Bremner, Bird and Fortune

History

Rory Bremner got his first TV break with the BBC after his Edinburgh Festival shows went down well. That series, called Now Something Else, kicked off on BBC2 in 1986 and lasted for seven series, though from the fourth one onward it was renamed The Rory Bremner Show. A bunch of other comedians helped out along the way, including Jeremy Hardy, Steve Nallon, Steve Brown, Enn Reitel, Jim Sweeney, and Steve Steen. John Bird came on board in 1989, and John Fortune joined two years later in 1991.

In 1993 Bremner switched to Channel 4, where his new programme Rory Bremner...Who Else? put Bird and Fortune front and centre. Over seven series the show got sharper and more political, taking aim at things like The Jerry Springer Show, Ainsley Harriott, and various sports figures. By 1999 the team dropped all the non-political sketches and narrowed the focus to straight political satire, also changing the show's name. In 2002 three members of the production crew—Geoff Atkinson, Steve Connelly, and Tristam Shapeero—picked up a BAFTA nomination for Best Comedy Programme or Series.

Bird and Fortune themselves were nominated for a BAFTA for Best Entertainment Performance in 2001 and Best Comedy Performance in 2002, though they didn't win either time. A one-off special from 2002 called At Her Majesty's Pleasure won a Broadcasting Press Guild Award for Best Entertainment in 2003. In October 2004 the trio put out a book tied to the show, You Are Here: A Dossier, and that same year Rory Bremner got a BAFTA nod for Best Comedy Performance.

November 2008 saw a four-part miniseries titled Silly Money, which tackled the economic downturn with fewer regular sketches and co-stars, more George Parr sketches than usual, and a bunch of archive clips. The last full series aired later in 2008. After that came two three-episode miniseries: The Last Show Before The Recovery, starting 7 June 2009, focused on the banking crisis, and The Daily Wind-Up, which ran from 2 to 4 May 2010 and covered the 2010 UK general election. Those final three episodes marked the end of Bremner, Bird and Fortune.

Regular features

For most of its run the show was almost entirely political, though later series introduced different sketch genres. Regular features included stand-up impressionism by Bremner, interviews between Bird and Fortune (alternating interviewer and interviewee roles) where the interviewee—usually a man in government or business named George Parr—exposed idiocies in his area of expertise, heavily researched three-handed historical narratives, dinner party sketches with Bird, Fortune, Pauline McLynn and Frances Barber, and other small sketches. Each episode ended with a usually political musical number.