The creators of The New Statesman on how B’Stard was a Tory ‘hero’ and why they’re bringing back the show for the satire-starved post-truth era

Satire can sometimes end up strengthening the people it’s supposed to be smashing. Sarah Palin only took on her full iconic form under Tina Fey’s truthy parody. Tory MP Norman Tebbit drew glamour from his truncheon-wielding bovver-boy Spitting Image caricature. Harry Enfield’s Loadsamoney quickly became a Sun-endorsed fanfare for the common man rather than a biting grotesque. To which list you could easily add Rik Mayall as Sir Alan Beresford B’Stard MP.

From 1987 to 1992, ITV’s unhinged sitcom The New Statesman centred on the scheming of B’Stard, a Conservative MP who revelled in every “greed is good” and “Tory sleaze” cliche of the time. The tale of a shameless, shagaholic money-grubber, the show began with B’Stard nobbling his rivals for the Yorkshire seat of Haltemprice, and his depravity only descended from there. He once stored a consignment of nuclear waste under a school.

Only, not everyone thought the show was a bad thing. Conservative MP Edwina Currie recalled how after B’Stard the Tory backbenchers got brasher. “I think one or two of them started playing up,” Currie said at the time. “[The MPs] thought: if that’s a success, maybe that’s how I should be. Certainly, the suits got a little bit slicker, the hair got a bit longer, the smiles got a little bit wider.”

“He did become – yes – a bit of a hero in his time,” admits The New Statesman’s co-writer Maurice Gran today, sitting opposite me in a charmless meeting room at the offices of indie TV giant Fremantle Media. “I remember when [co-creator] Laurence [Marks] and I went to a Tory party conference to sell B’Stard books and people came up to us and said: ‘What a pity he isn’t real.’ It was unfortunate.”

I went to a Tory party conference and people came up to us and said: 'What a pity he isn't real.' Maurice Gran

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Rik Mayall and Marsha Fitzalan launch the stage adaptation of The New Statesman in 2006. Photograph: Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images

The pair are plotting to create a new version of the show, doing for the Steve Bannon age of rightwing populism what they once did for Thatcherite headbangers in the 80s. And although Mayall died in 2014, Marks and Gran are addressing this minor hurdle by turning The New Statesman into a dynastic saga, titled The B’Stard Legacy. At the end of March, the pair sent a letter to the press outlining their plan. “Sir Alan B’Stard, as we’re sure you remember, met his untimely end in 2014, in a skydiving orgy disaster that the world’s media were bribed not to report,” it read. “[Alan] was a frequent and enthusiastic sperm donor from the age of 12, when we were contacted by the man claiming to be his rightful heir.” Enter Arron B’Stard.

In the new show, he gets adopted by two Green Party activists in Welwyn Garden City and has apparently been behind some of the most disruptive properties of the new media age: Wakileaks, HowlerMonkey, Flashermac. Like his biological dad, wherever there’s a crisis there he is, beavering away in the background. That’s as far as they’ve got. “We’re organising all the elements before we take it to the channels,” Gran explains. “Nowadays, when you go to a commissioner, they don’t want to even look at it unless you’ve got all the bits nailed down.” In other words, they don’t really want to do their jobs any more? “Well you might say that but I couldn’t possibly comment,” he deadpans.

The TV landscape has completely altered since Mayall first dangled his unfortunate sidekick Piers Fletcher-Dervish MP out of a window in the House Of Commons. Tellingly, The New Statesman used to sit in a plum 10pm ITV Sunday night slot that rotated between it and Spitting Image. Times have changed, but from a satirist’s perspective they have mainly changed for the worse.

“People are very touchy nowadays,” says Gran. Although it wasn’t always that way. “We were hideously rude about [Conservative MP] David Mellor. Then, on a TV show, someone said to him: ‘They’re really horrible about you, aren’t they?’ And he said: ‘Well, that’s their right.’ They had power. They didn’t care. We were just pin pricks. Though we pricked as hard as we could. So although there’s a lot about that era I abhor, I’m also nostalgic for it.”

There’s this deluge of daily insanity, and the feeling that the best satire of it is just politics itself Maurice Gran

Facebook Twitter Pinterest New Statesman creators Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran. Photograph: FremantleMedia Ltd

Both believe that there is a lack of satirical programmes on television at the moment. “There is nothing on TV about what’s really going on,” Marks says. “To a certain extent there’s Screenwipe and Black Mirror, but there’s nothing attracting large-ish audiences, not just cult audiences.” Is there anything they’re excited by in the current landscape? “In satire terms, I thought The Thick Of It was good but that finished four years ago,” says Gran. “At the Cheltenham literary festival last year someone asked [Thick Of It creator Armando] Iannucci if he was still doing political satire, and he said: ‘Well, I don’t know how to at the moment.’ There’s this deluge of daily insanity, and the feeling that the best satire of it is just politics itself.”

In the 80s, the duo recall there was never any attempt to be non-partisan in what they were trying to do with B’Stard. Both writers are old-school lefties, Marks is still a card-carrying Labour member who voted for Jeremy Corbyn twice, he says. “Mainly because I couldn’t see there was anyone else to vote for … Look, I don’t think [Corbyn] will win the election.” I ask how he would write a scene in Parliament now. “You’d have a scene where a government minister would make a speech of staggering incompetence, full of holes and then the leader of the opposition would stand up,” he says, “and ask if the Speaker could open a window, and then sit down again.” Crucially they realised that the next B’Stard wouldn’t be based in Parliament. He’d be online and rabble-rousing. “I was thinking: ‘What’s weird and different about the early 21st-century world?’” Gran says. “It’s the spread of fake news, duplicitous websites.”

As well as these contemporary touches, they also hit upon setting The B’Stard Legacy in the near-future, 2019, to make the show less dependent on the sorts of last-minute rewrites that emerge as the news agenda shifts. “We were thinking of having a Sky News ticker tape at the bottom of the page,” Gran suggests. “It can say: ‘Brexit Day Minus Five: talks continue about the shape of the table. Boat people sent back to England.’” Marks says: “The solution is to highlight how ridiculous it is. When the mains sewer bursts and you’re ankle deep in shit, you’ve got to get on a chair and sing out.”

The new B’Stard is also a man who, in his name and personality, seems to bear a – purely coincidental, surely – relation to Arron Banks, the insurance millionaire who became Ukip’s main backer, then fell out with them, and is now trying to float his own political party. “Arron Banks?” asks Marks. “The well-known rhyming slang?” Gran affirms: “Names can’t be copyright.” He reckons it’s more of a tribute. “I like the name Arron. It’s a cross between the Bible and not being able to spell your own name … I tell you what,” he concludes spontaneously, “he can be in the show. He can have half the show for twice the money. That’s fine: it’s win-win then, isn’t it?”

It would certainly make casting that much easier. Replacing Mayall in a role that was written specifically for him is the first impossible task on the duo’s list. “When Rik died – which was ghastly – we thought the idea died with him,” says Gran. “But we’re also going to write this show around the personality of whoever we cast.”

Then again, perhaps B’Stard can be anyone because B’Stard is everyone, a changeling, eternally reincarnated. He’s the big sac of pus collecting at the edge of every age’s great social transformation, a stubborn unchanging fact about human psychology. “I feel like post-truth has always been with us,” Gran considers. “But I don’t think post-truth has ever been promulgated with such contempt for its subjects. I can imagine Joseph Goebbels wincing at what comes out of Breitbart: ‘Oh God, that’s a bit unsubtle.’”

B’Stard’s best bits

Facebook Twitter Pinterest B’Stard dines at Mussolini’s.

Mussolini’s Stephen Fry channels all his deep pomposity into financial journalist Piers Lonsdale, offering insider-dealing tips to B’Stard. Fry and Mayall vie to be the most awful but the background is just as impressive: they meet in a fascist-themed restaurant called Mussolini’s, where the walls are covered with big portraits of Il Duce and the waiters give Nazi salutes. They spit a thousand-quid bottle of wine over the hapless waiter (Hugh Laurie), get him fired and then chortle off to abuse a one-legged Falklands veteran begging outside.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest B’stard goes to the (privately contracted) gallows.

Who Shot Alan B’Stard? Exhausted, Gran and Marks tried to end the series by offing B’Stard in an assassination attempt, complete with gruesome blood splatters. But panicked execs at Yorkshire Television soon demanded they un-kill him. So began an arc in which B’Stard recovers in hospital in time to cast the deciding Commons vote to bring back capital punishment and then gains the contract to build the new gallows. B’Stard is charged with the murder of a TV presenter and hung on his own gallows. But as his contractor has only used balsa wood, it collapses.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest B’Stard tortures Piers’s teddy. Photograph: YouTube

The teddy Reservoir Dogs’ ear-slice two years early, the scene in which B’Stard tortures the teddy bear of long-suffering colleague Piers Fletcher-Dervish (Michael Troughton) generated a record number of complaints. He impales it on a spike and then snips off its ears with scissors. It’s initially camp and daft, but by the time Mayall is dousing it with lighter fluid, B’Stard’s demented sense that the stuffed animal knows something he doesn’t begins to chill the marrow.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Blair B’Stard Project, 2006. Photograph: Tomos Brangwyn/WireImage

The Blair B’Stard Project It seemed obvious that once B’Stard had squeezed all the juice out of being a Tory, he would see the writing on the wall and become New Labour. As B’Stard explains in the course of his West End debut, Episode 2006: The Blair B’Stard Project, he merely found a vaguely handsome out-of-work actor called Tony Blair and coached him in the dark arts. In real life, Mayall’s head injury after an accident in 1998 had made it difficult for him to learn his lines. He would often blank, resulting in sharp improv to disguise his visits backstage for a cue: “I’m just nipping off for a piss.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest B’Stard throws his weight behind the real-life N0toAV campaign.

No2AV B’Stard made his final TV appearance in 2011, campaigning against the Alternative Vote system for NOtoAV. “The really great thing about a fudged coalition is that neither of us need to carry out a single promise of our election manifesto,” he barked.