Rich Peppiatt is not, by his own admission, a comedian. And his show barely qualifies as live comedy: it's mainly video clips, screened in a tent at the Pleasance until, you suspect, the right TV format is found for them. Mind you, telly may never risk a show like this, which – Peppiatt's faltering stagecraft notwithstanding – is often starkly, litigiously funny, as this former tabloid hack turns the doorstepping, long-lensing tables on the editors and executives who run Britain's gutter press.
Funny isn't quite the right word for One Rogue Reporter. The pleasure I derived was as much to do with a sense of justice being done. It's an eccentric kind of justice, to be sure, which involves Peppiatt springing unlikely stunts on prudish Mail boss Paul Dacre ("Do you know anything about the dildo on the doorstep?") and Express editor Hugh Whittow, who has his nose rubbed in his paper's appalling exploitation of Madeleine McCann's disappearance.
Alongside these incursions into the cosseted lives of the press barons, Peppiatt narrates his own brief career at the Daily Star – comparing it drolly to the work of his heroes, George Orwell and Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein at the Washington Post. There's a word-by-word analysis of an idiotic woman-in a-bikini photo-story at Mail Online – a deserving target Peppiatt hits again and again for cheap laughs. For contrast, we're then shown Mail Online chief Martin Clarke trespassing on the moral high ground at the Leveson inquiry.
There are weak spots – we don't need to hear internet abuse directed towards him to make up our minds about Kelvin MacKenzie. But by the finale, when Peppiatt screens two breathtaking clips that expose red-top grandees in more ways than one, Peppiatt's flaws are forgotten in gratitude for the (probably actionable) activities of Fleet Street's very own angel of vengeance.
