Tracey Emin

Preview - Passions: Damien Hurst by Harry Hill

From picked dissected sharks to diamond-covered skulls, you can perhaps see the connection in style between the art of Damien Hurst and the surreal comedy of Harry Hill.

Ian Wolf, On The Box, 18th April 2017

In his preview of Black Mirror (Channel 4), Charlie Brooker offered The Twilight Zone as one of the key influences for his new Sunday night dramas. To the untrained eye, the first of them, National Anthem, looked suspiciously like political satire - and a very superior one - rather than a sci-fi vision of technology's power to distort the world. All the gadgetry seemed only too familiar and the voyeurism all too credible: there's more dystopia in an episode of Spooks.

Rather less credible was the premise in which we were asked to believe, that Princess Susannah - think Kate Middleton - had been abducted and that the kidnappers had threatened to kill her unless the prime minister - think David Cameron: really, please do, as you'll never be able to take him at all seriously again - had sex with a pig live on television. As it emerged right at the end that the kidnap was a piece of performance art by a Turner prize-winner, plausibility was further stretched to breaking point. Could you picture Tracey Emin holding up a police escort and abducting Kate? Or that no one would notice that the severed finger came from a man, not a woman?

Yet none of this really seemed to matter, as good satire often lies as much in the fun you have along the way as in the absurdity of the set-up. And where this scored heavily was in the way everything was played as near-straight drama. There was an inexorability about Rory Kinnear as a PM tortured by focus groups and Twitter stats, whose decision to fall on his pork sword is ultimately driven by how he will be perceived in the ratings, that was both touching and funny. And Lindsay Duncan's understated press secretary - no Malcolm Tucker she - was just a delight. "Don't get it over too quickly, sir," she advised, as the PM prepared for the performance of his life. "Otherwise, the public will think you are enjoying it rather too much." Brilliant.

Brooker is no shrinking violet - though he did rather skate around the bio-mechanics of getting a hard-on in the presence of a pig, so either he has some taste boundaries after all or inside knowledge of politicians' attraction to the trough - so naturally the PM was not spared closing his eyes and thinking of the polls. In so doing, he lost the love of his wife and gained the sympathy of the nation. So no getting any bright copycat ideas, anyone. Imagine having to feel sorry for Cameron.

John Crace, The Guardian, 4th December 2011

Rather than attempt to hold on to their youthful glamour like some yoiks I could mention, Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse returned on Friday for the second series of Harry and Paul embracing old age so tightly it may soon expire on their chests. The opening titles feature them as a pair of old Soviet generals and they reappear as geriatric DJs playing their favourite Nineties rap and then again as Nelson Mandela and Castro.

You might accuse them of favouring some pretty old jokes, too. Thirties cinema remains an inspiration; here an early version of The Bourne Identity had a plummy Jason asking: "Hells bells who am I?" Whitehouse's version of Theo Paphitis in the Dragons' Den sketch was clearly a close relative of Stavros. And the pair still delight in imagining breaches of the walls that divide Britain culturally: meet the builders with opinions on Tracey Emin ("a child of five could become a ludicrous parody of themselves"), a foul-mouthed but multilingual football manager, the over-educated surgeon operating on a Foo Fighter and the fishermen chatting, by the side of their local pond, about the merits of Peter Shaffer.

For those of us of a certain age, this half hour was pure pleasure, or would have been were it not for knowing that its producer, Geoffrey Perkins, had died ten days ago without seeing the old age his stars parody with such fate-tempting brio.

Andrew Billen, The Times, 8th September 2008