What I’m interested in is what gets your curiosity going, because there’s so much that’s just there to fill space.”He tells a story about Jeremy Clarkson. “I have a producer friend whose party trick is to play theme tunes from television on the piano Clarkson heard him once and really enjoyed it. Then, a few weeks later, he wrote in his column about how terrible these people were who have party tricks. “I’m happy with that,” he says, “because the alternative is too terrible to contemplate.”Keeping his politics in check, or at least making sure he is not too preachy, will be the issue for his column. Their contribution was more fully recognised in 1997 when the title Bremner, Bird and Fortune was adopted.”I went to the Bird and Fortune madrassa,” says Bremner. “I was trained in satire camps in the fine arts of ridicule and in whatever the comic equivalent of suicide bombings is. They radicalised me, and they still do.” Bremner describes himself as moving “further and further left”, finding himself, in the paradox resulting from the creation of New Labour, most at home with the Liberal Democrats.
“It coincides with breakfast, which is very important for the children [he and his second wife, the artist Tessa Campbell Fraser, have two daughters aged four and two]. It’s the one meal in the day when we sit down as a family.”From the early 1990s onwards, Bremner’s shows, which had moved to Channel 4 and featured his name in various permutations, also contained slots from the veteran satirists John Bird and John Fortune. “It originally was a wider thing,” he says, “but the change came because of the way television developed.”When I was growing up, there were just the three channels, so as a nation we all sat down to the same meal at the end of the day. And I can remember in 1987 having this despair when it turned out that Thatcher got back in.”By this point, Bremner had his own BBC2 series, Now – Something Else, to which he had graduated after contributing to Spitting Image and Week Ending. I would hear the news voices – the Clintons, the Majors, the Clarkes, Bushes and Heseltines.”Bremner watches Newsnight, is an irregular reader of The Independent and The Guardian, and listens to the Today programme “a lot”.
Now there’s been this explosion – BBC radio alone has seven channels. So I was drawn increasingly to what happened in the news, perhaps because those programmes were the only ones I was beginning to watch. He was still known then as a general impressionist, the “new Mike Yarwood”, whose speciality was, if anything, in sports commentators (he had a hit in 1985 with N-N-Nineteen Not Out, a spoof based on a Paul Hardcastle number in which Bremner ridiculed the poor performance of the England cricket team). But it didn’t take me long to realise that something had gone terribly wrong.
