Nicola Sturgeon
- Scottish
- Politician
Press clippings Page 3
Preview - The Last Leg: Re-United Kingdom
Inspired by the courageous MP, Jo Cox, tonight's extended episode of The Last Leg, is dedicated to all her hard work and beliefs.
Eloise Craven-Todd, On The Box, 16th June 2017Who 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
Where did it all go wrong? Of course, Spitting Image profited hugely from being the product of the Thatcher era, when the political battle lines were starkly drawn and the whiff of anarchy and grapeshot was in the air. Now we've entered an insipid (yet disturbing) era in which politicians posture, bluster and say anything that might nudge the all-powerful opinion polls half a percentage point in their direction. Conviction is dead, and everybody has fired off their personal opinions all over Twitter before the Newzoid scriptwriters have managed to pull the caps off their biros. And besides, doesn't the EU make all the big decisions for us anyway?
Take out the ads and Newzoids only last about 23 minutes, but even so it could hardly drag itself to the finishing tape. The team had laboured hard to draw up a checklist of likely targets, but then couldn't think of anything satirical to say about them. Ed Miliband appeared as a gormless geek with Ant and Dec (or perhaps it was vice versa). A barely-recognisable David Cameron was carried around like Nero in a sedan chair, talking like Ken Clarke impersonating the Duke of Kent. And why have him saying "get me to a hospital, a private one obvs" when his use of the NHS is well documented?
There was a sketch called "Mrs Crown's Boys", in which the Queen and Prince Philip kept saying "feck", and we had a pantomimic Nicola Sturgeon and Alex Salmond singing "sod the English". It looked as if there might be a daring moment coming up when we saw a Muslim couple worrying about their son joining Isis, but it stopped before anything controversial happened. Nigel Farage was depicted as a stand-up comic with a fag and a pint of beer. Then Gary Barlow sang a song about not paying tax. It was like Anti-Pointless, where you had to find the laziest, most obvious answers that everyone else had already thought of.
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.
Pete Naughton, The Telegraph, 25th March 2015Rory Bremner on indyref
All's fair in love and satire for motor-mouth Rory Bremner, but he admits Nicola Sturgeon is off-limits, and the state of the Union is beyond a joke.
Janet Christie, The Scotsman, 21st December 2014In his recently-published, tremendously indiscreet diaries, Daily Telegraph journalist Alan Cochrane mused about meeting Rory Bremner before the referendum. The satirical impressionist apparently spoke "in a funny voice" for a few minutes, leaving Cochrane flabbergasted when it was revealed he was supposed to be "doing" Alex Salmond.
Let's hope Bremner has mastered it by now, as this is his last round-up of this extraordinary year of Scottish affairs, including interviews with some of the major players, from punters to pundits to politicians. Now re-settled in Scotland, after a career mostly based around Westminster politics, Bremner's first Holyrood special last year showed him trying to get a grip on the referendum before it really began (something that many national commentators found themselves scrabbling to do at the last minute). So what is his conclusion now? And how on earth will he portray Nicola Sturgeon?
Andrea Mullaney, The Scotsman, 20th December 2014