Ian Hislop

Ian Hislop: Humorist, historian - a national treasure

Best known for his razor-sharp wit on Have I Got News For You, Ian Hislop has turned his attention to the Victorian age.

Ian Hislop and Nick Newman, co-writers of What Went Wrong with the Olympics?, could have done with more real-life couldn't-make-it-up stuff to fuel their satire set in 2014 which looks back on the catastrophe that was the 2013 (geddit?) London Games. I say satire, but it's just comedy, strictly speaking: satire demands a certain accuracy underpinning the laughs, but this was crucially undermined by the fact that, in the real world, 2012 preparations are bang on schedule and bang on budget.

There were some good laughs (I liked the sports minister questioning the legacy value of the Coliseum, since it was no longer used for sea battles), but for the show to succeed, the organisers of the bona fide Olympics need to be making a mess of things. So far, they're not. You definitely couldn't make that up.

Poor James Blunt. Ever since he shuffled onto the music scene with his pre-pubescent twang and feminine looks, he's become something of a pop-culture hate-figure. His name is not only a by-word for a wet blanket, but cockney rhyming slang for the rudest word in the English language.

It can't be easy for comedians and TV presenters lumped with the singer - who's currently promoting a new album - to resist the temptation to mock and berate the singer. Astonishingly, Graham Norton managed to restrain himself when Blunt appeared on his Friday-night show, but surely the acid tongues of Ian Hislop and Paul Merton wouldn't show him such mercy; surely, they would lay into Blunt and rip him apart, ruthlessly mocking his every word?

Well, perhaps they would have done, were they given the chance. But Blunt proved to be the funniest panellist on the programme last night; perhaps even the funniest off the series so far. As he regaled stories of dinner with Bill Clinton and Cher and joked about his army days, he outshone even Merton, who was on excellent form himself.

When Hislop called him a "cool dude", he snapped back: "Thanks, Dad" and the audience roared with laughter, delighted by yet another Blunticism. It was actually fellow panellist Nick Robinson who found himself the butt of his teammates' jokes, most notably when footage of his recent outburst at a protester's banner was shown.

Even Blunt's appalling leather jacket went unmentioned; such was the distracting sophistication of his humour. He might have trouble shaking that rhyming slang from his name, but perhaps "James Blunt" will now be a by-word for "self-deprecating wit of the first order".

The satirical news-based panel game has been running since 1990 and is now in its 40th series. The first guest host to face the crossfire from Paul Merton and Ian Hislop is the Sherlock actor Benedict Cumberbatch; later in the series, Jeremy Clarkson and Martin Clunes will take the chair. The first guests to join them tonight are writer and presenter Victoria Coren and comedian Jon Richardson. We can also expect to see James Blunt, Nick Robinson and Ross Noble later in the series.

Sherlock Holmes himself, Benedict Cumberbatch, is the first guest host at the start of the 40th series of the much-loved comedy current affairs panel show. Here's hoping he has the right mix of affability and keen-wittedness that a good host needs, otherwise he'll be wrapped up like a Maypole by team captains Ian Hislop and Paul Merton. The show is recorded the night before transmission, so there is little that we can say, apart from doling out a few nuggets for fact-fans. Such as, did you know this is the 138th show hosted by a guest presenter in the eight years since Angus Deayton left in October 2002? No, thought not.

There are touches of brilliance in Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse's latest series. Everyone will have their favourite sketches but the plummy old men in a gentlemen's club discussing which famous people are "quare" are the highlight for me. "If he sounds like a quare and he looks like a quare I should think he's a probable quare," they concur. This week Ian Hislop and, shockingly, David Attenborough are up for discussion. Not all the sketches work so well, but for fans there's good news: Café Polski is back in all its sad glory.

Sir David Frost, sometimes dubbed "the godfather of satire", talks about the impact of this particular type of humour on politics in the UK and the US. Using clips from That Was the Week that Was and America's Saturday Night Live, Frost shows how the genre has changed and garners the opinions of satire veterans such as Jon Stewart, Ian Hislop and Rory Bremner.

Ian Hislop puts it well when he says satire's job is to ridicule "vice, folly and humbug". He also argues that it works best when politicians are particularly divisive, hence Spitting Image's success at the height of the Thatcher years and Tina Fey's Sarah Palin in the 2008 American election campaign. It's one of the many good points made in a documentary that makes excellent use of David Frost's cachet on both sides of the Atlantic. So sit through the umpteenth showing of Bernard Levin being punched on TW3 in order to also see some insightful interviews with those who have impersonated our leaders, namely Rory Bremner (Tony Blair), Chevy Chase (Gerald Ford) and Will Ferrell (George W Bush), who all consider the extent to which impressions tarnish the reputations of people in high office.

Why HIGNFY hits the target even after 20 years

When they first appeared on BBC2's risky new show Have I Got News For You, Ian Hislop and Paul Merton, aged 29 and 32 respectively, were young, dangerous, and at the cutting edge of television satire.

Private Eye: Audio slideshow

As Private Eye prepared to go to the presses with its last pre-election issue, editor Ian Hislop invited the Today programme to see how the satirical magazine is put together each fortnight.

Take a unique look inside the Eye's offices in central London - as its writers decide which politicians, business leaders and celebrities deserve to be scrutinised and lampooned in the latest edition.