Nigel Farage Gets His Life Back

Maybe we should have had Kevin Bishop as Nigel Farage singing pro Nazi songs which the real Farage apparently used to do in his school days. After all this scourge of Europe loves things Germanic, even his wife hails from there.

This mockumentary traces Farage's life away from front line politics which mainly consisted of going down to the pub drinking and smoking, something he did in his political days. He never seemed to have attended the European Parliament too much, a position that he was elected to hold. Maybe there is not a good bar in Strasbourg.

Here we see Nigel having banter with his pub landlord, drinking beer with patriotic or heritage names, watching 1970s comedies with bad stereotypes, doing the crossword, rejecting reality television offers unless they put an extra zero at the end, making jokes that only he laughs at and swearing at the Biased Broadcasting Corporation.

We do not see his wife but we do see his embarrassed look when his supporters tell him that they understand what he really meant when he said 'we want our country back' (the Nazi singing, anti foreigner stuff has always been inside him.)

The trouble is despite Bishop's efforts playing Farage it really was not that funny. Farage is a character you can let rip with satire, maybe this was meant to be bittersweet. I got bored by the end.

Writing good satire is hard. You have to elevate it above the obvious and the mundane. This fails rather spectacularly to do this. The jokes were very obvious (and repetitive) and it looked like a university rag week project that was well funded. Years ago - Malcolm Bradbury wrote 'The Gravy Train' about life from the perspective of several Brussels bureaucrats - with statuesque performances from Ian Richardson, Judy Parfitt, Alexei Sayle and others. That's how you do it peeps - not with 3rd rate stuff like this. OK - apparently my review is not long enough - 10 lines is the minimum… How perverse - normally these days - everything has to fit into a soundbite or 140 characters! Why on earth do people set these silly rules? Maximum 1000 words - minimum 10 lines. Perhaps if writers are under these conditions at the BBC - it might explain why their end- product is so questionable?