Guy Jenkin

Written by Guy Jenkin (co-writer of Drop the Dead Donkey and Outnumbered), Hacks is a satirical comedy about the phone hacking scandal.

This comedy wasn't as funny as it could have been for one simple reason: what happened in real life was much funnier and shocking than what happened in this programme. I know this to be true personally. During the actual phone hacking scandal I thought, "There's no way that this can get any weirder." Then I found out that one of my old university lecturers had been arrested on suspicion of phone hacking and, well, you get the point.

The thing with the phone hacking scandal is that it's so ridiculous and stupid that i''s almost impossible to think how you can make it even funnier than it really was. For me, the funniest thing in the whole show was this world's version of an enquiry in which the Murdoch-esque owner (played by Michael Kitchen) was attacked with silly string and then the attacker was nearly beaten to death by his owner's wife (Eleanor Matsuura).

When Guy Jenkin and Andy Hamilton satirised media values in their Nineties sitcom Drop The Dead Donkey they produced a perceptive but gentle chiding of failing newsroom standards and most journalists loved it. They won't have found Hacks so funny.

The phone-hacking scandal is no media industry in-joke but an already much-publicised story of shameful events that the audience will have instantly recognised.

It was snappily written but it seems almost futile to try to exaggerate for comic effect the extreme methods that we know were actually employed at the News of the World. So when we saw Tabby, the pearl-wearing royal correspondent for the Sunday Comet, tasked with hacking the phone calls of the "Ginger Prince" we well knew the dapper Clive Goodman - her real life equivalent at the News of the World - was up to so much more.

Channel 4 ran the inevitable disclaimer: "The characters and events in this film are entirely fictitious." That may not have satisfied ex-staffers at the News of the World. Former showbiz editor Rav Singh and former investigations editor Mazher "The Fake Sheikh" Mahmood (neither of whom have been accused of criminal activity) can't have been impressed at the portrayal of the Sunday Comet's most scurrilous reporter Rav Musharraf (Kayvan Novak), who is shown trying to blag documents in the voices of Desmond Tutu, Sean Connery and Prince Philip ("just fax me the bleeding bank statement you imbecile").

Novak's was one of many slick performances. Claire Foy was scary as a ruthless editor with some of the ambitious traits of Rebekah Brooks. Michael Kitchen deftly played Stanhope Feast, a media baron with an Australian accent, a fruity vocabulary and a feisty young Oriental wife with a talent for close combat, Ho Chi Mao Feast (Eleanor Matsuura).

Hackgate has been such a gripping and multi-dimensional story that the hour-long drama rattled along at the pace of a good Sunday tabloid. And with the Leveson inquiry still unfolding, much of the material felt hot off the press. Scotland Yard should have squirmed at Russ Abbot's portrayal of a top cop and politicians were expertly lampooned for their obsequiousness towards the media.

But the Channel 4 audience, amused as it might have been by this all-too-real tale of tabloid excess, will have been left with little sense of the value of journalism. The role of other newspapers in exposing hacking was skipped over, leaving Ray (Phil Davis), a veteran reporter with an aversion to the dark arts, to represent Fleet Street's conscience.

Rupert Murdoch's influence on British media culture was mercilessly satirised. Hacks ended with an abandoned Stanhope Feast, hopping mad on his skyscraper helipad as the pages of his dead newspaper blew away in the wind. But the real life mogul is still worth more than $7bn and his News Corp empire generates $33bn a year in revenues, so that part at least was indeed entirely fictitious.

It's up to you whether you regard the hacking scandal as more tragedy or farce. Guy Jenkin sees it as the latter, so the Drop the Dead Donkey co-creator brings us another news comedy. This time it's a scurrilous red-top called the Sunday Comet, which may, purely in your imagination of course, feel like a broad caricature of, say, the News of the World at its height (or depths). Only a clip was available, but highlights look to be Celia Imrie as a royal expert and an Australian proprietor played by Michael Kitchen.

"This is the story of a British tabloid newspaper," says the on-screen message at the start of Hacks. "Obviously everything in it is made up." Then, for the next hour, Guy Jenkin's satirical look at you know which story chronicles recent events remarkably accurately. Not the boring bits - the most outrageous, and the most fun. It is fun. And very, very silly.

Claire Foy is properly good as the pushy moral vacuum of an editor. Kayvan Novak - Fonejacker turned phone hacker - is hilarious as an investigative reporter who specialises in the art of disguise and whose resemblance to a real investigative reporter who specialises in the art of disguise is obviously purely coincidental. Likewise Alexander Armstrong as "David Bullingdon", the posh twat who somehow gets to run the country. (From now on we must all refer to the PM as David Bullingdon, OK? And that includes you, Mr Miliband.)

But Guy Jenkin's master stroke is to give Wendy De ... sorry, "Ho Chi Mao Feast", the position at the heart of the story she clearly merits. Her brutal attack on the protester at the hearing - during which she repeatedly and ferociously bashes his head with her high heel until the blood spatters the select committee - is a joy.

The phone-hacking comedy Hacks might have been the first entry in a new genre: the reverse satire.

Written and directed by Guy Jenkin, the co-creator of Drop the Dead Donkey and Outnumbered, it took a swipe at a real-life farce that has aroused intense public ire - the parade of newspaper executives explaining that they never asked where the stories on their front pages came from - and turned culpability into one big joke.

Its characters included an Antipodean media magnate (Stanhope Feast, played by Michael Kitchen) with a much younger wife called Ho Chi Mao (Eleanor Matsuura), plus a tabloid editor, Kate Loy (Claire Foy), who was aware of the nefarious means used to extract celebrity pay dirt, and oblivious to its human cost and cruelty.

Except she wasn't oblivious - the voices of phone-hacking victims were keeping her awake at night - and Foy, promising actor though she is, has something about her that suggests warmth and vulnerability.

This put Hacks in the indelicate position of making its targets sympathetic. Kitchen's character even got all the best lines. Now where's the fun in that?

Hacks: the satire that puts the tabloids in the stocks

Someone somewhere was always eventually going to make a scabrous comedy out of the phone hacking scandal. We should give thanks that that person is Guy Jenkin, the co-writer of long-running Nineties newsroom comedy, Drop the Dead Donkey...

It didn't take long for the first phone hacking comedy to make it to our screens. This hour-long swipe at the tabloid scandal, written by Guy Jenkin of Drop the Dead Donkey fame, is set at The Daily Comet, where staff land stories by any means necessary. Phone hacking, entrapment, blagging... the hacks here do it all. Press baron Stanhope Feast (Michael Kitchen, playing a gruff Antipodean magnate with a young Asian wife) demands some big exclusives from his flame-haired editor Kate Loy (Claire Foy). But her moral compass went awry some time ago and it's about to cause a major scandal. The salty script is peppered with political references, while a colourful cast includes Nigel Planer and Celia Imrie.

An anthropologist of the future wanting to study the life of British children in the early 21st century would have a field day with Outnumbered, the sitcom beloved of the middle classes because it so precisely seems to reflect their lives.

In the opening episode of the fourth series, shown on Friday, daughter Karen is having a conversation with her mother, Sue, who has just started to work full-time. "It's a mum's duty to pick up her children from school," she opines.

When her mother points out that she herself might like to work when she grows up, her retort is swift: "See, you're getting aggressive. That's what happens to women who work like men. They start turning into men. They get hairy chests and they smash up town centres." Sue exclaims in exasperation, but Karen barely looks up from her colouring. "You're getting aggressive. You'll get hairy." As a mother who works full time and spends a lot of the rest of my life sitting around kitchen tables having remarkably similar chats with my offspring, the exchange made me rock both with laughter and recognition. It is this sense of shared experience that has made Outnumbered, written by Andy Hamilton and Guy Jenkin, but also partly improvised by its cast, such a success.

Whereas most television sitcoms, such as My Family, which preceded it on screen last week, rely on incident, plot and comic misunderstanding to raise a laugh, Outnumbered is always at its best when its characters are simply bumbling through the mundane business of their lives: the fight over the Wii controller, the cheese stuck in the toaster, the dinosaur melted in the microwave, the keys which vanish just as you are leaving home.

It is particularly sharp on the vagaries of modern language: this week's conversations about the use of the word "gay" could have been recorded in many homes as a generation of school children apply it in the new sense of "feeble" to the horror of their parents who have co-opted it (against the wishes of a previous generation) to mean homosexual. The glee of the children when their father described the Wii controller as a "nunchuck" - "you said you'd never say that, you said that it wasn't a real word" - was equally astute.

From the anthropological point of view, however, it is the way in which the children behave that is of most interest. The family depicted in Outnumbered is one where the children rule: their parents are hapless, helpless adjuncts to the kids' power. It is not only that the youngsters argue each and every point. It is that on many occasions - such as Karen's decision to attend her uncle's funeral - they get their own way against the wishes of their parents.

In this way, Outnumbered depicts the sea change in behaviour in which a generation brought up to be submissive to its parents, finds itself once again in thrall - but this time to its children. For all its humour, it is essentially true.

Outnumbered: Leader of the comedy revolution?

Combining fine actor improvisation, a smart script and some relatively innocuous storylines to paint a familiar picture of the 'joys' of family life, Andy Hamilton and Guy Jenkin's creation has amassed enough prizes to make Alex Ferguson go green-eyed. But with the kids another year older I wondered if it could still cut it.