CULTURE Why Inside the Commons is the funniest comedy of the year Whitehall farce: Sir Robert Rogers plays to the camera in Inside the Commons Pic

[AdamSmith]

This I want to see.

CULTURE

Why Inside the Commons is the funniest comedy of the year

Whitehall farce: Sir Robert Rogers plays to the camera in Inside the Commons

By Benji Wilson

9:00AM GMT 07 Feb 2015

When I heard that a BBC camera crew had been granted warts-and-all access to the Palace of Westminster for a documentary series, Inside the Commons, my first thought was, thats a lot of warts. My second thought was what on earth were the politicos thinking? Why would they let the veteran political film-maker Michael Cockerell in at all? In the run-up to an election, and at a time when respect for politicians runs somewhere alongside respect for Seventies DJs, how was letting in TVs quiet assassin, a man who does for political reputations what oxidisation does to cars, a good idea?

Well, it wasnt a good idea, not for our elected members, anyway. Cockerell, with a forensic brilliance honed over years of taking down preening nitwits, quickly latched on to a trenchant metaphor and hammered it home that the Palace of Westminster is a mock gothic relic that is coming apart at the seams, and so is the institution it houses. The shots of peeling paintwork and crumbling stone intercut with images of politicians being berks undermined our democracy faster than a Saudi arms deal.

But Inside the Commons did proffer an answer as to why the politicians would have let Cockerell in to do a Guy Fawkes in the first place.

Politicians are all budding thespians, said Deputy Speaker Lindsay Hoyle at one point. That chilled me to the marrow have you ever been in a room full of budding thespians? Its the budding part of their thespianism thats truly blood-curdling theyre not even any good at it. And if you wanted an example, PMQs, filmed here at ground level for what we were told was the first time, as if that was a good thing, was the horror show writ large. What a tawdry carnival of mountebanks and yahoos. The sight of MPs bobbing standing up and sitting down in the hope that they might get a free hit and actually ask the PM a Q was an image of dumb futility as potent as anything Beckett ever dreamt up.

If politicians are all budding thesps, what do you think happens when you put them in front of a camera? That was why they were queuing up to let Cockerell mug them. Michael Fabricant (a man whose hair has formed an uneasy coalition between Smashie, Nicey and a polenta bake) and then Nicholas Soames (in skull-and-crossbones comedy braces that require no further comment) and then Clerk of the House Robert Rogers (taking snuff) all did their bit to make MPs look as relevant as steam power. Cockerell cleverly kept the cameras away from Joe Public for most of the time and there were very few shots of windows or natural light, making the Commons look like an entirely inward-looking institution. Overall I was struck with the same feeling as when watching the auditions for The X Factor or Big Brother. Surely no one can want to be on television enough to commit these kinds of crimes against dignity? But they couldnt help themselves. Presumably it is the lust for attention that makes them want to stand in the first place. Cockerell simply served the choicest cuts on a platter in the edit and there you had it the funniest comedy of the year.

I laughed my head off at that withering satire on politicians and after that I watched Rory Bremners Coalition Report. Satire has been pronounced dead more often than rock n roll, in general because reality Fabricants barnet, for example has overtaken it. And so theres always a feeling these days that Bremner himself is a relic of the type that Spitting Image might have mocked in the Eighties with a sheep on his head or something.

Bremners satire, here with the help of a brilliant younger Brem-a-like called Matt Forde and a few old chums like John Bird, is indeed old-fashioned in as far as he simply pretends to be a politician and makes them all look like chumps a bit like Cockerell but with voices and wigs. But it works, up to a point, because Bremner always was, and still is, tack sharp and just angry enough.

The problem is that this programme was a one-off, to mark five years of the Coalition government. Spitting Image, and indeed Bremner, Bird and Fortune, ran for years. To really make a mark, satire needs to be relentless. Spitting Image seared itself onto the public consciousness because John Major was dull and grey every single week. Satire cant just prod power once and then walk off it must keep prodding. Rory Bremners Coalition Report was funny, and at times devastating the song about zero-hours contracts, for example but you cant chop down a tree with a single axe blow. Someone needs to give Bremner a regular slot again.

One of the things that both Bremner and Cockerell highlighted was our politicians distance from normal people. What any party would give to have motorbike racer, lorry mechanic and worlds least likely TV presenter Guy Martin on their ballot sheet.

Hes a man you can see people voting for. Martin is the TV executives golden goose, a discovery who hasnt been to stage school and probably thought Channel 4 had something to do with CB radio before they signed him up.

Unfortunately for Martin he made the mistake of appearing in a documentary about the Isle of Man TT, fell off, and became Grimsbys latest possibly first instant cult star. Martin has a sense of honesty that Cameron, Clegg and Miliband will never possess. And Channel 4 is not going to let its new discovery go. Hence, he is now being sent to any part of the world that a motorcycle can go. This time it is India.

The curse of the celebrity travelogue is that it can quite quickly start to look like a spurious jolly for someone who could have just paid the airfare themselves and saved us their tedious observations. But this series has gone to the other extreme Were not making a holiday programme, were here to see the reality of India, Martin said on several occasions. We know full well, however, that the reality of any given place is really not available to anyone on a statement vehicle being followed by a camera crew, which left Our Guy in India betwixt and between: lengthy scenes of Martin pruning bushes on a tea plantation or watching a woman change a tyre certainly werent contrived, but they werent very interesting either.

The problem is that theres really no reason for him to be doing any of this. Martins selling point is that he likes simple things that are not normal TV fodder riding bikes, drinking tea, fixing trucks. Viewers have fallen for him because he represents integrity in a medium where, like politics, these are scarce resources. But as Tony Blair found out, overplay the pretty straight guy card and eventually the public will smell a rat.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/tv-and-radio-reviews/11395052/Inside-the-Commons-review.html