Armando Iannucci's Charm Offensive, The Now Show, Bigipedia: Nick Doody's CV reads like a list of the best radio satire of recent times. Add in his stand-up, and he's one of the most prolific topical comedians around. He chats to Andrew Mickel about putting on an Edinburgh show on the cheap, the state of British satire and how to graffiti Wikipedia...

You wrote before Edinburgh about doing 10 gigs with no promo (article). How did they go in the end?

Really well, yeah. The downside of doing gigs secretly is you don't get reviewed, but that aside, it was great. I've never done the Free Fringe before.

How did it end up numbers-wise?

Before every show I got this feeling of, 'God, will they come?' But I was quite moved with the first one, actually, and got emotional that forty-something people came to it with no flyers, press or posters. It wasn't listed in the main Fringe guide, only the free one. Word of mouth meant it was packed out for more shows than it wasn't. There was always a decent audience.

You didn't flyer either...

Yeah, that's where I got really experimental. I didn't list because they charged through the nose for it, and because of sorting venues and things I was never going to be in the printed brochure. But they charge a hundred and something quid to be listed on the website. It's just a licence to print money really. People lose money at the Fringe for the most part, so I thought, I'm not going to pay that, and I'll see what happens if you just do it by word of mouth. Although I realise it isn't a model that would work if everyone did that, I'll probably do the Free Fringe next year, but with posters.

Have you done the sums to see if it worked economically?

Well, the only overheads are getting to Edinburgh and staying somewhere. I did it as cheaply as you can do. Even if I got zero in the bucket it would still be economically better off than doing things at the Pleasance like I've done before.

It must mean you got more time to do Fringe things than usual too?

Well, I did a lot of gigs for publicity. If you see someone you might think, 'yeah, I'll try that at', but if they also know you're free, that's a big advantage.

Tell us about your show this year...

I called it Work in Progress: The Greatest Hits. The thing was I had no pressure on myself to repeat material from previous years, so I was mixing hardened club material with some stuff that was still in development. And then the riots happened, so that became the first five and then ten minutes of the show. Doing material on the riots as they happened was very different to coming back to London where they actually happened...

How much stuff has actually carried down?

I came back with the same basic attitude to it, but you have to adjust the point of view, because people are in Scotland at an arts festival, reporting on the absurdity of the reporting, but that's not what was seen in London - they're looking out of the window, being scared.

What about now - there's so much news, is there any particular story you find yourself writing about?

It's unbelievable. For myself, I don't think I've ever felt more politically hopeless in my life. I don't see anyone with any vision or hope, and it's incredibly depressing that the entire political class across the parties accept something I don't accept: that the only way out of the recession is to cut public spending, while super luxury goods are undergoing a boom. The super-rich are doing absolutely fine right now. Those things, they haven't been in a recession since the end of 2008. I was in an airport three years ago and saw a magazine with the headline, 'Yachts to Beat the Credit Crunch'. What the hell universe do you buy a yacht, but consider yourself part of the credit crunch?

Well, you might want to sail to Belize...

Yeah, sail away from anyone looting you.

So is this just material for live, or are you working on anything satire-wise at the moment?

I've just finished Tonight with Rory Bremner [on Radio 4]. It was a lot of fun to write for because it was trying to be genuinely satirical, putting across an argument, so there was a lot of research involved. And the writing was a lot of fun as well.

How easy is it doing those shows to get beyond the easy targets - half the cabinet having gone to Eton, that sort of thing?

Yeah. Well, the other thing is that those things are real distractions from the important things. There's a general commentary across all the media that George Osborne doesn't know what he's doing. He knows what he's doing, he's just not doing it in your interests. He was behind the plan to hold May's electoral reform referendum at the same time as the local elections. There were a lot of Tory voters who were going to come out against it because it was against their interests - because it was fairer - and that boosted turnout at the local elections. He's a canny character; that might not be particularly funny, but if you just say he's a bumbling idiot... well, it's not the same thing at all. And Berlusconi, any mention of him is the easiest laugh to a Radio 4 audience, so from that point of view it's a good thing he's gone.

What do you make of the state of British satire on TV and radio?

Well, I don't have a TV, and I don't listen to much radio. But Tonight was really good, it was a pleasure to work on and I was really proud of the results. For all I know there's some great stuff on telly but I haven't seen it. But for a really long time there's been a blurring of the lines between satirical and topical. Making a joke about something that's been on the news, and saying something with a point of view about events - I don't think they're the same thing. One is a lot easier to make mainstream comedy out of than the other, and as a result, that's what we got.

On TV, you did do The Comic Side of 7 Days, which made a good crack of it. How were you involved in that?

I was a talking head. I was bought in on an hour's notice because someone else dropped out. The fact they knew I only had an hour to write everything meant they were suitably impressed. David Tyler produced that at the time. He saw what I did in an hour and drafted me in as a writer on Armando Iannucci's Charm Offensive, and asked me to pitch ideas if I had them. One of them was for a multi-layered show, like Wikipedia but also the argument pages, and that became Bigipedia [which he produced]. That's now had two series.

The second series went out this summer; is there a third one coming?

It's one of those things that you both hope for and dread. There's so much writing, an unbelievable amount. Most of the episodes in Bigipedia started out twice as long as what went out. It got to the point that we'd written so much material that we could have given the BBC a whole extra episode, which is kind of ridiculous.

What's the worst graffiti you've done to Wikipedia yourself?

I haven't spent that much time on it. We did some research to see how long something would take to change - on my page we changed a 'very' to a 'very very', and it was changed back within ten seconds. I've done almost no changes, but I've corrected a lot of others. For almost a year, my Wikipedia page started 'Nicholas Derek Jackson (stage name Nick Doody)', and that was done by Matt Kirshen. Within a few weeks of doing it, it was being quoted in other press. Also my youngest brother went through a phase of vandalising my page. There's a lot of references in the history to my time as a mercenary in Indochina, and being inexplicably afraid of spoons. That was changed to 'understandably afraid of spoons', mind. He also changed it on my IMDb page and referenced it so it stayed up for ages.

Other radio: is there likely to be another Charm Offensive series?

My understanding was it was really well-received, but Armando couldn't do it because of In The Loop. There was another series commissioned but the team are all doing massively exciting things - some have been nominated for Oscars. At one point David Tyler said he looked around the room of writers and said 'everyone in this room has their own radio show'. The pedigree - Jon Holmes, Tony Roche, Will Smith - that was a lot of fun to write on.

Any other irons in the radio fire?

Another series of Tonight has already been commissioned for next March. I had an idea of a podcast with Matt Kirshen... you know that feeling where you're watching Question Time, and someone's saying something that you know is lies and you start shouting at it? I wanted to do something tentatively titled Question Question Time Time, which would be a bunch of us miked up watching it, a mix of checking stuff out and being outraged. But there's a question of legality over using Question Time.

And what are you doing at the moment? New shows or regular circuit?

I'm co-writing a TV script with the Bigipedia team - Matt Kirshen, Sarah Morgan and Carey Marx.

You'll have to buy a TV to watch it, mind...

I'll just go round someone's house. Sarah's house, she's the only one of the writers with a television.

Get two tickets for the price of one to see Nick with Dave's Comedy Society. He is playing Tuesday 15th and Wednesday 23rd November at The 99 Club in Leicester Square; and Friday 25th at Jongleurs Edinburgh. Dave's Comedy Society