Bremner, Bird and Fortune: Silly Money

It was the death of John Fortune that saw me looking back on his work as part of Bremner, Bird and Fortune and I was able to find this special they did shortly after the economic crash in 2008. The series is in four parts. The first looks at where all the money has gone and what happened where suddenly it appears to have vanished. The second looks at where the money is coming from to support so much borrowing (basically China). The third show looks at the offsetting of debts onto future generations and the claiming of future profits as current income, looking at pensions, PFIs and the selling off of Government assets to create cash now. The fourth film looks at those to blame and what can possibly be done.

As a satirical comedy the first thing to say is that this is nowhere near their best work because frankly a lot of it is amusing rather than funny. Part of this is the delivery because this isn't a series of sketches so much as it is a rather fragmented presentation. What I mean by this is that the episodes will cut to a character for an input of a few sentences rather than a longer time to deliver a "bit", instead a series of edited sequences make up an extended bit. This fragments things a little bit but not too badly. The bigger problem is that the show actually does too good a job of explaining the crisis and what is going on. It does it in an accessible and barbed fashion that is more likely to make the viewer frustrated with the reality of it all.

There are still laughs but they are dark and depressed laughs rather than the ones I was used to with BB&F as they were very sharp with their targets. Here all three are on good form although it is Bird and Fortune that have the easier task. They have sections together that last longer and are more absurd (their usual George Parr sections for example) and these tend to work well whereas Bremner is more of a presenter and often the things he is saying don't benefit from him doing them in character. In fairness it is hard to satirize such an absurd situation and they hurt themselves by how clearly they spell it out. Watching it again six years down the line, there is an additional layer of frustration and depression because so many of the practices and businesses criticized here are doing fine and carrying on as those at the top seek to continue making money from money.

It is a good general piece about the crisis but it isn't their funniest show by any means even if it technically is successful at what it sets out to do.