About 10 years ago comedians would loudly complain on chat shows about the lack of "characters" in British politics who are ripe for satire.Whilst the amount of "characters" have come back with a vengeance over the last few years,comedians have struggled to find a footing in the increasingly crazy world of politics.Finding Anthony Atamanuik fully-embodied impression of Donald Trump to be "big league", (with Atamanuik even including Trump's most subtle hand movements into his performance.) I decided to see Kevin Bishop take on the biggest British political figure of 2016.The plot:After being one of the main campaigners for the UK to vote for Brexit, UKIP leader Nigel Farage announces that he is stepping down from the party,in order to get his life back. Followed by a documentary crew,Farage celebrates the vote by spending time drinking gallons of booze in his country pub.As he tries to live a "normal" life,Farage starts to feel the cold of the political wilderness.View on the film:Re-enacting Farage's 89th resignation speech, Kevin Bishop's wears the UKIP wax jacket with Nigel's trademark gurning. Although his voice is a pitch too high,Bishop fills his impression with the smoked UKIPpers of Farage's most attention-grabbing body language,from the stomp that Nigel walks down the road with,to Bishop brilliantly tapping the small head-butts Farage uses to emphasis key points in speeches.Rushing to change the ending after a punch-up during the leadership election pushed UKIP even deeper (is that possible?) into farce,the screenplay by Alan Connor & Shaun Pye takes the moc-doc route to oddly skip over the most, bombastic side of Farage,to instead paint him as a looser in the wilderness,who has had no effect on UK politics. Airing a week and a half before the US election,the screenplay by Connor and Pye dies the moment it leaps out of the ocean,due to the lack of focusing on Farage's personality leading to running gags such as Nigel's tall tale that Donald Trump will win (oh my sides!) and vicious, swearing outbursts which run completely against the dim, unaware "loser" that Bishop creates,which leads to this being a real knock-off Nigel.

Writing good satire is hard. You have to elevate it above the obvious and the mundane. This fails rather spectacularly to do this. The jokes were very obvious (and repetitive) and it looked like a university rag week project that was well funded. Years ago - Malcolm Bradbury wrote 'The Gravy Train' about life from the perspective of several Brussels bureaucrats - with statuesque performances from Ian Richardson, Judy Parfitt, Alexei Sayle and others. That's how you do it peeps - not with 3rd rate stuff like this. OK - apparently my review is not long enough - 10 lines is the minimum… How perverse - normally these days - everything has to fit into a soundbite or 140 characters! Why on earth do people set these silly rules? Maximum 1000 words - minimum 10 lines. Perhaps if writers are under these conditions at the BBC - it might explain why their end- product is so questionable?

Maybe we should have had Kevin Bishop as Nigel Farage singing pro Nazi songs which the real Farage apparently used to do in his school days. After all this scourge of Europe loves things Germanic, even his wife hails from there.This mockumentary traces Farage's life away from front line politics which mainly consisted of going down to the pub drinking and smoking, something he did in his political days. He never seemed to have attended the European Parliament too much, a position that he was elected to hold. Maybe there is not a good bar in Strasbourg.Here we see Nigel having banter with his pub landlord, drinking beer with patriotic or heritage names, watching 1970s comedies with bad stereotypes, doing the crossword, rejecting reality television offers unless they put an extra zero at the end, making jokes that only he laughs at and swearing at the Biased Broadcasting Corporation.We do not see his wife but we do see his embarrassed look when his supporters tell him that they understand what he really meant when he said 'we want our country back' (the Nazi singing, anti foreigner stuff has always been inside him.)The trouble is despite Bishop's efforts playing Farage it really was not that funny. Farage is a character you can let rip with satire, maybe this was meant to be bittersweet. I got bored by the end.