The Comic Strip Presents...

The Comic Strip gang, creators of previous full-length satirical fantasies deploying prodigies of mimetic skill to recreate erstwhile Britain through parody of its movies and television, set out to do so again with "The Hunt for Tony Blair" (Channel 4). Stand by for a sardonic take-down.

Some of The Comic Strip's catalogue is very good. They did a version of the Arthur Scargill story as it would have looked if Hollywood had taken it over and cast Al Pacino in the lead. I remember laughing at that. They did a version of The Professionals in which the pair of style-free heroes ran around the entire time with their lips pursed. It was called "The Bullshitters". I remember laughing very hard at that.

But I can already remember not laughing at "The Hunt for Tony Blair" even once. It made all the standard references to Blair the war criminal as if that was enough. Meanwhile it recreated The 39 Steps and a whole era of British film in which Britain's short list of stars struggled to be glamorous. Tony Blair, in fact, looked a bit like John Gregson, remembered by dozens of people even today.

But even as you admired the fidelity of the stylistics, the show refused to fizz. Somewhere in the middle there was a little giggle about Blair being Mrs Thatcher's lover, which gave Jennifer Saunders the chance to enact scenes from Sunset Boulevard: scarcely a British movie, one would have thought. Around that shaky fulcrum, deserts of unfunniness stretched far away.

You can't, however, blame Jennifer Saunders for grabbing any chance going to climb into period threads. Women's frocks were just so interesting, in the days when they were the top layer of a whole support system.

For the first time in six years, The Comic Strip, the comedy which was broadcast on Channel 4's opening night, returns with a film noir spoof on former Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Stephen Mangan played the PM, who finds himself on the run from Inspector Hutton (Robbie Coltrane), who arrests him for a murder Blair claims he didn't commit. During his attempt to escape the law he pushes an Old Labour tramp off a train (Ross Noble), kills a spookily accurate predictor of the future (Rik Mayall) and ends up in bed with Baroness Thatcher (Jennifer Saunders).

This episode features some great performances, from Mangan as Blair, Saunders as Thatcher, Harry Enfield as an "f-word" fuelled Alistair Campbell (still think Malcolm Tucker is the better, ruder and funnier spin doctor), and Nigel Planer's spooky reincarnation of Peter Mandelson. There were plenty of laughs to be had, especially if you're a film noir fan; for example, Rik Mayall's Professor Predictor is a clear parody of Mr. Memory from Hitchcock's The 39 Steps.

There were also actual moments of tension. My favourite bit in the episode featured Blair in Thatcher's mansion, preparing to change for dinner and being told by the butler Tebbit (John Sessions) not to look in a cupboard. Blair obviously does and out of it pops the rotting skeleton body of Dennis Thatcher.

If I were to have any complaints about this programme, it would be that Tony Blair doesn't seem to be that much of a current satirical subject to mock. Not only is Blair no longer Prime Minister, he wasn't even our last Prime Minister. We've had two different people in the position since he's left. If this was made while Blair was still in power it would have had a much bigger impact.

At least Downton Abbey gives you laughs, which is more than you can say for The Comic Strip Presents - The Hunt for Tony Blair. Family loyalty would explain the commissioning of this "satire", since Comic Strip helped launch the channel, but I'm not sure anything can explain its transmission. The pastiche was undisciplined (what was Barbara Windsor doing in a 39 Steps parody, other than showing that Ronni Ancona can do the voice?), the script flabby and seemingly unedited ("Here, I was back in the city. Anonymous... apart from my sack-cloth toga") and the plot utterly devoid of satirical bite. It should have been cordoned off with crime-scene tape, not broadcast.

The Hunt For Tony Blair review

Personally speaking, if it was not for the fact that some of the 'old guard' was going to be in this programme, I do not think that I would have enjoyed it as much.

We see so little of The Comic Strip ensemble these days that it's easy to forget how long they've been in the trenches of British spoof, tossing out a grenade every now and then, as if cursed to spend the rest of their days striving to match the perfection of their hilarious first episode, "Five Go Mad in Dorset", which introduced high jinks to Channel 4's inaugural broadcast in 1982 and the term "lashings of ginger beer" to the cultural memory.

"The Hunt for Tony Blair" - a parodic splicing of noughties politics and 1950s British film noir (though what Herman's Hermits were doing on the soundtrack I don't know) - wasn't uproariously funny but it was handsomely made, with melodramatic shadows and enough money for fog, flat-footed policemen and steam trains. The plot, such as it was - a madcap chase across country, with the PM on the run for murder - threw up knockabout humour and vignettes from Blair's WMD fiasco, featuring a cast of the usual suspects: a languid Nigel Planer as Mandelson; Harry Enfield in East End shout mode as "Alastair"; the excellent Jennifer Saunders as Thatcher in her dotage (and full Barbara Cartland drag), watching footage of her Falklands triumphs from a chaise longue.

Director Peter Richardson, whose comic talents aren't seen enough on screen, played George Bush as a rasping B-movie Italian mobster ("I'm gonna get straight to the crotch of the matter here"). With the exception of impressionist Ronni Ancona (whose 10 seconds as Barbara Windsor seemed puzzlingly extraneous), no one went for a direct impersonation. Stephen Mangan didn't make a bad Blair, though he could have worked on the grin, and he couldn't quite make his mind up between feckless and reckless as he capered from one mishap to the next leaving a trail of bodies. Did Blair's moral insouciance ("Yet another unavoidable death, but, hey, shit happens") call for a look of idiocy or slipperiness?

The comedy had mischief at its heart in mooting that Blair had bumped off his predecessor, John Smith, and accidentally pushed Robin Cook off a Scottish mountain, while Robbie Coltrane's Inspector Hutton (aha!) tacitly invoked the spectre of Dr David Kelly (we never found out who Blair was charged with murdering). But it was hard to squeeze fresh satire from the overfamiliar stodge of the politics ("Tell Gordon to run the country and trust the bankers"). Mangan was at his funniest hiding among sheep in the back of a truck or kicking Ross Noble (playing an old socialist) off a speeding train, though there was amusement elsewhere. I had to laugh at variety theatre act Professor Predictor, shoehorned into the story to enable Rik Mayall in a bald wig and boffin glasses to answer questions from the audience. Would the Beatles still be at No 1 in 50 years' time?

"No. The Beatles will no longer exist. But Paul McCartney will marry a woman with one leg."

How the audience roared. "Pull the other one," someone shouted. Arf, arf.

The Hunt For Tony Blair review

Bush is a hoodlum, Maggie a Norma Desmond diva - and Blair and Mandelson a pitch-perfect joy.

The Comic Strip Presents... review

After a six year sabbatical, the comedy collective who "changed the face of British comedy" returned with their comedy crosshairs set firmly on Tony Blair and his questionable behaviour in Iraq. The moment a police axe went through the door of Number 10 I knew we were in for a treat.

The Hunt for Tony Blair was bonkers but brilliant

"The Hunt for Tony Blair" saw comedy veterans from The Comic Strip join forces with Stephen Mangan for this wacky, tacky and very funny offering.

The Hunt for Tony Blair, review

While they varied in quality, a new Comic Strip film was always an event back in the day - which makes it particularly sad that their latest outing is so irrelevant and lacking in bite. Maybe it's time the Comic Strip was left to rest in peace.