Ed Miliband

Russell Brand backs Labour

After years of telling people not to vote, Russell Brand seems to have changed his mind and backed Labour's Ed Miliband.

Ed Miliband tells Russell Brand he's 'wrong'

Ed Miliband has challenged Russell Brand over his view that voting is "pointless" in a video interview conducted by the campaigning comedian.

Ed Miliband visits non-voter Russell Brand's home

Ed Miliband was spotted leaving Russell Brand's London home last night.

Who says satire is dead? After this, I would imagine just about everybody.

According to Jon Culshaw, one of the prime movers in ITV's new puppet-CGI farrago Newzoids

General election: Ben Elton on Labour campaign trail

Ben Elton has recalled his campaigning for Labour in the 1980s and 1990s as he introduced Ed Miliband at a rally.

As a younger show with an "open door" submissions policy - meaning that anyone can send in material for consideration - the topical sketch series Newsjack (Radio 4 Extra, Thursday) ought to be edgier, weirder, less formulaic than The News Quiz; but ends up, somehow, being just as complacent. Currently fronted by the comedian Nish Kumar, with assistance from a revolving cast of comics and actors, it's one of a small group of original, non-archival series on 4 Extra.

This week's half-hour instalment was dispiriting in the way that only really unfunny comedy can be. A skit about a plane that had been forced to land at Heathrow because of a broken lavatory careered out of the radio and landed with a tin clunk on the floor. The nadir was reached during a skit about politicians doing drugs, in which Nicola Sturgeon was represented by someone doing a generic Scottish accent, David Cameron by someone who sounded vaguely like Ed Miliband, Ed Miliband by someone who sounded like a young Janet Street-Porter, and Nigel Farage by a woman making no attempt to do an accent at all.

Why does BBC radio so consistently fudge this kind of thing? Neither series is doing anything that pushes a boundary, finds an edge, or ventures anywhere outside of an ideological comfort zone. Chris Morris's On the Hour, commissioned by Radio 4 nearly 25 years ago, retains more bite in a single sketch than they managed across an hour of broadcast time. Here's hoping it doesn't take another quarter-century for the BBC to try something different.

Written and presented by the comic Jolyon Rubinstein, best known for pranking politicians on The Revolution Will Be Televised, An Idiot's Guide to Politics started with the assertion and concomitant question "the Facebook generation is tuning out of politics. Why?" To which the obvious answer is they're all on Facebook.

This was not so much a guide to current politics as an impressively thorough analysis of its failings. Rubinstein spoke to Zac Goldsmith, Vince Cable and Len McCluskey and even one or two authentic "young people" before concluding that the reason no one trusts politicians is because politicians tell lies.

It would be easy to dismiss Rubinstein's efforts as just more anti-establishment catcalling, and I thought that the relentless pranking - taking a lie detector to Ukip's head office; taking a cartoon statue of Ed Miliband to Unite's head office - sometimes undermined his case. But this was much more than just mockery: where Michael Cockerell's documentary Inside the Commons has been trying to show us what parliament actually is, Rubinstein was looking for things about politics we might actually change. One was demanding that MPs tell the truth. Play fair and be honest - even the four-year-olds in the playground seemed able to understand that.

Bill Bailey compares Miliband to plastic bag in a tree

Predicting the results of the general election in 2015, he described Labour leader Ed Miliband, rather unflatteringly, as being "like a plastic bag caught in a tree."

Spitting Image creators: Cameron & Miliband are too similar

David Cameron and Ed Miliband are too "alike" to inspire the type of satire that made Spitting Image famous, according to Steve Nallon, who impersonated the voice of Margaret Thatcher on the show.

Long may Jolyon Rubinstein and Heydon Prowse run riot incognito. Tonight Ed Miliband, Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage fall victim to the politically driven pranksters. Posing as a workman, Prowse also waltzes into the Afghan and Saudi Arabian embassies to install "a glass ceiling" to "protect women from their aspirations".

Not all of the stunts come off: Katie Price is already too much of a joke and Johnson sidesteps a certificate for being The Hardest Working Man In Showbiz. Still, when this viewer wasn't giggling, she was boggle-eyed at their gumption. Best of all is when they sell ice creams to bankers and charge their outraged customers extra for "insurance". The name painted on their cart: PP Ice creams. Geddit?