The ability to laugh at yourself is a valuable quality; it shows you have a sense of perspective about your place in the world. In an age when The X Factor has encouraged self-delusion to hit epic scales, any evidence that egotism hasn't run entirely rampant is to be welcomed. So the BBC sending itself up - or its foreign news teams, at least - had to be a good thing.

So how did Taking The Flak, set in a fictional African land in uproar, flip the coin and end up as an orgy of patronising self-congratulation rather than a healthy mickey-take? Because Jennie Bond playing the good sport put it on the same smug level as all those Comic Relief spoofs you can't slag off because they're for charidee. As media satires go, Taking The Flak was Taking The P***.

Keith Watson, Metro, 20th August 2009

This corking satire could win an award for Most Scandalously Overlooked Programme. From puncturing reporters' egos to outright mockery of the news, this has been terrific, and the final bulletin from the war-ravaged African nation of Karibu announces the conflict has ended - but Harry and David's own troubles are far from over...

What's On TV, 19th August 2009

Even if the comedy here was always too broad to cut it with the best of satire, the series ends very much as it began - with a gentle burbling of in-jokes and good humour. The BBC's senior foreign correspondent has begun to suffer from such chronic sexual frustration that he is displaying symptoms of dementia. In desperation he rings up Jennie Bond - playing herself - in the hope that they could "do things" together. "I've said it to John Humphrys," she replies, "and I say it to you. NO!" This final episode also represents the triumph of the underdog, as Harry the hapless stringer (Bruce Mackinnon) finally shows a glimmer of talent. At the very least, this was a better class of light entertainment.

David Chater, The Times, 19th August 2009

I have seen several episodes of Taking the Flak, the BBC's satire upon their own foreign correspondents, and it has yet to become embedded in my affections.

The characters are in a world in which grieving relatives and photogenic orphans are at a premium, shots to camera must be accompanied by just the right amount of hand wringing and two minutes on Newsnight fully justifies any and every act of misconduct during filming.

The BBC had enough faith in Taking The Flak to bankroll location shooting in Kenya, and they have been rewarded with a self-assured, amusing and original comedy with more than a whiff of authenticity about it. Plus any show with Doon Mackichan among the cast is, by definition, a very good thing.

However, the characters simply fail to engage, or even surprise. Perhaps we have seen too many television comedies recently about the wacky world of television, populated by jaundiced and manipulative self-serving cynics, to care any more.

Harry Venning, The Stage, 14th August 2009

Taking the Flak - Cameramen and War

It's the penultimate week of Taking the Flak, so here is another exclusive piece of Red Button content. This week we go behind the scenes to meet both the real and fictional Directors of Photography.

Written by Matt Callanan. BBC Comedy Blog, 13th August 2009

This comedy drama that's mercilessly taking the myth out of BBC war reporting is something of a hidden gem. Indeed, we hear that John Simpson, John Sergeant and Martin Bell have actually gone to war themselves over which one of them the wonderful David Bradburn (Martin Jarvis) is based on. Tonight, David throws his fags out the pram when media darling Jeremy Pax - sorry, Jeremy Morrison - is drafted in to report on a ceasefire...

What's On TV, 12th August 2009

Taking the Flak - Animals

Continuing the series of exclusive red button content from Taking the Flak - here's journalist Harry Chambers talking about the perils of reporting when scary animals are looking at you.

Written by Matt Callanan. BBC Comedy Blog, 6th August 2009

Taking the Flak - Strictly Come Tribal Dancing

Here's another slice of red button video from Taking the Flak, plus some more exclusive pictures taken by the crew from the filming in Tanzania.

Written by Matt Callanan. BBC Comedy Blog, 3rd August 2009

The satire that pokes fun at the competitive world of war reporting continues with the BBC's junior stringer, Harry (Bruce Mackinnon), facing his toughest assignment to date: a rendezvous with his girlfriend's fiercely intimidating father. Elsewhere, David (Martin Jarvis), the bumptious chief foreign editor, learns that if he doesn't file an exclusive pronto, he will have to return home to work on the apparently much-maligned breakfast show.

Daily Telegraph, 22nd July 2009

Now here's a moment of true excitement: there's a funny comedy on the BBC. Like me, I'm sure it's something of a relief to you when you are fortunate enough to witness such a rare event but I was more than impressed with Taking The Flak

Mike Ward, The Express, 12th July 2009

Taking the Flak is Drop the Dead Donkey stuffed with Broadcast News and a wishful pinch of Evelyn Waugh's Scoop. Whenever television examines its own hubris, you tend to get more navel-gazing than forensic insight. Foreign newsgathering is a subject that's gagging for a good satiric seeing-to. This script came across like a string of well- sucked traveller's tales from the foreign desk. I have covered stories with news teams and, superficially, this was really not a million miles from the reality. But it suffered from what it was attempting to lampoon. It never looked beyond the obvious and went for the jokes that were easiest and simplest.

It was shot on location - when real life intervened, they had to flee from Kenya to Tanzania - but was set in an imaginary African country suffering a farcical civil war. The ineptitude, ruthlessness and crassness of the news teams might have been roughly authentic, but depicting this made-up nation as a tinpot comic turn of eye-rolling natives and Third World clichés really wasn't fair or funny. It's always Africa that's traduced as bongo-bongo land, never given the dignity of being a real place. African wars aren't funny. The suffering that, far too rarely, attracts the world's news isn't intrinsically amusing.

Neither can it be diminished to a backdrop for white men behaving badly, just as the danger journos put themselves in isn't imaginary or laughable. This series would have been brilliant had it not given up at the first sentence to mock the afflicted and traduce the brave, and had it, like Getting On, allowed the comedy to arise out of the pity and the stupidity. What this should have been was hard satire. What it was was racist farce.

A. A. Gill, The Sunday Times, 12th July 2009

Taking the Flak is a satire on TV foreign correspondents. More precisely, it is a satire on John Simpson, the BBC's foreign editor. David Bradburn, played by Martin Jarvis, is about the same age, weight and hirsuteness as Simpson and is the BBC's "chief foreign editor". It must have been good fun for BBC people to guy Simpson - who has, to be sure, a measure of the pomposity all famous broadcasters acquire. But to make him into a womanising, fraudulent vampire, sucking the facts out of local stringers and fixers in order to feed his self-dramatising "pieces to camera", is a terrible thing to do to this boldest and most illuminating of reporters. Still, satire is unfair by nature. Broadcasters dish out much worse to politicians and other public figures who don't have their comfort and salaries, and it would be fine if it were funny. But it's very bad.

John Lloyd (not the comedy producer), The Financial Times, 11th July 2009

TV review: Taking the Flak

John Preston reviews the first episode of Taking the Flak, BBC Two's new comedy drama series set among war reporters in an African country.

Written by John Preston. Daily Telegraph, 10th July 2009

Taking the Flak - The Red Button

If you missed it last night, here's the packages that went out on the red button after episode 1 of Taking the Flak. You will see lots of BBC New Journalists telling their favourite stories about David Bradburn.

BBC Comedy Blog, 9th July 2009

Pompous, self-absorbed foreign correspondents were set up as the fall guys in Taking The Flak and heaven knows the John Simpson school of tank-riding self-aggrandisement is a sitting duck. But though it energetically flailed around in a fictional African nation teetering on the brink of civil war, the intended satire ended up as flabby as its intended target. Why it was stretched out to an hour when the late, great Drop The Dead Donkey would have filed a similar story in a pithy 25 minutes was a mystery.

Way too much time was spent on the state of a female World Service correspondent's bowels, an enervating side issue which repeatedly sucked the momentum out of a supposed comedy thriller involving boy soldiers and a hostage situation. And there you had the problem. BBC Four comedy drama Getting On showed it is possible to find laughs in the darkest corners of the human soul. But Taking The Flak flipped the coin and showed how tasteless it is when you get it wrong.

Keith Watson, Metro, 9th July 2009

Taking the Flak is dependent on collegiate war stories too, rather more literally in this case since BBC2's new comedy is about foreign correspondents covering a small African war that has just got big. For Harry Chambers, the local stringer, this is a good news/bad news deal. On the one hand, his long service in this grim station may finally be rewarded with a few seconds' airtime on the main bulletins. On the other, he is almost certain to be "bigfooted" - edged out by the arrival of a more famous colleague, whose in-depth research consists in pumping the hotel waiter for basic facts 40 seconds before a live two-way with Sophie Raworth (who appears as herself). The fact that BBC News felt comfortable about allowing its anchors and studio to add verisimilitude to the comedy tells you something about its lack of real bite. And although this comedy, too, is built on the black humour of a closed cadre of professionals ("Would you like your rooms on the shooting side or the mortar side?" a hotel receptionist asked the arriving hacks), there's never a sense that you're just eavesdropping. Everything's effortfully designed to get an audience reaction, most effortfully with a running gag about a World Service reporter's irritable bowel problem. And whereas the crap in Getting On smells like the real thing, the crap in Taking the Flak is more like a plastic joke-shop turd.

It is a great subject for a comedy and it does have its moments, whether it's the interplay between a producer struggling in the field and a desk producer who has enough time on his hands to make Daleks out of coffee cups, or the skewed cultural grasp of the local fixer ("Goodfellas... my favourite comedy movie! That Joe Pesci!"). But while Getting On cares about being true first and hardly seems to care whether you laugh or not, Taking the Flak cares so much that you feel almost embarrassed when you don't laugh as often as you'd like to.

Tom Sutcliffe, The Independent, 9th July 2009

Taking the Flak had satirical aims based around the absurdities and egos of 24-hour news, and it pointedly mocked the BBC's very own BBC News channel. It followed a big story breaking in an African country, with a vain chief reporter, a harried producer, a right-on, shrewish World Service presenter with diarrhoea (a joke that ran and ran) and a junior correspondent whose patch was being invaded.

It was sporadically funny - particularly the character of a moon-eyed, Sloaney children's charity worker and only the occasional glimpse of any actual war or unrest going on - but it told us nothing we hadn't seen before on Drop the Dead Donkey and other similar shows. The characters didn't feel original (as ever, the journalists were all shysters and unprofessional). The jokes and satire went one way and after an hour of in-jokery, you did find yourself wondering: if the BBC is so keen to mock its own news operation, using recognisable presenters and graphics, why should we trust the real thing?

Tim Teeman, The Times, 9th July 2009

TV Review: John Simpson on Taking the Flak

War reporter John Simpson reviews Taking the Flak, BBC Two's new comedy drama about a team of news reporters in war-torn Africa, whose lead character is not entirely unlike Simpson himself.

Written by John Simpson. Daily Telegraph, 9th July 2009

Taking the Flak (BBC2), which competes for the same airtime, begins promisingly enough. Harry, the local stringer in Karibu, is doing a piece to camera: "This ancient country, 38 times the size of Wales, is in desperate need." (Any plague-spot of indeterminate location is always compared to Wales. Wales is not quite sure how to take this.) Over his shoulder, the cheerful life of Karibu pursued the even tenor of its way.

At this point the BBC's visiting firemen arrived, to cover the crisis, led by Martin Jarvis (playing, lets face it, John Simpson), and it all went to hell in a handcart. (Perhaps Susie Dent can explain the handcart.) The plot was chaotic. The locals were not always intelligible. And I am very sorry for the woman from the World Service who had to mime incessant diarrhoea. You wonder if the trip to Kenya was worth the shilling, as some of the funniest scenes were back at the BBC where Nigel (Mackenzie Crook) was holding the fort with minimal fortitude ("The editor of the six is literally foaming at the mouth. He bit a picture researcher").

Andy Hamilton was asked recently why he stopped writing Drop the Dead Donkey, the granddaddy of this genre, and he said you couldn't keep up. Damien Day - GlobeLink's shameless star reporter - putting a teddy bear on a bombed building would be considered quite mild now.

Nancy Banks-Smith, The Guardian, 9th July 2009

This could be Drop The Dead Donkey on location as we fly out with the BBC's foreign news pack to report on the strife-ridden African country of Karibu. "It wouldn't take much to make a difference here," junior reporter Harry Chambers (Bruce Mackinnon) explains. "A visit by Angelina Jolie or Fearne Cotton. Perhaps even a one-off drama by Richard Curtis."

A commissioning editor would green-light the script on the strength of that line alone. As the BBC's big guns fly to Karibu to steal Harry's thunder, the laughs come as much from the characters as the situation - like the mumsy World Service lady who compares Africa's roads with pot-holes in Putney.

But the best gags come from TV Centre back in London where producer Nigel (Mackenzie Crook) is busy making Daleks out of his used coffee cups.

Jane Simon, The Mirror, 8th July 2009

If this all has a (rather worrying) air of authenticity, that'd be because the show is written by people who've been there, done that. If you think about it, though, this is actually quite a brave commission by the BBC - they're saying that this is what it's really like... wouldn't they rather have us think the journalists we see on TV actually know what they're talking about?!

In any case, it's a generally a fun show. Filmed on location, it looks wonderful, and Mackichan and Jarvis are hugely watchable. The broad humour brought in through the almost ceaseless bowel movements of one member of the team, though, seems out of kilter with the programme - this isn't as intellectual as it might sound, and in fact a lot of the characters are quite cartoonish, but still, that doesn't quite fit. I'm also not sure why it was decided this should be an hour, but overall, it's a nice idea, well performed, and with some neat one-liners. Worth sticking with, in other words.

Anna Lowman, TV Scoop, 8th July 2009

Martin Jarvis plays a news reporter in a little-known African country 'Karibu' that's in the midst of a rebellion. The hacks want to find - or manufacture - stories for the news. Unfortunately we weren't pleased to discover that its dialogue stank of Radio 4's 6.30pm comedy slot. It really deserves to sit along some of the worst of those like Claire In The Community, Pat Self On The Back and Smugger And The Self Satisfied.

tvBite, 8th July 2009

This comedy takes a humorous look behind the scenes at the BBC's foreign news department and includes lots of cameos from real presenters. In Africa, an arrogant correspondent and a sex-mad producer are covering a civil war. But in the current climate, the jokes about making up expenses misfire.

The Sun, 8th July 2009

A cold-hearted sitcom brutally ribbing something close to the Beeb's heart: the producers, stringers and reporters in war zones itching to get their three minutes on News At Ten. The script for this opener, set in a conflict-ridden African backwater, is not quite as zinging as its obvious point of comparison, Drop The Dead Donkey, but there are at least plenty of heroes and villains, including Doon Mackichan's stressed-out producer and Martin Jarvis's lazy, big-shot reporter.

Sharon Lougher, Metro, 8th July 2009

There must have been a lot of wicked fun in the making of this series, which does for foreign correspondents what Drop the Dead Donkey did for a television newsroom. A senior foreign correspondent (Martin Jarvis) and his crew arrive in Africa to cover the outbreak of war. But the fighting is nowhere near as fierce as the rivalry between this grand old man of journalism, a young local stringer who resents having his thunder stolen, and a battered BBC World Service correspondent. Although much of the comedy is broad, it could have been written only by an insider and much of the jollity comes from sharing an in-joke. One of the writers was Tira Shubart, a producer and journalist who lived with John Simpson for ten years.

David Chater, The Times, 8th July 2009

This new comedy series was co-created by a journalist, co-filmed by a cameraman who's won RTS awards for reporting - and viewers may notice more than a little of foreign affairs editor John Simpson in fictional correspondent David Bradburn (played by Martin Jarvis). When war breaks out in the fictional African country of Karibu, where the child soldiers play football with Kalashnikovs for goalposts, the first BBC news television crew arrives, it seems, within minutes. The BBC's local stringer, Harry Chambers (Bruce Mackinnon), think he's about to win his first news scoop, but is promptly gazumped by his senior colleague, Bradburn, who flies into town and files his first flak-jacketed piece to camera without a jot of Karibu knowledge in his head. There's an over-reliance on fart jokes and Carry On farce here - at one point a dog is blown up by a land mine, splattering Chambers in "comedy" blood. The show bares its satirical teeth, though, in the plausible way it sends up the BBC news game's preening hierarchy. The reporters all clamour for precious minutes on "The One", "The Six" or "The Ten". Suddenly, the satire starts to ring true. It's just strange that a spoof of war reporting didn't want to take itself, well, a little more seriously.

Robert Collins, Daily Telegraph, 8th July 2009

"This ancient country, 38 times the size of Wales, is in desperate need." So begins BBC correspondent Harry Chambers' piece to camera from a central African republic at the start of this spoof on foreign news reporting. "It wouldn't take much to make a difference here," he adds, "A visit by Angelina Jolie or Fearne Cotton... perhaps even a simple, one-off drama by Richard Curtis." It's one of the better jokes in what turns out to be a rambling farce set under African skies - imagine Drop the Dead Donkey crossed with Evelyn Waugh's Scoop. Martin Jarvis is enjoyable as a John Simpson-style foreign editor who flies in to take over any story when it gets big enough, treading on the toes of local stringers like Harry. But Jarvis and the rest of the cast have to fight with a script that wobbles alarmingly. A running joke about a plump female reporter's troubled bowels is about as unfunny as comedy gets. There's a great satire to be made deconstructing the foibles of the news machine. Sadly, this isn't it.

David Butcher, The Radio Times, 8th July 2009

Taking The Flak: Its War

Taking The Flak is a brand new comedy drama following a team of journalists in an African war zone. They are in a state of perpetual danger, not just from bombs, but their colleagues too. BBC War Correspondant Ben Brown reviews the series...

Written by Lucy McDermott. BBC Comedy Blog, 6th July 2009

Taking the Flak: comedy about war reporters

Written with comedy producer Jon Rolph, BBC series is drawn from Tira Shubart's experiences as a journalist in Africa.

Written by Tira Shubart. The Sunday Times, 5th July 2009

Interview: Martin Jarvis on Taking the Flak

Martin Jarvis on parodying a bombastic war reporter and playing the voice of God in his new comedy drama series Taking the Flak.

Written by Michael Deacon. Daily Telegraph, 4th July 2009

Taking the Flak - The joy of foreign parts

In between dodging the snipers and the mortar rounds, everyone's having sex in BBC2's racy new sitcom about overseas news reporting. The Independent's defence correspondent, Kim Sengupta, reports, this time from the front row.

Written by Kim Sengupta. The Independent, 3rd July 2009

War is hell, even if it's a comedy drama

From a chance conversation 10 years ago with Jon Plowman (then head of comedy at the BBC) about what happens behind the scenes in television news, the idea for Taking the Flak was born: a comedy drama about journalists in war zones behaving badly.

Broadcast, 25th June 2009

Simpson's wars get the comic treatment

The BBC world affairs editor is 'chuffed' after inspiring new series set in an African conflict.

Written by Ben Dowell. The Guardian, 30th December 2007