Tonight With Vladimir Putin

BCG members who regret the passing of "Spitting Image" and even those too young to remember it might want to tune into BBC2 tonight at 11 pm.

The BBC have produced a new controversial and satirical comedy show that is bound to have people talking - some praising it and others demanding for it to be banned. The characters are not puppets this time: they are fully formed, free moving 3-D digital images.

In "Tonight with Vladimir Putin", we see Meghan Markle as an African-American trailer-trash girl who threatens to "cut" people who incur her displeasure.

Just to be clear, she doesn't threaten to ignore them: she threatens to stick a knife into them.

Be there or be . . . er . . . elsewhere!

PS Newspapers and many online sources are saying that Meghan's character is written and played by actress and writer Gbemisola Ikunelo but I think that's fake news: I think Meghan's character is written and played by actress and writer Gbemisola Ikumelo.

I watched the first two 15-minute episodes and the show is a very mixed bag.

Animated Putin is very good: quick-witted and funny, especially when interviewing the real-life guests. This morning's newspapers slam him (and the show as a whole) as woefully unfunny and dreadfully disrespectful. They even suggest the real Putin might attack us in retaliation. They clearly don't know comedy when they see it.

Animated Meghan is okay but poor by comparison with Putin and would never ever have been given a job on "Spitting Image". She appears in a solo spot in each episode in which she takes questions from the audience. It's a nice idea in principle but in practice it's disappointing. She's vacuous (which is good) and she deliberately ignores audience questions about her real-life family (which is good) but, apart from that, she's just not funny enough - especially when compared with the slick and witty animated Putin.

Reports of her being outrageous and offensive are entirely unwarranted. I'd love it if she were both but unfortunately, she's neither. When you think what a fearless and determined satirist could make of Meghan Markle on a show like this, you'll quickly realise this particular portrayal is about as anodyne as it could possibly be.

She tells the audience a story about threatening to cut Kate for borrowing her hairbrush but, as a satire on the Duchess of Sussex, she doesn't even come close to cutting the mustard, never mind the future queen (see what I did there?). Animated Meghan needs a much much better script if this show is going to fly

I'm not saying animated Meghan's scriptwriter, Gbemisola Ikumelo, lacks the necessary comedy talent to bring out the best in her comedy creation. I'm saying either she or the BBC lacks the "balls" to go for the jugular in the way "Spitting Image" did.

The real-life guests, Alistair Campbell, June Sarpong, Joe Swash and Deborah Frances-White were all good value in their interviews with Vlad but they appeared all too briefly.

In summary: Putin - very good, Meghan - okay, real-life guests - good, the show as a whole - pretty good.