Frost on Satire, BBC Four, review

If only Frost on Satire (BBC Four) had had a different presenter.

Two things swiftly became apparent from Frost on Satire (Thursday, BBC Four). One is that people tend to lose their appetite for causing offence in middle age, and the other is that age is the cruellest satirist of all. The years have done things to the American comedian Chevy Chase's face that might even have given Gillray pause for thought. Frost too has turned from the chirpy, sneering, brilliantly deadpan comic of his youth into a rheumy, clubbable figure oozing emollience in all directions.

In a rather too relaxed, chucklingly familiar sort of way, he was trying to find out what, if any, power satire held. Not much was the gist of it, with affronts to vanity being the most palpable hits. John Lloyd, producer of Spitting Image, recalled Leon Brittan's wife once coming up to him in a state of high indignation and saying, 'Leon's only got three warts on his face and you've given him five.'

Sir David Frost, sometimes dubbed "the godfather of satire", talks about the impact of this particular type of humour on politics in the UK and the US. Using clips from That Was the Week that Was and America's Saturday Night Live, Frost shows how the genre has changed and garners the opinions of satire veterans such as Jon Stewart, Ian Hislop and Rory Bremner.

Ian Hislop puts it well when he says satire's job is to ridicule "vice, folly and humbug". He also argues that it works best when politicians are particularly divisive, hence Spitting Image's success at the height of the Thatcher years and Tina Fey's Sarah Palin in the 2008 American election campaign. It's one of the many good points made in a documentary that makes excellent use of David Frost's cachet on both sides of the Atlantic. So sit through the umpteenth showing of Bernard Levin being punched on TW3 in order to also see some insightful interviews with those who have impersonated our leaders, namely Rory Bremner (Tony Blair), Chevy Chase (Gerald Ford) and Will Ferrell (George W Bush), who all consider the extent to which impressions tarnish the reputations of people in high office.

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