completion and screening, both programmes are poking fun at politicians at a time when both parties and TV regulators are most severely policing rules on editorial balance.
Each show could also have done without the existence of the other, as, like candidates in a marginal constituency, they are fighting over the same few people. This week, for instance, the franchises inevitably went for jokes about the same stories: the revelation of Ed Miliband’s online teenage fan base, David Cameron’s inability to remember which football team he claims to support, the tendency of Ukip candidates to sound like saloon-bar bigots, and the existential self-hatred of the Lib Dems.
At least the formats are different, although in both cases there is an echo of a previous TV comedy great. Ballot Monkeys shares parentage with Drop the Dead Donkey (Channel 4, 1990 to 1998). In both cases, writer-directors Andy Hamilton and Guy Jenkin place recurring characters within a situation – a TV newsroom then, campaign battle-buses now – into which topical gags can be dropped as late as possible. And, while there is no direct creative overlap, Newzoids, with puppets voiced by impressionists, obviously nods to Spitting Image (ITV, 1984 to 1996).
In terms of personnel, Newzoids is also closely related to Dead Ringers and is a satisfying solution to the reason that series had a much longer life on Radio 4 than in its BBC2 spin-off. In a phone call, the voice artists – led by Jon Culshaw and Debra Stephenson – could successfully fool the loved ones of anyone they impersonate, but, if they turned up on the doorstep, wouldn’t stand a chance. With Newzoids, you get the vocal matches – the Ed Miliband is adenoidally exact – without the visual dissonance, although there remains one irritation for the eye: because the puppets have black strings descending from their hands, they look as if they are skiing.
The big difference with Ballot Monkeys is that the real politicians are unseen except in photos or posters in the interior of the fictional spin doctors’ coaches. Intermittently, a character will be on the phone to “Dave”, “Nigel”, “Ed” or their people.
On two of the four vehicles featured, the characterisation is stereotypical – the top Lib Dem a wimp with irritable bowel syndrome, a Ukip staffer eyeing the black coach driver suspiciously – but the other half of the fleet is sharper. The Labour team has an American consultant who is more interested in getting her CV to Hillary Clinton’s people, while one of the poshest public schoolboys on the Tory bus happens also to be black.
When the shows go joke to joke, the puppets tend to be given more vicious scripts than the actors. Ballot Monkeys had Hugh Dennis urgently ringing Team Cameron with basic facts and stats on Aston Villa, while Newzoids had its Dave doll, as ever in full Bullingdon rig, standing in for Ray Winstone on the Bet 365 TV football ads, calling the referee an umpire and then ending with the spoof terrace chant: “I’m fat, I’m round, I’ve got a million pounds – Cameron! Cameron!” Newszoids’s main weakness, shared with Dead Ringers, is that its default conceit involves spoofing a TV show: this week Miliband was both a candidate on The Apprentice and a guest on Alan Carr’s sofa, while George Osborne became the central character in Breaking Bad.
A problem with both programmes is that, as they cut between parties, you feel that someone in the production team is jotting down the minutes each has had. Disappointingly, there was no Boris Johnson on last night’s Newzoids, presumably because the allocated Tory-bashing slots had gone to Cameron and Osborne. As some consolation, Hugh Dennis on Ballot Monkeys did a brutally acute impersonation of Bojo.
But satire, in its nature, takes sides. Although Guardian cartoonist Steve Bell visually depicts politicians of all parties with an even-fisted savagery, his work comes from a recognisably leftwing perspective. Spitting Image once dressed up the Tories as Nazis. Tied to television definitions of impartiality – applied fiercely during an election period – both Ballot Monkeys and Newzoids, though often funny, end up suggesting that all the parties are as bad as each other (except for Ukip, which is even worse).
Accusing politicians of not daring to say what they really believe, these political satire shows are prevented by broadcasting rules from doing so themselves.
