TV preview - Comic Strip: The Hunt For Tony Blair

‘PETER, don’t cross me over this.” The cynically beaming, ambitious schemer, sensing a looming power vacuum, pulls his crony aside and warns him not to block his becoming head of the organisation. Sinisterly, he’s already told his wife that “if John dies, I will be leader, not Gordon. And somehow I think this will happen.”

Conjuring up clichés of hard-boiled crime fiction, albeit with a smug veneer of destiny and entitlement, these ludicrous lines are uttered by the titular protagonist of The Hunt For Tony Blair, in Friday’s much-anticipated return of The Comic Strip Presents. Prior to that, though, they appeared in the former prime minister’s memoir, A Journey, causing writer and director Peter Richardson’s “jaw to drop” as he read.

In Richardson’s film, the death of Labour Party leader John Smith, and that of the Iraq War-opposing cabinet minister Robin Cook, sparks a police pursuit of the PM. The comedy’s cartoonish, film noir style, referencing everything from The 39 Steps to Sunset Boulevard and The Fugitive, suggested itself even before Richardson read Blair’s “700 pages of self-pity and self-justification”.

“I couldn’t believe my luck,” he says. “Though intriguingly, he edited the John Smith bit out of the CD version. I wonder if the engineer asked him, ‘Are you sure you want to say this Tony?’”

Blair is deliciously portrayed by Stephen Mangan, a newcomer to the long-running series, who appears alongside Comic Strip stalwarts like Rik Mayall and Robbie Coltrane, with Nigel Planer as Peter Mandelson and Jennifer Saunders channelling Margaret Thatcher as Bette Davis in Whatever Happened To Baby Jane? Other new faces include Ford Kiernan as Gordon Brown and Harry Enfield as Alastair Campbell, as well as Ross Noble, Ronni Ancona and The Inbetweeners’ James Buckley. Richardson appears as a mafia boss George W Bush, intimidating Blair into backing the Iraq invasion.

“The funny thing is people find him likeable in the film,” Richardson says of Mangan’s performance, which momentarily supplants Michael Sheen’s definitive interpretations. “Though they like hating him too. We have gone for a berkish Blair really, a thick-skinned berk.

“Everything he says has an optimistic spin and a lot of the jokes are him breezing through horrible situations and making light of them, despite being on the run.”

Though they dramatise Smith and Cook’s deaths, “we couldn’t tackle David Kelly because that’s far too painful, too real and too nasty,” he adds.

The film climaxes in a shootout at the Chilcot Theatre. Channel 4 had hoped to broadcast on the day the Iraq Inquiry announced its findings but gave up on that being established any time soon. No matter, Richardson reasons. The succession of recent New Labour memoirs, from Brown and Mandelson to Campbell, Jonathan Powell and Alistair Darling – “this endless circle of backstabbing”, as he puts it – justifies bringing Blair to book again.

“I just hope people find it funny and entertaining,” he says. “But I don’t mean to be trite, because there are serious points in there and they’ve been dealt with by Blair himself. We gave him enough rope and he hung himself. He kills people and says, ‘Well, look that was my decision, I had to kill them and that was the right one.’ He seems to sit blithely in the Chilcot Inquiry saying, ‘Look, I made a decision and that’s it you know, I went ahead with it.’ That doesn’t make it right, does it?”

Beginning on Channel 4, before moving briefly to BBC2, The Comic Strip was born out of the 1980s alternative comedy scene and maintained a political edge through films like The Strike (1988), a Hollywood account of the miners’ strike; GLC: The Carnage Continues (1990) a similar Hollywood parody of Ken Livingstone’s rise and fall; and Red Nose of Courage (1992), about John Major leaving the circus.

Notwithstanding Saunders’ grotesque seduction of her successor – “I won my war,” her Thatcher tells Mangan’s Blair – The Hunt For Tony Blair’s standout performance is Planer as the shifty Mandelson, a tricky role, according to the actor, because “he’s very contained and not afraid of silence. So you can’t let go, everything had to be held in.”

This resurgence of satire reflects resurgence in political feeling, says Planer: “There used to be more of this sort of thing and there will be again.” But can satire be effective if camera-conscious politicians like Blair have stolen actors’ presentation tricks?

Certainly, Planer says: “The target of our satire is not so much the politics as the biographies, the way they’ve self-dramatised themselves after the event, the way they’ve rushed to do it. That’s why it was such a clever idea to make it a 1950s’ melodrama. They’re all trying to make their lives sexy and racy, about how they all hated each other.

“They’re the first generation of politicians who, when you read their books, there’s no knowledge, just bickering and reflections on how it made them feel emotionally. And unfortunately that is funny. A lot of very important people bleating about their hurt feelings is ridiculous.”

Kiernan agrees, calling it the “celebritisation” of politicians. Nevertheless, and despite his avowed disinterest in politics, he found he could relate to the presentation of Brown as psychologically troubled, even while he distances the portrayal from its real-life counterpart.

“That was part of the charm for me, that he’s this incredibly angry man,” he say. “Everybody’s got their demons. This is high comedy and I played him that way because he’s justifiably angry that he’s not the premier and Tony is. But it’s so exaggerated I don’t think anyone will take offence. I hope all the politicians involved will sit down and watch it.”

Despite the convincing London scenes, the film was shot entirely in Devon over 13 days on a shoestring budget. Next year marks The Comic Strip and Channel 4’s 30th anniversaries and more films are being developed – a revisit of the original Famous Five spoofs, which finds them in rehab, and the latest in the Four Men series starring Richardson, Planer, Mayall and Ade Edmonson, Four Men In A Ship, in which they play bankers who have been pensioned off.

Richardson is also trying to develop a British version of Mel Brooks’ The Producers with Mangan, in the spirit of Terry Thomas.

He hopes to make another political satire. “But I can’t think what to do with the Coalition because I quite can’t figure them out yet. I’m sure that’ll emerge in time.”

• Comic Strip: The Hunt For Tony Blair is on Channel 4 on Friday, 9pm