Hans Teeuwen

Bremner's excellent new three-part series considers comedians from three different countries, comparing and contrasting their style and material with our own culture. Still to come are the 'don of Irish comedy' Barry Murphy and veteran Swiss satirist Viktor Giacobbo, but first Bremner meets The Netherlands' Hans Teeuwen, an absurdist performer and singer from Amsterdam who has been making waves over here since 2007. Teeuwen's deranged act teeters on the edge of sanity, but here he makes perfect sense as he deconstructs his artform, explaining to Bremner how he likes to play with audience perceptions in the same unsettling way as director David Lynch does in his films and TV shows.

He may be an impressionist but there is nothing lightweight about Rory Bremner and this new series of foreign satirists verges on the academic at times. In this first programme he learns about the Dutch cabaret tradition and the absurdist humour of Hans Teeuwen. Together the comics explore how their different cultures intersect.

"Power always tends to corrupt, and has to be ridiculed", is the view of absurdist Hans Teeuwen, who talks to Bremner about the risks facing Dutch comedians today. It is a subject matter close to the heart of a man who has become a leading advocate of freedom of speech in Holland since his friend, the film-maker Theo Van Gogh, was killed by Islamic extremists in 2004.

As Rory Bremner well knows, understanding a nation's sense of satire is a good way to start understanding that nation at large. Starting with Holland and the spiky musical comedian Hans Teeuwen ("I'm once, twice, three times Hans Teeuwen!"), Bremner embarks on an unapologetically intellectual quest to take the satiric pulse of three nations (Ireland and Switzerland are to follow). Tonight's edition is smart, engrossing and - providing you've a stomach for edgy, Bill Hicks-style jokes - occasionally very funny.