Tonight With Vladimir Putin

Who on earth thought THIS was a good idea? A cartoon of another country's leader interviewing D-list celebrities in front of a tiny and obviously confused live audience (with canned laughter and extra applause added to bolster the lukewarm response)?

I guess I might be out of the loop but I don't get the angle it's coming from at all: what its point is or why it's supposed to be funny. It's clear that there's a set of approved political assumptions on display here that I simply don't understand. Are we all supposed to specifically and mandatorily hate Putin? All of us? Without exception? Why? In this time of never-greater political division at home, why is a publicly funded British 'comedy' show singlemindedly trying to whip up distrust and derision for a world leader thousands of miles away? What other head of state would they devote an entire show to mocking in this way? (Aside from Trump, of course, but that goes without saying). One from the Middle East? Cuba? North Korea? Venuzuela perhaps? Of course not. That would be racist. Or at least Islamophobic. Best play safe and toe that PC line.

The nearest thing to this abomination, really, is Stephen Colbert's desperate and desperately unfunny "Our Cartoon President" propaganda handout, and it's almost as cringey. Both are shows that, in even 10 years time, people are going to find hard to believe ever even existed at all.

A perplexing disaster.