Heydon Prowse

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?

They could scarcely have timed it better.

In the week when ex-BBC executive Mark Byford popped up to plug a book and defend his £949,000 pay-off as 'not greedy', Jolyon Rubinstein and Heydon Prowse went chugging outside the BBC to raise money for BBC In Need. The Bafta-winning duo behind The Revolution Will Be Televised (BBC Three) were bang on the money.

You could criticise the second series of this mischievously scabrous satire as taking aim at exactly the same targets as the first - self-serving politicians, fat-cat money-brokers, corporations exploiting tax loopholes. But when those targets are so blatantly in need of a kicking, it's good to see someone stepping up to the mark.

The pair's stock-in-trade is penetrating the inner rings of power in cunning disguise. Their secret weapon is that they're entirely plausible as children of privilege. These chaps don't have chips on their shoulders, they've got herbed frites, and it's the sense that they are rejecting their own sense of entitlement that gives this revolution some added bite.

Class traitors Jolyon Rubinstein and Heydon Prowse return for a second series of pranks, stunts and hard stats about the sort of injustices that make Russell Brand's blood boil. Making merriment out of tax avoidance or PR firms that shill for tyrants isn't easy, but Rubinstein and Prowse have two ways to achieve it: flat-out silliness and a colossal amount of nerve. The series two opener sees Rubinstein combine both as he somehow accosts David Cameron at a fundraiser, demanding that he autograph his 1986 Bullingdon Club annual.

A post-Occupy Trigger Happy TV? Mark Thomas minus the Dave Spart earnestness? Politicised pranksters Heydon Prowse and Jolyon Rubinstein return for a second series tonight and, even if their stunts inevitably miss as often as they hit, it's easy to give them the benefit of the doubt.

For a start, they usually pick good targets - a glance at a list of PR company Bell Pottinger's recent clients suggests they're deserving candidates for the kind of treatment they receive here - but also, there is so little current TV with a remotely subversive agenda.

If you suspect that keeping calm and carrying on has become shorthand for enduring - without complaint - any amount of shit being dumped on us by government, vested interests and high finance, this is for you. The Revolution Will Be Televised isn't subtle, but maybe it doesn't need to be. Maybe it's enough to know that someone's still awake.

At times this show resembles a strange hybrid of Trigger Happy TV and Da Ali G Show, with Heydon Prowse and Jolyon Rubinstein adopting a collision-course policy to satirising current affairs by thinking of ways to intervene. It's an approach that's redolent of countercultural pranks: not always funny, but often admirable. Tonight, they inform the people of Lincoln that they will soon, in part, be policed by security firm G4S, and serve up glasses of crude oil at the BP portrait awards. Their acting may be bad, but their interaction with the public shows real chutzpah.

Payday loan companies are free to shaft the poor

Charging extortionate rates of interest, these companies are robbing the poor. I know, because I worked undercover for one.

Imagine if the Jackass boys sacked Steve O and replaced him with Mark Thomas. At times, that's the vibe of this prankishly political comedy show. Every now and then, creators Heydon Prowse and Jolyon Rubinstein nail it; the tax affairs of Vodafone are put under the spotlight in a brilliantly ballsy guerilla rebranding exercise, while a nicely placed blue plaque testifies to the rampant inconsistencies in the economic vision of George Osborne. Elsewhere, the pranks are less successful - no one's going to match Chris Morris in the absurd public vox pops stakes, so it's probably not worth trying. Still, it's great that this kind of material is getting an airing on BBC3 - perhaps comedy's response to the parlous state of the nation is beginning at last.

The Revolution Will Be Televised is quite possibly the most intellectual show BBC Three has ever broadcast, which is odd seeing as this is a hidden camera show, a genre not know for its challenging material.

Created by Heydon Prowse and Jolyon Rubinstein, the series revolves around various satirical pranks and stunts. In this first episode the duo attempted to clamp ambassadors' cars for not paying the congestion charge (they try to claim they don't have to because of diplomatic immunity); try to enter the London 2012 Olympic stadium wearing shirts with protest slogans on them; and pretend to be sadomasochists asking MI6 to send someone somewhere for some "fun".

BBC Three has had much success with satire in the past. After all, arguably its most successful comedy is Russell Howard's Good News. However, these two shows are the different ends of two funny extremes. Good News mocks all the weird and odd stories that somehow filter into our papers and news channels. It's admittedly not that satirical, but it is fun. TRWBT however is much more vicious and subversive. It tells you things you need to know. It has a huge nerve to go and do the things it does. And I'm surprised that Prowse and Rubinstein haven't been arrested yet.

Politically aware pranksters Heydon Prowse and Jolyon Rubinstein continue their mission to lampoon hypocrisy, greed and corruption in their satirical comedy series. Pointed references to a mobile phone company, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and a Guantanamo "demo" outside the US embassy in London make their point succinctly, but other ideas such as right-wing correspondent Dale Maily (a smart idea which could work better) and the energy and water company sketches fall short, while the ongoing Coalition prank just isn't very good.

A colourful collision of Mark Thomas and Dom Joly, this political hidden-camera prankathon is fact-packed, judiciously targeted, scarily well performed and, often, splutteringly funny.

The stars, Jolyon Rubinstein and Heydon Prowse, set out to satirise tax avoidance, state violence, banker bailouts and other 21st-century injustices - their main weapon being sheer cojones. I was laughing and stuffing my fist in my mouth at the same time as they fired stupid questions at policemen mid-riot, tried to climb over MI6's front gate and, in the best sketch, proved that Tony Blair's central London mansion isn't as heavily guarded as it's cracked up to be.