The day a Downing Street minion asked Rory Bremner: 'How do you know Tony Blair likes to eat an apple in his office?' was the moment the impressionist knew his latest series - Bremner, Bird and Fortune - had finally scored a direct hit.
His team discovered that No 10 was so disturbed by Bremner's devastating portrait of the Prime Minister's subservient relationship to his all-powerful and laconic press secretary, Alastair Campbell (played by Andrew Dunn), that it had authorised a paranoid mole-hunt.
'They seriously thought,' Bremner said last week, with undisguised glee, 'that we had access to CCTV footage of Tony and Alastair.'
New Labour is probably right to take Bremner seriously. It's his unplugged Sunday night TV satire that's landing significant political punches, leading to a growing sense of outrage. As John Fortune's regular character 'George Parr' put it in the opening episode: 'I'm not talking about people bribing the Government - that's corruption. I'm talking about Government bribing the people - that's democracy.'
As well as persuading heavyweight journalists such as John Humphrys, Channel 4's Jon Snow and Sky's Adam Boulton to participate in cod-interviews, the show has persuaded some people it's the only serious opposition Labour has got. To Snow, the show has 'just got stronger and stronger.
It's all the more potent because Rory is attacking from the radical side. He's inside the tent, but he's also urinating all over it. It's become a political show more than an entertainment show.'
If, by some surreal quirk of psephology, Bremner could reach beyond his regular two million viewers on Channel 4 to a more significant portion of the electorate, Blair might even have a fight on his hands.
The new lease of life experienced by Bremner and his collaborators, John Bird and John Fortune, is as much of a surprise to them as to their audience. This is, after all, the show's ninth series.
When it started in 1993, Bremner was simply the most gifted impressionist in the business. In those days, he worked from scripts prepared by freelance sketch-writers. There was every reason to be leery of hard-boiled satire. Spitting Image had run out of steam and lost its way. Bremner's commission from C4 was to mix alternative comedy with variety, and, of course, to entertain. Initially, his show's only connection with the satire of the 1960s came from the presence of 'the two Johns'.
Ripple-dissolve to the long, dark spring of 2001, and a farrago of innuendo and old-fashioned abuse chiefly directed at Labour humbug. What's happened, it seems, is that Bird and Fortune's influence has slowly sharpened Bremner's political appetite and tuned his comedian's antennae into decoding the confusing political static that surrounds the Government. 'I think it's fair to say,' observed Fortune carefully, 'that we have radicalised him.'
Bird and Fortune have had to evolve, too, to speak to the Friends generation. Snow said: 'What's amazing is the way the two Johns have made the transition from Macmillan to Blair... What they're implicitly saying is, "Nothing has changed. The chaps who ran Suez are the same chaps who now run Maff".' >BR>
Bremner's own anger has evolved alongside the voters' disillusion. Now he's found his subject, he is both shaping and contributing to the debate about Labour's failure to deliver on its promises and the growing perception that it has become a Conservative government in all but name. 'I mean,' said Bremner, 'Winston Churchill would be thrown out of New Labour for being too left wing.'
It's taken four years. After the satirical bonanza offered by the dying days of Tory rule, the show took a while to get to grips with New Labour, and for popular disenchantment with the new Government to give Bremner an audience responsive to his own deep sense of anger at the shift 'from ideology to ruthless pragmatism'.
'The key to the series now,' he said, 'is that it's engaging with what's happening.' So is he now a satirist? 'That's a label you can never give yourself. What we do is we observe.' He adds: 'The show has become like a column, or like a commonplace book, in which we respond to anything that's caught our eye.'
He's been lucky with his timing: Mandelson, the Hinduja brothers, Keith Vaz, Gordon Brown's Budget ('Let's not pretend it was anything to do with economic policy') and now foot and mouth and the improbable spectacle of the Defence Minister and top military brass deployed in the killing fields of Cumbria. You couldn't make it up. 'We are simply sifting through the facts and translating it into satire. We operate in the gap between rhetoric and performance. That's where we live. I cannot believe the pomposity of New Labour.' His writing partner Geoff Atkinson says much the same. 'We have found a voice, though I can't quite put my finger on why.'
Part of the explanation may lie in Bremner's own obvious delight in his material. 'It's the writing that takes precedence now,' he says. 'I spend much more time writing than I used to. I came out of light entertainment, and the show used to be a show of impressions. Now it's different and now I get real pleasure in being truthful. Bird and Fortune are writers, too. The two Johns have this fantastic eye for absurdity.'
Bird's weekly improvised interview with Fortune is one of the highlights of the show, a well-researched and often blisteringly funny exposé. It's this moment in Bremner, Bird and Fortune that recalls the satire of the Sixties.
It's clear that the example of 'the two Johns' has become important to Bremner. In earlier series, Bird and Fortune had a lower billing than Bremner. Now they are an integral part of the show. It's the two Johns (and the star actress Frances Barber) who write and perform the 'dinner party' sketches that have become a vital ingredient in Bremner's satirical portrait of 'the way we live now'.
Nonetheless, all those who are close to the show make clear that it's Bremner who holds the ring. Will Hutton, former editor of The Observer and now chief executive of the Industrial Society, who has briefed Bremner on economic policy for years, says: 'It's Rory who calls the shots. It was Rory who first saw through New Labour. What's impressive about him is that he takes no prisoners. He's nobody's ally.' Bremner himself likes to boast that he's only said 'eight words to the Prime Minister in the past five years'. ('You are making it too easy for me.')
Those, like Snow, who work opposite him, testify to the 'eerie experience' of finding the man they know morphing into 'Gordon' or 'Tony'.
Combined with a natural independence, Bremner is hard-working and well-informed. 'He has a very good network,' says another insider. 'He does his homework. He cultivates politicians and civil servants. You see him on the circuit, finding things out.'
Talk to Bremner for more than a few minutes and you find his outrage at the 'shamelessness' of the Government breaking through. 'Can you believe it?' he says. 'They are actually taxing more and spending less than the last Conservative Government.'
Still, trying to pin down Bremner's own political allegiance is hard. Fortune, who says he cannot bring himself to vote in the next election, identifies him as a libertarian. Hutton thinks Bremner is, at heart, an old-fashioned British liberal 'who has become angered by the present Government. But like all the great comics, his work has a real humanity. It's not enough for satire simply to attack.'
The show itself exemplifies this. Tune into the series and you will find the familiar range of comic impressions drawn from a close observation of contemporary politics and media - Chris Tarrant, Jeremy Paxman, Des Lynam et al. But what distinguishes Bremner's caricature of, for instance, Robin Cook, is that behind the know-all demeanour and squeaky, argumentative voice, there's a devastating portrait of the Foreign Secretary's vanity.
Similarly, Bremner seems to understand Brown's broodiness, and Blair's obsessive anxiety to please. His perception of Blair's 'niceness' has what he calls the all-important 'hinterland' to his caricature - Blair is a sincere man who is also incredibly manipulative.
Geoff Atkinson believes that part of the show's secret now is that 'we've narrowed it down. We've eliminated stuff that in the old days could have gone into Weekending '. The streamlined team that produces New Bremner is similarly lean.
Apart from Bremner and 'the two Johns', there's Atkinson, Bremner's longtime collaborator John Langdon, a couple of researchers and 'a woman called Val who researches the archive footage'. The show is put together from week to week on the hoof.
An important element is the time Fortune and Bird spend together at the beginning of the week, and the half day Fortune spends with Bremner as the recording session approaches.
'I watched it last week,' said Martin O'Neill, Labour MP for Ochil and chairman of the DTI select committee. 'It's good fun and, like all satire, it makes us [the Labour Government] feel uncomfortable. He wouldn't be doing his job if he did not cause us to feel as much annoyance as he did the previous Tory administration.
'In the Blair-Campbell exchanges he has got the body language of both down to a tee - you almost don't need any dialogue. It's well observed, good fun, and not really driven by any malicious intent. It does its job, and pricks all the right bubbles.'
'People have got a sense of humour,' said Charlie Whelan, former adviser to Brown. 'We used to get Rory a seat in the Commons so he could watch MPs at work. Gordon Brown was quite happy about [the show]. He does have a sense of humour. One of the problems is that there haven't been any hard satire shows any more. A lot of comedians are Labour these days.'
Not everyone is impressed by New Bremner. 'I'm all in favour of being able to laugh at ourselves and for satire to keep our feet on the ground,' said David Blunkett, Education Secretary. 'What I worry about is when satire masquerades as serious comment.'
As for Campbell, an aide - spokesman for the spokesman - said: 'He has no comment to make on that. No comment at all.'
The Daily Mail 's TV critic, Jacqui Stephens, notes that 'It's quite formulaic in the way that verything, from Big Brother down, becomes a metaphor for New Labour.' But she concedes that it's still the only satire on the scene.
Bremner himself is too self-critical to be easy with the idea that it's a return to the satirical heyday of the early 1960s.
'We're working in a popular medium and producing entertainment. Satire depends on a finely developed sense of irony. If we did a television version of the Modest Proposal we'd have watchdog organisations all over us. Look, I've just filmed a sketch of Des Lynam interviewing Sven Göran Eriksson in the sauna. It's not exactly Swift.'
40 years of television satire :
That Was The Week That Was Harold Macmillan and Sir Alec Douglas-Home bore the brunt of sketches that ran from 1962 until just before the 1964 election. Dennis Potter, David Frost and Christopher Booker all contributed. One of its most memorable sketches was 'What is a Mum' a satirical depiction of the housewife through ad slogans. Macmillan bitterly disliked the show.
Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister These two pioneering shows of Margaret Thatcher's 1980s introduced Jim Hacker as Minister for the Department of Administrative Affairs. He worked with the unflappable bureaucrat Sir Humphrey Appleby. Thatcher said of Yes PM : 'Its closely observed portrayal of what goes on in the corridors of power has given me hours of pure joy.'
Spitting Image Home Secretary Kenneth Baker was portrayed as a slug. John Major was a grey-skinned robot controlled by Thatcher. At the height of apartheid, the show had a rendition of 'I've Never Met A Nice South African'. It ran from 1984 to 1992. Michael Heseltine tried to buy his puppet. Margaret Thatcher said: 'I don't ever watch that programme.'
