The New Statesman

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So for this year's televisual odyssey I have decided to watch every episode of The New Statesman. There are four series, 29 episodes in all (including three specials).

1:1 Happiness is a Warm Gun

This evening then I watched the very first one, in which the ultra-Thatcherite, devious, scheming, completely amoral and utterly self-serving Alan B'Stard is elected as MP for the constituency of Haltemprice after arranging accidents for his two main opponents.

Unfortunately for Alan, the local Chief Constable knows exactly what he's done and blackmails him into having a law passed, to arm the police. Needless to say, Alan manages to come out on top.

The New Statesman is of course a parody of Thatcherism and the Conservative Party. I was arguably more of a Tory at 27 than I am now, and yet I loved this. I recorded all of them to VHS and watched some of them (including this first one) many times.

To my mind Rik Mayall is the funniest human being ever and he portrays Alan's incorrigibility with brilliant tongue-in-cheek panache. There are lovely touches. I particularly like the casual disregard and discourtesy Alan shows to the two fellow Tories he shares an office with, especially the long-suffering Piers Fletcher-Dervish. But Rik could raise a laugh just with an eyebrow or a knowing smirk.

I hadn't watched this for years - fantastic to see it again. A laugh-out-loud moment every minute.

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1:2 Passport to Freedom

Sarah inherits 200,000 shares in Ocelot Motors, which makes her wealthy enough to afford a divorce. This presents a problem for Alan, because her father controls the local Conservative Party. The second he's divorced, he'll be out on his arse.

Alan's solution is to ruin Ocelot, making Sarah's shares worthless. He manages to provoke a strike.

I particularly enjoyed the dialogue between Alan and a German airline employee early on in the episode. "I don't need a passport, we won the war", he tells her.

It's the little details that make The New Statesman brilliant, like Alan not bothering to swerve to avoid his old gardener as he arrives home in his Roller.

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1:3. Sex is Wrong

Alan involves himself with a moral campaign spearheaded by a prudish aristocrat called Lady Virginia Imry and cleverly manages to connive some money out of it in an episode that satirises both the puritanism and sexual depravity of the average Tory. I'm firmly in the latter camp myself.

Off the scale physical comedy in this one. Subtle, bit hilarious. There's no way to script this stuff.

Why did I never think of watching this in the last three decades or so? I remember it well and it's hilarious.

There's a joke that won't mean a lot to people in the present day, about Peter Wright, who'd just published Spycatcher, a book banned at the time in the UK.

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1:4 Waste Not, Want Not

An old lockup in Hull is scheduled for demoolition. This presents a problem for Alan, because some time ago the Argentinians paid him £55,000 to dispose of some nuclear waste, and that's where he had it stashed.

Fortunately, there's a disused coal mine in the constituency. Alan's transsexual accountant Norman points out that the mine runs under an infant school - but Alan reminds him that it's only a council school.

Alan's xenophobic father-in-law Roland who owns the mine is prominent in this one. Played by Charles Gray, who was Blofeld in Diamonds Are Forever as well as appearing in You Only Live Twice.

Sidney Bliss, the former hangman who runs the Hangman's Knot Inn is played by Peter Sallis.

Very good, though not one of the better first series episodes.

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1:5 Friends of St James

Brilliant. Alan meets an old acquaintance at a school reunion event. His old school chum is now president of a marijuana-rich Caribbean island.

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Or so he claims. After sampling some of the island's "special tobacco" and getting conned out of £1000, Alan hatches a scheme to open a bank on the island, get people to invest their money in it - then keep the cash for himself.

It doesn't quite go to plan, but the devious Tory manages to come out on top. Very good.

Interestingly there's a bit of racial language - "honky" is used twice, and Alan describes his old school acquaintance as a "black con merchant".

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1:6 Three Line Whipping

Always loved this one. Alan spends the night at a brothel and gets into trouble when he turns up at TVAM, not knowing the result of the previous day's by-election.

He kills a cab driver by accident, then while impersonating said cab driver in the process of getting rid of his body, ends up giving a lift to the Prime Miniser and her chief whip. We never actually see the PM but the voice impersonation is spot on.

Needless to say, he gets himself off the hook.

Lots of funny incidental humour in this one. I love the fact that the brothel's clientele consists mainly of senior judges, politicians and high-ranking police officers. Also the way Alan inspects the girl he's with like a farmer inspecting cattle. Brilliant.

Some of the scenes are set in Dulwich, a part of London I came to know well. I don't think the real Dulwich is used. Hadn't seen this since the '80s and never made the connection when I lived there.

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1:7 Baa Baa Black Sheep

Alan's father-in-law Roland is intent on deselecting him from his constituency. But the delinquent MP's accountant Norma (previously Norman) comes up with an idea - to have the American fast food tycoon Willoughby Guzzler open a factory in Haltemprice, rather than Wales.

Alan's plan to do this involves smearing the Secretary of State for Wales. Willoughby and his wife are devout Christians.

Brilliant telly.

There's a joke about Mark Phillips, then married to Princess Anne, and a trial which I didn't understand at all but the studio audience clearly loved it.

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2:1 Fatal Extraction

Alan discovers oil under Hackney Marshes, and does his best to ingratiate himself with the leader of Hackney Council, a socialist firebrand black cutie called Georgina Pitt, so he can make a fortune out of it. he doesn't.

Hilarious scenes when he's being obnoxious to her on a panel show (definitely based on Question Time, the Robin Day character even has a bow tie) then tries to cop off with her when he gives her a lift home.

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I've always remembered this one fondly. I seem to remember that the second series is not quite so good as the first, but it definitely gets off to a cracking start.

One thing that really dates this (arguably apart from all the jokes about Georgina being black, although they aren't hateful) is that Alan blackmails the Tory chief whip after finding out that he's gay.

This was first broadcast in January 1989. I was in the final year of my degree, my last few months of living in Hartlepool. Where did the time go?

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2:2 Live from Westminster

TV coverage is introduced to the House of Commons. Alan takes full advantage, becoming a national sensation and taking an opportunity to make some money from a bit of product placement.

The way that live broadcasting from the Commons is depicted is hilarious, with TV cameras all over the floor, makeup assistants all over the place and a director cueing up contributions from the MPs.

Very different from the real thing which started a few months after this was broadcast.

Alan's new-found celebrity gets him an appearance on the TV gameshow What's The Question? hosted by Nicholas Parsons. A show so vulgar that, as Sarah puts it, even their servants don't watch it.

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But Sarah also plans to capitalise on her husband's place in the spotlight by publishing a brutal, sensationalist memoir about her life with Alan in one of the papers.

It turns out that Thatcher, tired of being upstaged by B'Stard, put her up to it!

But of course - Alan has a solution.

Good one. I'd forgotten about this one apart from the game show scene. Nicholas Parsons appears as himself. Would have filmed this about a year after he appeared in the brilliant Comic Strip feature Mr Jolly Lives Next Door with Rik and Adrian Edmondson.

Come to think of it - what a shame Ade never had a cameo role in The New Statesman. A hapless, bespectacled and bewildered SDP MP, perhaps.

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2:3 The Wapping Conspiracy

A memorable episode that starts with Alan copping off with a girl guide to whom he's supposed to be giving a guided tour of Parliament.

A reporter for The Times - publishes photographs of the lecherous MP engaged in group sex with underage girls.

Alan enlists Sarah's assistance - for a substantial price of course, to play the loving wife in a libel case. The court case itself is clearly a parody of Jeffrey Archer's case against the Daily Star. I've just looked it up, it's hilarious:

"Remember Mrs Archer in the witness box. Your vision of her probably will never disappear. Has she elegance? Has she fragrance?" - actual words spoken by the judge in Archer vs Daily Star, 1987. In this episode, Sarah B'Stard is also described as "fragrant" by the judge. Twelve years after this episode was shown, Archer was found guilty of perjury and perverting the course of justice during the trial, and of course got prison time.

I was quite surprised at the depravity of the sex acts alluded to in this episode, as well as the allusion to sex with underage girls.

Hartlepool gets a mention, in what I think is a gentle poking of fun at northerners. It's a throway bit on a news item, read by the real Peter Woods, just before he reports on the libel case. The oldest cat in Britain has died and its owners, an elderly couple from Hartlepool, say they intend to eat him for Sunday dinner.

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2:4 The Haltemprice Bunker

Following a meeting at a restaurant with a business associate, arranged for a bit of insider trading, Alan decides to expose an old Nazi war criminal who lives in his constituency whom he's been blackmailing for years.

But Helmut, the war criminal in question, pays him off with £500,000 in Nazi gold.

I don't think I'd seen this one since 1989, when it was shown. The end of the war happened only 45 years earlier, which in current terms is roughly when Moving Pictures came out.

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The scene in which Helmut gets pushed under a train is very impressive - the stunt man really does seem to go off the platform right under a moving train.

Alan's business associate is played, with delightful insouciant arrogance, by Stephen Fry. The waiter to whom they are unspeakably rude is Hugh Laurie.

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There's something delightfully of-its-time about this one, particularly in the yuppie stereotype portrayed by Stephen Fry. The 1980s laptop, the early brick mobile phone, the stripy shirt.

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2:5 California Here I Come

Alan goes to Hollywood with Piers, to pitch his idea for a soap opera about the Royal Family at a party given by a TV director. He cops off with a sex-crazed TV star hottie.

But after chaining her to her bed, at her own request, he manages to lock himself out of her hotel.

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Shortly afterwards, he gets arrested and imprisoned by the local sheriff - played superbly by Mac McDonald, who was Captain Hollister in Red Dwarf.

It's not a great one but the ridiculous bedroom scenes and the redneck sheriff rescue it.

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2.6 May The Best Man Win

Improbably, Piers is getting married to an upper class hottie. Alan agrees to be his best man, and briefly manages to get off with his fiancee - but when she insults his sexual prowess and tells him she's going to prevent Piers from acting as his lackey, he attempts to murder her.

Brilliant one this. Alan's behaviour at Piers' fiancee's stately home is delightfully imperious, rude and obnoxious.

Celia Imrie reprises her role from the Comic Relief sketch of 1988, in which she played Thatcher's secretary.

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2:7 Piers of the Realm

Alan returns from Yorkshire, where he's made some money on a fixed horse race, to find that Piers has been given a junior minister role and is no longer subservient to him.

But why? Well it turns out the hapless Fletcher-Dervish is being manipulated by his boss, the Secretary of State for the Environment, to rubber stamp a scam.

Alan has also secretly been videotaping his wife's fleshly lust with their gardener, unknown to her of course, and she's riding high (so to speak) in the German porn charts.

The episode (and second series) ends on a cliffhanger, with Alan being shot dead in the street as he's about to climb into his Bentley.

Is he dead? And who's the culprit? Jeff D'ckead, the Sunday Sport's political editor, who bet £1000 on the horse that Alan had nobbled? Sir Greville MacDonald, the Secretary of State for the Environment, who knows Alan's found out about his scam? Sarah, who's found out that he's made her an unwitting porn star? Or Piers, whose teddy bear Alan tortured and burned?

I've always remembered this episode for two scenes - one in which Alan cons a senile old woman into selling him her seven bedroom house for £500 - and the teddy bear torture scene. Only Rik Mayall could have done that.

I was curious about the actress who plays Sarah B'Stard as I don't recall seeing her in anything else. She is Lady Marcia Mary Josephine Fitzalan Howard, the third daughter of the 17th Duke of Norfolk! She was about five years oler than Rik.

Was quite annoyed by the cliffhanger at the end of this one, which was shown in February 1989. Had to wait nearly a year for the next instalment.