John Bird, satirist and actor who with John Fortune became best known for excoriating the New Labour government of Tony Blair – obituary
John Fortune #JohnFortune
John Bird, the satirist, who has died aged 86, became known to television audiences in the mid-1960s through Not So Much a Programme, More a Way of Life, but came into his own in the era of Tony Blair as part of a double act with John Fortune on the satire series Bremner, Bird and Fortune.
In Not So Much a Programme, a sequel to That Was the Week That Was, Bird was notable for his impersonations of Harold Wilson and the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin. But in his satires on New Labour he left the mimicry to Rory Bremner, concentrating instead on brilliant lampoons which captured the intellectual vacuity behind the New Labour “Big Tent” and all its moralising claims of integrity.
The Bird/Fortune targets were rarely individual members of government, but rather what they saw as the self-deceiving New Labour political culture. Their main satirical device consisted of a head-to head dialogue between a top adviser – generally a civil servant or captain of industry – and a credulous interviewer whose questions were so guileless and literal-minded that the interviewee would wade unguarded into the idiocies of his own rhetoric.
Bird and Fortune took their inspiration from Jonathan Swift and other 18th-century satirists. When putting together their sketches, they would ask themselves what the “Modest Proposal” was to be, Swift’s famously being that hunger and over-population in Ireland could be solved at a stroke through the eating of babies.
In one sketch for example, Bird, the interviewer, is puzzled by Fortune’s, the politician’s, enthusiasm for secure units for young offenders. Surely, he asks, there have already been 19 suicides. “Well, that’s a start isn’t it?” Fortune replies. “It’s also proof that this type of hostel regime really works. That these young people have decided: all right, now I’m going to vote with my pyjama cord.”
Another stock sketch in the show was the ghastly north London dinner party, a satirical portrait of “the way we live now” featuring smug, ageing trendies whose obsession with school fees and house prices has been sanctified and given a politically correct vocabulary by New Labour’s love affair with Middle England.
A small, pale, rather plump figure, Bird was not a natural mimic, yet he captured the essence of New Labour to a tee – the empty soundbites, the dodgy piety, the shamelessness – because of his grasp of ideas and the remorselessness of his logic. Indeed, so successful were the interview sketches that Bird and Fortune won The Oldie’s Opposition of the Year award for 2003 as the judges felt they had provided the only effective opposition to the Blair Government. People would stop them in the street to ask them to keep up the good work. The interview series was spun off by Channel 4 into a series on its own, The Long Johns.
In fact, the satire was all the more effective because of where it was coming from. Bird was a lifelong Socialist, and behind the slightly bemused screen persona it was always possible to spot an almost savage sense of moral outrage.
John Bird was born on November 22 1936 in Nottingham, where his father ran a small chemist’s shop. Although he failed his 11-plus, his secondary-modern headmaster managed to get him transferred, aged 12, to High Pavement Grammar School. In 1956 he passed the entrance exam into King’s College, Cambridge, where he read English and stayed on to do a postgraduate thesis on “European Drama 1888-1914”.
At Cambridge he got to know David Frost, Eleanor Bron and Peter Cook, with whom he worked as co-writer (and director) of a Footlights Revue. They caused a sensation by replacing the customary undergraduate jokes about bedders and punting with a show in which each sketch ended with somebody dying. It was the first Footlights revue to be booed on its opening night.
His ambition was to be a serious theatre director and he directed a series of productions at the Cambridge Arts Theatre including Sheridan’s School for Scandal, which he set in 1890s Louisiana. His final Cambridge production was NF Simpson’s comedy, A Resounding Tinkle, which George Devine at the Royal Court Theatre had said was impossible to stage, and to prove it despatched the theatre’s director Bill Gaskill to see Bird’s effort. Bird was immediately offered a job as assistant director at the Royal Court, and by the age of 22 he was directing Lotte Lenya in Bertolt Brecht.
But he found that theatre directing was too much like hard work, and when he got a call from Peter Cook a year later asking him to help out at the Establishment Club, Cook’s new satire venue in Soho, he jumped at the chance.
Cook invited Bird and Fortune, both of whom he had known at Cambridge, to help to write the material for actors to perform. The two Johns had never worked together, although they had got to know each other at Cambridge after Fortune attended a seminar Bird was giving on stage lighting in Ibsen.
The problem was finding the right actors. After two fruitless afternoons auditioning unsuitable candidates (including, rather surprisingly, Barry Humphries), Cook asked them to stand in for a few months until someone better turned up. Their first sketch, performed on the club’s opening night in 1961, involved Fortune as Christ on the cross and Bird as one of the robbers who wanted to know why Christ was “’igher” than “’e” was.
It was also at the Establishment Club that they performed the first of the improvised dialogues for which they became celebrated. Their performance attracted enthusiastic reviews from, among others, Kenneth Tynan. From then on, there was never any question of replacing them.
As the satire boom moved to television, Ned Sherrin offered Bird the chance to front That Was the Week That Was. He did a pilot, but suggested his friend David Frost might be a more suitable candidate, and decamped to America for a two-week stint with the Establishment Club. He stayed for two years.
He made his belated debut on television in 1964 after Sherrin invited him back to do sketches on Not So Much a Programme, More a Way of Life. His range of impersonations won him a Bafta in 1966 as Light Entertainment Personality of the Year and he developed many of the techniques that would make him so formidable a satirist in the Blair era.
His impression of the late Iain McLeod in a Party Political Broadcast led to suggestions that McLeod should be withdrawn from the television screens forthwith before Bird’s impersonation did the Conservative Party irreparable damage. It was not that he looked or sounded like McLeod, but it was his mastery of the politician’s studied mannerisms – the half-smile, the puzzled frown, the honest gaze direct to the camera, the earnest appeal – that made him dangerous.
But by the time Bird became part of it, the 1960s television satire boom was on the wane. Not So Much a Programme ended in 1966. Bird’s own show, A Series of Bird, was cancelled in 1967 after one series as was another, With Bird Will Travel, the following year.
The next few years were difficult for Bird, professionally and personally. In 1965 he had married an actress, Ann Stockdale, daughter of the American ambassador to Ireland, but the marriage did not last. A second marriage, to Bridget Simpson, a television researcher, also failed. Unhappy in his private life and making little progress in his career, he began drinking heavily and taking amphetamines. By the mid-1970s he was seriously ill, paranoid, and contemplating suicide.
He was rescued from despair by Libby Crandon, a pianist and teacher with whom he lived from 1978 and subsequently married. His career took longer to recover, though he continued to take bit parts in films and television series.
He did nothing satirical until 1991, when Rory Bremner, who wanted to introduce a more political edge to his impersonations, asked first Bird and, a year later, Fortune, to write for his show Rory Bremner, Who Else?, which he later renamed Bremner, Bird and Fortune. Together, they brilliantly lampooned the combination of arrogance and incompetence that characterised the dying days of the Major administration with the creation of George Parr, the all-purpose establishment figure, forever defending the indefensible.
They did not have far to look for real-life examples. Researching the Eurofighter, for example, they discovered that the Spanish made one wing and measured it in centimetres while the British made the other wing and measured it in inches. This guaranteed the near impossibility of fitting them together.
But an administration which seemed to have lost the will to live and no longer believed in itself was too soft a target, and it was only with the election of Tony Blair in 1997 that Bremner, Bird and Fortune really reached their satirical peak.
To begin with Bird was ecstatic about the Labour victory, which he and Fortune celebrated with a sketch about Tory ministers milling about a job centre looking at positions at £3.50 an hour. It did not take long for disillusionment to set in, though for a time they found it difficult to identify what it was that they should be grappling with.
In the end it was the supremacy of style over substance and the grandiose moralising that became the target. In addition to performing their own pieces, they worked in sketches in which Bremner, in the guise of a politician, would be grilled by the pair as interviewers. It was Bird who conceived the hidden camera sketches in which Blair (Bremner) and his boorish and Machiavellian spin doctor Alastair Campbell (Andrew Dunn) talk alone and privately in Downing Street, unaware that they are being filmed.
The series won the trio a clutch of awards from, among others, Bafta, the Variety Club and the British Comedy Awards, along with an Olivier nomination for their stage show, which ran at the Albery Theatre in 2002. They were also involved in two television specials, Between Iraq and a Hard Place and Beyond Iraq and a Hard Place.
Success brought Bird a series of leading roles on television sitcoms. He was the bombastic barrister John Fuller-Carp in Chambers (2000) and the deceptively Machiavellian public relations guru Martin McCabe (with Stephen Fry) in Absolute Power (2003). His other television credits include Andrew Davies’s A Very Peculiar Practice, an episode of Inspector Morse, two series of the ITV crime series El C.I.D, Dennis Potter’s Blue Remembered Hills, and the political satirical dramas In the Red, Giving Tongue and To Play the King. His film credits included Jabberwocky, Dick Turpin and Yellow Pages. His final appearance was in an episode of Midsomer Murders in 2017.
John Bird is survived by his wife Libby and by two stepsons.
John Bird, born November 22 1936, died December 24 2022
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