High-table comedian

Rory Bremner is in a hurry. The controversial impersonator surges into his production office a few minutes late for our meeting. ‘So sorry. Did they tell you? We overran,’ he says in his light, energetic voice. ‘Won’t be a sec. Got to go to the loo. Ooh! Too much information.’ A few minutes later he reappears and sits patiently while I fiddle with the wrong buttons on the tape machine. ‘Quick soundcheck?’ ‘Testing, testing,’ he says helpfully. And we begin.

I’m keen to talk about comedy, politics, his work as a satirist, the infamous Margaret Beckett tapes — about absolutely anything other than our designated topic, Bertolt Brecht, whose earliest play Bremner has translated for the Young Vic’s alarmingly titled ‘Big Brecht Fest’. I kick off with a topical question. ‘As a satirist, would you prefer a coronation or a contest for the Labour leadership?’ He leaps on one word in particular. ‘I’m very wary, you’d be surprised to hear, very wary indeed of describing myself as a satirist. First and foremost we’re comedians who engage with what’s going on. We do topical comedy.’

With no prompting he then delivers an analysis of the Brown accession which develops into an examination of the role of satire within the body politic. ‘There’s a kind of irony that Gordon Brown has waited such a long time and that his inheritance has been so poisoned by his association with Blair’s policies on Iraq. And I mean with Blair, with all the criticism of Blair, the satire if you like, far from being the counter-culture, is now so embedded in the culture that we’re in danger of not taking anything seriously at all. Do we have a role in that?’ He puts this question to himself. ‘I always say we’re a sceptical programme. But it’s not f***-you satire, it’s a synthesis of intelligence and humour.