Bremner unplugged

Published on Wednesday 9 April 2008 20:32

IT'S A weird way to spend an afternoon – watching a nice young woman yank purposefully at the nose of England football manager Fabio Capello. "Let's just … get … it … off," she murmurs and – pop – Rory Bremner's considerably smaller snout emerges, dripping latex goo. Disconcertingly, Bremner keeps Capello's oversized ears on while he eats lunch. They'll double up as Gordon Brown's in the next sketch he's due to film.

Ears, it turns out, are easy. But Bremner admits that – in this, the second series of Bremner, Bird and Fortune since Brown's accession – he's still struggling to grasp the Prime Minister's essential character. "It's so weird, like Brown has sort of imploded," he says, picking flecks of rubber from his nostrils. "It's a bit like having an uncle who's been building something in the shed for the past ten years. You go down to see what he's up to, look through the window – and there's nothing there. That's the terrible fear. I still cling to the hope that somebody, somewhere knows what they're doing, because we certainly don't."

This is how Bremner speaks – in neat, pithy summations that very quickly add up to complete character assassination. As for Brown's Cabinet, its blandness terrifies him.

"It looks for all the world as though the Cabinet has been handed over to a bunch of sixth-formers to run as a project. You look at them – the Milibands, the Balls – and none of them resonate with the public. They don't even resonate with me, and I study them.

"Satire is a bit like panto, you need grotesques and villains: the Tebbits, the Prescotts, the Reids. There are no real characters to caricature."

I meet Bremner during the first week of filming his new series and, despite the good humour with which he slips in and out of voices (John Major, Graham Norton, BBC business editor Robert Peston, with whom he's currently obsessed), he's in a pensive, almost anxious mood. The pressure to perform week-by-week in reaction to the news builds to a pitch the nearer he gets to the first show. "You always start every series thinking you're not going to be able to do it again," he frets. Halfway through the interview, he apologises for not being funnier.

There's a deeper worry here. At 48, Bremner admits to feeling the twinges of mid-life crisis, and to finding simple, though expertly executed, acts of mimicry not nearly as rewarding as he once did. "After 20-odd years, doing impressions of politicians and football managers and other comedians is just not that fulfilling in itself," he says.

So Bremner the chameleon has spent the past few years transforming himself beyond the merely skin-deep. His three films for Channel 4 on Iraq – Between Iraq And A Hard Place and two follow-ups – have taken him on to more serious, journalistic territory, while Bremner, Bird and Fortune itself has dwelt increasingly on heavyweight subject matter.

Bremner implies that the need to characterise politicians "truthfully" is not a comic obligation but a moral one. "The alternative is that you create a parallel universe which has very little to do with the truth or real life, and you're just borrowing the characters to take part in your circus. If you satirise their circus, it's much more effective." He admits to using "moles" from within government, and to pumping "very recently departed members of the Cabinet" for inside information.

For Bremner, the shift is partly a reaction against a national culture dominated by C-list celebrity. "Celebrity has become a parody of itself. When nobody takes anything seriously any more, you're left with a choice – which is either to become another wave in that tide of cynicism or find other areas to explore. Personally, I've become fascinated with the deep background of some major political issues." He's next planning a "comic documentary" on the world's financial markets, which had better be funnier than it sounds.

When I ask him whether anything can be turned into comic material, the grim subject of Madeleine McCann naturally comes up. Bremner got into hot water last year for including a joke about her in the last series of Bremner, Bird and Fortune in which John Fortune's character mused on Gordon Brown's desire to get re-elected: "I wouldn't be surprised if the night before the election he went on television and said, 'Look what I found…' and held up Madeleine McCann."

He hasn't given a "defence" of that joke until now, and his reaction to the media fuss is, at first, uncharacteristically curt: "That was complete bollocks."

How so? "Well, I read in the papers that it was a joke I'd done, which is just not true, and the whole thing got so out of hand …" He's a bit flustered here, and as near to cross, I imagine, as he gets in public.

"Firstly, it was in a sketch that John Bird and John Fortune did, and they were in character. They were playing these particular men who were cynical about politics, so straight away that joke is in a context ... "

He pauses for a second, then says, a little desperately: "There is a difference between the real-life Madeleine McCann tragedy and a reference in a comedy programme to her. You know? You're not actually in Portugal abducting her. It's a reference.

"As soon as it comes out of a comedy show and gets into a newspaper, you've lost control of the story … I even feel weird justifying it after the event, because the only way you can justify it is to tell people to watch the sketch and see it in context."

It's up to the viewer, he implies, to make a judgment on the McCann reference. Dozens of people are said to have complained to Channel 4.

Yet you can't be an impressionist and worry too much about the sensitivities of others. Heather Mills once sent him "a very stroppy e-mail" after he adapted an old joke about the Beatles "dying in the wrong order" and applied it to Labour ministers. "Robin Cook, Donald Dewar and Mo Mowlam; all now gone, leading me to believe that, as someone once said of the Beatles, Labour is dying in the wrong order."

He hoots. "She wrote saying how upset her husband would be. What surprised me was she hadn't heard that line about the Beatles before!" Far more sinister was the reaction to a joke about Michael Portillo's sexuality. "I did a sketch a long time ago, about Portillo, and I was in the office late at night when I got a phone call from somebody. And it was very … well, it was the closest thing I've ever got to a threatening phone call." So who made it? "I've no idea. That's when you start to think, well, there are other forces at work …

"The closer I get to that world – the Westminster village – the dirtier I feel, funnily enough."

If his soul needs cleansing, he does it at home in Oxfordshire. Bremner married the Scottish sculptor Tessa Campbell Fraser five years after divorcing his first wife, teacher Susie Davies. He went through a nervous, unhappy phase after divorcing during which he suffered a brief bout of bulimia and sought therapy (he's no longer in it). But his second marriage and the arrival of his two daughters – Ava, six, and four-year-old Lila – has "absolutely grounded" him. Children are very good at pricking vanity, he says.

He worries – and I think Bremner worries an awful lot – that he spends too long away from them. "From about now until the beginning of July, I'm going to be away from home for 51 nights," he sighs. "Sometimes, I think, God, I should stop doing what I'm doing and just look after the children full-time."

Not much chance of that, though. Bremner has "about five" projects on the go at any one time. He is "peripherally involved" with the new ITV comedy show Headcases – billed as the new Spitting Image -– and has recently signed up to appear in an episode of Who Do You Think You Are?, the BBC show in which TV personalities trace their roots. As it happens, Bremner – who was born in Edinburgh – doesn't know much about his ancestry. He barely knew his father, a former Army major who died of cancer when Rory was 12 – though he's not above making a joke of it: "I'll probably find out my father was a guard at Auschwitz or something terrible."

Meanwhile, in make-up, we're back to the artifice of chins and wigs. Briefly Bremner muddles up Capello's and Brown's, and I get to see what the PM would look like with a mass of dark Italian curls (weird). "You've always got to pay the rent by making people laugh. We've got to remember that this is fundamentally a comic show." The paradox is that he's also trying to tell serious jokes. "I suppose what I'm trying to get to is engaged comedy," he says, contorting that super-malleable brow into an attitude of pure angst. "Because the alternative, really, is just graffiti."

FIGURES OF FUN

HAROLD MACMILLAN

HIS bloodhound-like features widely portrayed by newspaper caricaturists, "Supermac" felt the first sting of the new wave of political satire with Peter Cook's savage impersonation of him in the groundbreaking stage revue Beyond the Fringe. Even when Macmillan himself attended a show, Cook cranked up his attack: "There's nothing I like better than to wander over to a theatre and sit there listening to a group of sappy, urgent, vibrant young satirists, with a stupid great grin all over my silly face."

HAROLD WILSON

MIKE YARWOOD'S legendary pipe-puffing take-off of Wilson, prime minister in the 1960s and mid 1970s, attracted huge viewing figures, while another skilled impersonator of the man in the Gannex coat was John Bird on That Was the Week That Was.

EDWARD HEATH

TED HEATH, the yachtsman prime minister who lamented what he saw as "the death of deference" brought about by irreverent TV satire shows, became another speciality of Yarwood, who homed in on the heaving shoulders whenever Heath laughed.

MARGARET THATCHER

THATCHER attracted a veritable legion of lampoonists and impersonators – not least Steve Nallon, who provided the voice of her Latex puppet on Spitting Image, and also went so far as to dress up as her for his stage shows. Thatcher – portrayed on Spitting Image as a terrifying, besuited and masculine tyrant – was someone whom Yarwood could never capture: on his shows she was mimicked by Janet Brown, who later suggested to Thatcher more authoritative vocal inflections, which the PM cheerfully adopted.

NORMAN TEBBIT

ANOTHER favourite target of Spitting Image, the unpopular "on yer bike!" employment secretary, who was portrayed as a leather-clad "bovver boy". He was philosophical about this caricature, however, later remarking: "It never did me any harm. Sometimes politicians need a jolly good drubbing."

MICHAEL HESELTINE

ANOTHER member of Thatcher's cabinet and one-time defence secretary, Heseltine was satirised on Spitting Image as "Hezza", a flak-jacket wearing maniac, but later confessed that: "In a sense, Spitting Image made me. I was an obscure member of the British Government, and suddenly wherever I went – Hezza or Michael – I was a celebrity."

JOHN MAJOR

JOHN MAJOR'S perceived lack of charisma didn't make him the easiest statesman to parody, although Phil Cool pulled off a rare memorable impersonation. Spitting Image portrayed him as a grey man who dined mainly on peas.

TONY BLAIR

THE lately departed figurehead of New Labour received his fair share of satirical mauling, not least from Rory Bremner, who later wrote: "'Doing' Blair has consistently been a challenge; from original attempts to master the smiley, sibilant, all-things-to-all-men premier with the enthusiasm of the young choirmaster … to his latter mantras, halting, care-worn and self-justifying." Even Bremner, however, had misgivings over his 2001 sketch in which the ghost of Princess Diana materialised to advise the PM, with Bremner voicing both characters.

Bremner, Bird and Fortune is on Channel 4, 7pm, Sunday.