This programme contains some strong language and adult humour
APPLAUSE
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
Hello and welcome to Have I Got 30 Years For You.
Well, Paul, 30 years.
That's a remarkable achievement for any TV show.
Absolutely, and I think
it's really seeped into the public consciousness.
I was watching an episode
of Richard Osman's House Of Games the other day.
And one of the contestants was asked, "Which popular TV quiz show
"started in 1990 and features as team captains Ian Hislop
"and Paul Merton, and give the name of the programme in reverse order?"
And without a moment's hesitation,
the contestant said, "Stars Shooting".
LAUGHTER
If you think that's tragic, I was watching The Chase...
That is tragic. Yeah!
And the question was, "Which Ian has been editor
"of a satirical magazine for over 30 years - Ian who?"
And the contestant said again, just like that,
"Ian Himmler".
And is that the right answer? It is, yeah!
COMICAL MUSIC
That is Jeffrey Archer, in fact.
He's talking about railways, about which he knows a great deal,
having handed over £2,000 in notes
to a prostitute on a railway station.
BOTH: Allegedly!
I was very aware of it. I mean, everybody was.
It was a kind of radical...
..landscape-changing thing.
Paul and Gill, what have you come up with for this?
"Take that, you old bag!"
I am genuinely interested in politics and news
and current affairs, so...
And I obviously like a laugh,
so it's always been one of my favourite shows.
Some irresponsible vandal has had the audacity
to paint a Hitler moustache on the portrait of Mrs Thatcher.
Must be the first time she's been touched up since Cecil left.
I just thought it was so great to have a panel show like that
that was about something
a) I was really interested in, but b), that wasn't just knob jokes.
There is a connection with arms deals,
and I'd better be slightly careful here.
Maxwell was a crook and an arms dealer
and he's dead and he can't sue.
At that moment in time, I would have found it inconceivable
that any comedy show, particularly a panel show, would run for 30 years.
I'm sitting here with a tub of lard,
trying to answer questions in German!
Nobody lets you stay on TV for 30 years just out of charity.
You've got to be good.
So that's what we call back home "sustained excellence".
And the winner is Have I Got News For You.
It could not have existed at all. The pilot was terrible, apparently.
You can't really imagine that when you see it now.
The News Quiz had been running 13 years
when somebody had the idea
for doing a thing a bit like it on television.
Good evening and welcome to Newsround. In the news this week...
I knew John Lloyd
because I'd worked as a writer on Spitting Image
and I knew he was absolutely brilliant, you know,
one of the great producers.
And I thought, you know, "This'll probably be good".
And now a round to test our contestants' in-depth knowledge
of the House of Commons, as we ask them to name that member.
For you, Paul and Simon...
Sometimes something can start off quite out of focus,
which is what it was.
It was a bit blurry,
nobody really knowing what they were meant to be doing.
The format didn't embrace the idea
we were going to do a TV show, it was all very verbal.
Three members of the House who happily share a name
with three world-famous generals.
It's Bernard Rommel, I know that.
LAUGHTER
I'd never read an autocue before.
The thing that was really difficult was that these spontaneous jokes
were actually coming at you on a string,
and I wasn't a good enough actor.
Well, it's Richard Alexander, I have to give, um...
Richard Alexander, I don't know, where's he from?
Newark, that's right.
My late mother, who came to see it,
I sort of bounded up afterwards to see what she thought
and she said, "Never mind, dear."
Goodnight.
I said to Jimmy Mulville afterwards,
"I don't think this is me, get somebody else."
I think if you trust the people making the show
and you feel there's potential for it
and the pilot goes wrong,
I like to think... I have this phrase,
"Failing to succeed".
If you're going to succeed, you need to know about failure.
They then had to hold a couple of auditions
and get people to come in and do a sort of dry run of it, I suppose.
We auditioned Angus, we auditioned Sandi Toksvig.
We even auditioned Chris Evans before he became Chris Evans.
When they suggested
this pretty obscure radio guy and voice-over guy called Angus Deayton,
they'd go, "Who?"
So, put your feet up, take the phone off the hook and...
..put your feet up.
At the time, Angus was best known
for playing presenters on sketch shows.
I mean, he was really good at acting the presenter of a show.
Good evening and welcome to Have I Got News For You.
As Iraq runs short of medical supplies,
patients waiting for pacemakers are forced to improvise.
When Angus stepped into that chair, the first time I saw him, I thought,
"He's much better than me. He's so good."
It's Bill Clinton's stated plan to send a peace envoy to Belfast.
Clinton said that Americans want to put an end to violence in Ulster.
Well, they could stop paying for it, for a start.
He could have been on the board of an advertising company.
He was suave, he was cool
and he read the autocue like it was coming out of his head.
He was perfect.
So it's goodbye from me,
and it looks like it could be goodbye from her.
Poppycock.
Angus was a very strong part
of the trio that was making the show every week.
And he was a perfect foil, particularly for Paul.
And every now and again, he and Paul would have an off-script engagement.
Leslie Nielsen... Nice suit.
LAUGHTER
I always think brown is tremendously underrated.
It was constructed as a sitcom, that was the genius,
where Angus Deayton was the father figure, the authority figure,
and Ian was the good son who'd done his homework and knew everything,
and Paul was the wayward son
who'd been smoking round the back of the bike sheds.
I'm just going to blow my nose to get make sure this gets edited out.
I'll just carry on saying it, then.
Brown suit, brown suit.
LAUGHTER
Right, where were we? We were talking about your brown suit.
But they would both kick against his authority in the middle.
Tony Blair and Gordon Brown have already been dubbed,
within the Labour Party, "the beautiful people",
but then given their main rivals are Margaret Beckett and Robin Cook,
it's not that surprising.
They're not auditioning for Baywatch, Angus.
It's their job to lead the Labour Party.
Well, they're the ones who were dubbed "the beautiful people".
Sorry, I can't do anything about it.
No, you carry on with your lookist rubbish.
Go on, say Robin Cook looks like a garden gnome,
I bet that's coming up.
Robin Cook, of course, looks like a garden gnome.
It was to do with, somehow,
education, class, where you come from, also competition.
They were competing with each other.
There was a story about a man called Paul Merson
taking a huge amount of cocaine and appearing drugged in public,
which, understandably, a lot of people thought
was TV's own Paul Merton.
It always had an edge, the relationship.
There was a thing going around that it was me for a while.
My wife got phoned up last week in the middle of the night...
I'm sorry, I am so sorry.
Did he ring her?
No, don't apologise, it wasn't a problem.
I think originally, Paul thought, and he probably still does think,
that I was just another classic Oxbridge stuffed shirt twit
who hadn't done his time in comedy and didn't really know anything.
"Oh, how poash.
"More tea, vicar?"
That's a lovely impression you have... That's you.
"I went to Oxford, don't you know?
"We walked through the quadrangle with our mortarboards on."
I thought it was important for me and Ian
to have a rivalry as team captains.
So I said to Ian very early on,
I suggested that we should play the quiz element seriously,
which he was... He didn't need any persuasion on that.
That's how he saw it,
and he does indeed still play the quiz element very seriously,
which is a shame
because he very rarely wins.
Do him tonight. Turn the bastard over. I mean, what's he got?
Nothing! Metalwork O-Level?
And what have you got? A grounding in the classics.
Greek, Latin, ancient history!
The dynamic between Angus and the other two was kind of odder,
but of course it gave a flavour to the show.
And so to our Odd One Out Round
in which a monkey with a pin has a one in four chance
of getting it right, so let's see how he does. Paul...
LAUGHTER
I think if you've got a bit of acid in the mix
and you can keep it under control so that nobody gets cross or sulks
or shows it on camera, you've got a very good mix.
It's always a good idea to analyse what you're doing.
Well, if you're a brain surgeon, it is.
Don't analyse what you're doing, for God's sake.No.
It'll come down as reading out loud.
What was clear with Have I Got News For You early on
was that it was incredibly well produced.
The initial producer was a guy called Harry Thompson.
He was, in a sense, in a classic mould
that would go back to the '60s satire boom,
you know, That Was The Week That Was,
"We're going to say what we shouldn't say,
"we don't mind whose feathers we ruffle."
And with Paul Merton this week,
we were hoping to be joined by the right honourable Roy Hattersley
but sadly, and for the third time in our brief history,
he's pulled out at the last minute
due to having something better to do.
So as his replacement, liable to give much the same performance
and imbued with many of the same qualities,
we're delighted to welcome a tub of lard.
Right from the early days when Harry Thompson was the producer
and put the tub of lard on,
there is an element of just, "Let's do this and see what happens.
"Let's just shake this up, let's have a go at this."
In his MacTaggart Lecture this year, John Birt praised this programme...
..said the puffed-up little twat.
Most of the time, we talk about the risks you take in comedy.
This time, we were actually taking a bit of a risk with a man's life
because Salman Rushdie had written The Satanic Verses
and there was a fatwa out on him
which seemed to give licence to anyone to kill him
if they wanted to.
I think this is Raymond Illingworth's bid
to ban God or at least God's chaplain from the dressing room.
I think there's not much to be said about that.
He should be sentenced to death. Mm.
Jimmy Mulville said that there was one show very early on
when I was sitting next to Robert Harris
when the missing word was, "I made Maggie blank," said Nigel.
"I made Thatcher what, boasts Nigel"?
Swallow.
LAUGHTER
APPLAUSE
Jimmy said that hit the note
that we should... not necessarily be that rude,
but that sort of irreverence
is something that we should probably pursue.
People say to me,
"How are you allowed to be that rude about the Government?"
And I explain to them, "This is the point of being in Britain.
"This is one of the freedoms we have."
The suicide pact will be enforced if the Tory rebels have their way,
although if John Major did try and blow his own brains out,
he'd have to be a bloody good shot.
That's not kind at all.No, no. It was quite funny, though, wasn't it?
I think that's maybe one of the reasons why it's endured so long.
It doesn't feel didactic, actually,
which a lot of political comedy just feels like,
"I'm going to take you from this position of ignorance
"to the correct position,"
whereas they seem neither merely political nor just silly.
On which note, I leave you with news that at a crowded London party,
someone shouts, "Oi, dickhead!" across the room.
I've said to politicians in the past...
They've said, "I thought I'd have a go at Ian".
Don't have a go at Ian, honestly,
because he'll come back at you and he'll make you look silly.
What is possible at the Ritz? Anything. Dinners.
Dinners, no.
The grammar's not good there, "Dinners is possible".
Grammar's not the strong point of Private Eye.
He edits a magazine, you can't expect him to know these things.
I know, he's made me a cover girl. What did we say?
Oh, that was it, you were saying,
"What would it take to make you resign?"
and he said, "About 10 grand in a brown envelope."
Grammar all right there for you? I think so!
Ian's forensic and quite moral analysis of events
always feels worth listening to.
They found you guilty, didn't they, Conrad, the jury?
Er... nine acquittals,
complimented by unanimous vacation of the four guilty verdicts
by the of the Supreme Court of the US... But two stuck, didn't they,
one for fraud and one for obstruction of justice.
No, no, no, Ian, please...
"Oh, stop reciting the verdict as though it was true!"
It's great that there are people like Ian
who still have what looks like and very much seems to be integrity.
And I have come here...
You've come here to say you're innocent,
which is sweet, but not true.
LAUGHTER
The audience wants Ian to tell us,
who are the heroes and villains here,
what do we need to know?
And for Paul to make it all OK by finding a joke or moving it on.
It's all about chads, isn't it,
which is the mark that those punching machines makes.
And the argument at the moment is over dimpled chads.
If there's a good, honest American hole in it, it's a Republican vote.
Yeah!
But if there's a dimple, it's a sort of liberally Democrat...
There's a sitcom in that.
At Home With The Chads.
The hanging chad is like the public hangman.
The swinging chad is the groovy teenager.
The tri-chad is in a Chinese gang
and the pregnant one is obviously the one who's pregnant.
I'll write it now, actually.
Merton has no perceivable run-up,
which is very rare in a performer.
Most of the time when someone's improvising,
you see them scrabble around and you see a sense of cogs whirring
and them trying to reach for the right word
or to bend the situation to something that will work comically,
whereas his...
..attack on it seems immediate.
It was really horrid.
A 12-year-old boy was chased 200 yards all the way home.
He ran in, slammed the door in the badger's face...
And the badger shot through the cat flap.
The badger held him hostage, got hold of the potato peeler.
The mum came home, the badger overpowered her,
took over her identity and her credit cards...
She was locked down in the cellar.
When the husband came home a little bit pissed, he walks in,
sees a figure in the bed wearing a negligee, thinks to himself...
.."Is it Friday night already?"
And before you know where he is...
..he puts the light on and goes, "Oh, my God, I've fucked a badger."
APPLAUSE
The team didn't view it as a big show.
They viewed it as a niche show on BBC Two,
and I viewed it as having the potential
to be a mainstream show on BBC One.
Welcome to a brand-new series of Have I Got News For You,
now on BBC One for the first time,
although we'd like to reassure our regular BBC Two viewers
that the move to mainstream television
will in no way affect the show's content.
SNAZZY SHOWBIZ MUSIC PLAYS
LAUGHTER
Because BBC two was really where edgy comedy had always been
and BBC One was mainstream, and you thought,
"What are we doing on BBC One?"
Ian and Paul were worried, and Angus,
because they thought they'd have to tone down the comedy.
And I was like, "No, I want the show exactly the same as it is."
It's the war on terror in Afghanistan,
where America's precision bombing of military targets
has intensified with the use of missiles so accurate
that they can hit the exact centre of a big Red Cross.
After the first show, the audience was so good
I think everybody's fears were allayed.
It was a hit from the start.
It's Thursday, it's 7 o'clock, it's BBC One
and that can mean only one thing.
Yes, we're just half an hour away from EastEnders.
Angus became incredibly famous.
He was Mr Sex, and so in the green room,
there'd be half the Manchester United football team, and celebs.
When Angus became famous
and started doing adverts for Barclaycard and things like that,
they would take the mickey out of him mercilessly.
On which note...
AS ANGUS: On which note, we finish the Christmas edition
of Have I Got News For You but first, in Reading...
..police are worried that Oliver Reed's drinks cabinet
has flooded once again.
LAUGHTER
He was very robust. He knew what he was doing.
He wouldn't be thrown by me saying, "Are you still here?",
or whatever it was.
I don't think anyone really disliked each other.
I mean, I still, you know,
when there isn't a major pandemic sweeping the world,
go and have a Guinness with Paul afterwards,
because we always used to in the early days. And...
..I mean, I was very friendly with Angus.
Er...
And, um...
Obviously, not any more, sadly.
Of course, what happened in the end was tragic.
Do you think there's people here that come every week...
Yeah, I'm one of them.
And that fellow over there looks familiar.
I'm not sure who he is, but I think he's here every week and all.
There used to be another guy, I don't know what happened to him.
Usually when there's a bad story about to break,
you'd know that it was going to be in the daily paper the next day.
So I got a call the evening before,
saying that there was going to be a story about Angus in the papers.
So there we were, just sort of like looking at this
in absolute amazement, astonishment.
We decided that, you know,
what was happening was happening between consenting adults.
And this was an adult programme,
so we would let Angus continue in the role.
But I remember looking him and his agent in the eye and saying,
"Tell me whether there's anything else to come out,"
and they both said there wasn't.
I rang Angus and told him, "We're going to do the show this week
"and we will prepare the show and it will not involve this story.
"The script will not have this story in it."
I couldn't guarantee what Paul and Ian would say.
That's a man having his chips,
trying to join the Labour Party, probably. That's Ken.
I think this is a thing about party funding.
This has been one story of the week,
but the one I'm really interested in, Angus...
I mean, we'd been incredibly rude
about any other celebrity caught up in anything similar,
and we would have to do the same with him.
Now, you and this prostitute... Mm.
How did you manage to get off paying her?
Er, she didn't tell me that she was a prostitute. She didn't tell you?
The idea was, he's got to be given a hard time, get through that,
show him having a bit of a hard time.
Then we can come out the other side of this and we can then carry on.
I don't want to dwell on this, but...
"He made me groan all night."
What were you doing, reading the autocue?
You know, I ripped in fairly early on in round one,
but there was no way we could not do it.
Is that it, or do you want to...
Because obviously, there was another question...
Apparently, there's a world war breaking out in India.
So the ethics committee that you were talking about...
Angus wanted to focus on making the show,
even if there were photographers outside the building
waiting to snap him coming out.
He was aware it wasn't going to be comfortable.
I just don't think he was aware
of just how uncomfortable it was going to be.
Sorry. Thank goodness I took a line of coke before I came on.
KEN LIVINGSTONE: I felt so sorry for Angus
with all this eruption in his career.
So I wasn't going to be jumping in.
So if you look back at that,
I can't think of any other episode where I said so little.
You did describe yourself as a model of New Labour conformity.
Really?Mm. Oh, what was I on at the time?
Angus can sort you out. Yeah!
Shall I quit while I'm down?
I was amazed that Angus turned up.
And I thought he handled it really well.
I think it's very bad to have brought the newspapers on.
Imagine going to that kind of effort.
I was as guilty as Ian
of bringing on the front cover of the News Of The World.
To go to all that kind of effort is just unbelievable.
I think for the viewers, it turned out to be classic!
So how many journalists are here still?
I noticed the two people who left earlier.
The Daily Mail, the guy from the Mail was sitting here. He's left.
Oh, has he?Oh, no.
I was hoping to catch up.
Of course, we thought that that was it
and then six months later in October,
we discovered that there were more allegations coming out.
And this was when it becomes really difficult to do,
because you can't keep making the same jokes every week.
But then if I don't say something or Ian doesn't say something,
the guests will say something.
It was a very tidy sum,
a darn sight more than you get paid to be on this programme.
Well, they pay what people are worth.
There was a defining moment, for me anyway,
when Christine Hamilton got the best of Angus.
When he was rude about Neil Hamilton, her husband,
she rounded on him and gave him both barrels.
Peter Stringfellow, Piers Morgan, Stephen Fry
and disgraced former Tory MP Neil Hamilton.
Wait a moment, would you mind cutting out the word "disgraced"
when you refer to my husband in future?Certainly. I will...
I was so furious with him.
How dare you? How absolutely dare you, after everything you've done,
how dare YOU use that word about my husband?
If he's disgraced, what are you?
Exactly.
Disgraced, I think.
Though I haven't banged on about family values
for the last seven years.
LAUGHTER
The very small amount of moral high ground
that the show needed in order to operate had been taken away.
I mean, that week I rang the BBC and said,
"We can't make the show any more".
We tried to stand by him,
but once the show was damaged by what he had done, then he had to go.
I actually felt very bad about that afterwards,
and I wrote to Angus and I expressed my regret at what had happened.
He never responded to the letter. I don't know whether he ever got it.
But I wished him well and said,
"I'm sorry for any part that I have unwittingly played."
I thought they might sack the whole show,
which would have been understandable.
They said, "OK, what are you going to do?" I said, "I've got no idea".
"Well, think of something". And that week, I said to Paul Merton,
"You always said how easy it is on the show to host the show.
"You said a monkey could do it.
"Well, actually, it's your turn this week."
Good evening and welcome to Have I Got News For You.
We'd like to apologise
for the recording fault in last week's episode.
It should have ended like this.
Goodnight.
EASTENDERS END-OF-EPISODE DRUMS
Amongst some of the producers,
there was a feeling that this might be the end of the show.
One producer was really nervous about what it was going to be like
and was talking to me in make-up in such a nervous, anxiety-ridden way,
I said, "Look, can you just sit down somewhere and take a deep breath?
"It'll be fine."
Were there any other freak happenings in this storm?
Bearded ladies punching people?
Bearded ladies punching people, extra point.
That certainly happened.
It is a different show, isn't it?
That didn't happen under the old regime.
There were a few journalists amongst the audience in the studio audience,
ready to write down, "Have I Got News For You flops, end of series."
That was me. Yes, that's right.
This...
HE STUMBLES OVER NEXT WORD
LAUGHTER
Next! Are you new at this? I am, yes.
This is... The discovery of Saddam Hussein.
LAUGHTER
I have absolutely no desire to sit in the chair.
I don't think I'd do it very well.
No, I'm sure I wouldn't do it very well and... Oh, of course you would.
Sorry, I totally missed that cue. Your timing is so terrible.
I totally missed that cue, I really am sorry.
So until next week,
when someone else will be sitting in this chair -
my money's on Sooty - goodnight.
That's what I needed to do.
I needed to demonstrate that somebody else can host this show.
The following week, I rang up Anne Robinson, who I knew,
and she was the Queen of Mean at the time on The Weakest Link
and probably the most famous,
one of the most famous faces on British television,
and she jumped at it because she's a journalist.
Do you want me to recap on the scores at this point?
Do what you like, love.
We've got a lot of people to see, so if you can keep it coming.
For me, it was fantastic
because she'd been one of Robert Maxwell's great defenders,
and here was someone who was still banging on
about how this terrific crook
who'd made my life miserable by suing me every five minutes
was suddenly on the show.
It was great!
You used to get 250 grand from Robert Maxwell.Yes, indeed, I did.
Still, he's dead now, isn't he? He is indeed, thank goodness.
That's not what you said afterwards.
And I suddenly thought, "Oh, I see.
"There's another world that could open up
"with people bringing their own stuff."
Good evening. Good evening.
Good evening.
Welcome. Welcome to...
Have I Got News... Have I Got News...Have I Got News... For you.
I'm Stephen Mangan.
I'm Miranda Hart.
I'm Bill Bailey. I used to be Jon Pertwee.
We did entertain the idea of a permanent host.
In fact, we went down the road
of kind of auditioning people along those lines.
Good evening and welcome to Have I Got News For You.
I'm Alexander Armstrong
and if I seem a little uncomfortable tonight,
it's because I'm sitting on Matthew Parris' column.
We did some run-throughs in some basement studio somewhere in Soho,
not with Ian and Paul,
but with Jimmy Mulville, the head of Hat Trick.
And it was...
That was quite good fun, actually.
I did enjoy that, but nerve-racking.
And there's disturbing evidence of how a young Boris Johnson
got his big break in the Conservative Party.
AUDIENCE: Oh!
Goodnight.
There were quite a number of people being lined up,
and so therefore, it did become a little bit competitive.
The Australian man denied
that his life is ruled by his obsession with lager,
though he does have XXXX-wives and a Foster child.
Kirsty Young was terrific.
There was almost an element of someone quite strict
keeping the show on the road.
Finished? Yeah, we have. Thank you. Former editor...
No, we haven't.
Sorry, childish. Do carry on. Thank you. Former...
I'm going to start now.
Now the game's started, you see.
You do this every time I'm here. No, we don't.Yes, you do.
No, no. Please. It's our version of Name That Word.
LAUGHTER
In your own time.
The thing about having a guest host every week
is that I'm sure it's added to the longevity of the show
because of the five people on screen,
three of them weren't there the week before.
In conversations with the BBC, obviously they did their research
and they said, "We think the guest host thing is really working."
We're talking 16 million, aren't we?No! You read too many papers.
I do.No, it's nowhere near as much as that.
I have to pay 40% tax, everything. Oh, you're kidding.
There was this frisson,
"Who's going to be sitting in the chair this week?
"Are they going to be good, are they going to be funny?
"What particular aspect of their personalities
"are they going to bring?"
So let's find out how the teams line up.
Captain Ian Hislop plays on the right
if the Government's on the left
and on the left if the Government is on the right.
Captain Paul Merton,
like Jamie Vardy,
who started off in an amateur steelworkers team,
Paul kicked off his career
with a CSE in metalwork.
The logic would have been that guest hosts should be comedians,
this is a comedy show.
But what was striking was that you could put in as a guest host
somebody like William Hague, not a comedian at all,
a politician, and a front-line politician,
a very senior politician, and he'd be brilliant.
So...
BOOING
Yes, it's the latest development... Did you hear that booing then?
Did that not register in your brain, William, that booing?
You'll find it washes over him.
I've been in the Tory party long enough
to know how to ignore boos.
So you weren't very popular, then?
Why do you think that was?
Listen, just because I tell jokes,
doesn't mean you should have political opinions.
LAUGHTER
I do love it when they get these very famous actors as hosts.
They are invariably brilliant,
and there's always an extra bit of spark and spice
when they say something edgy.
Did anybody read anything about other cast members
in the phone-hacking scandal this week?
Rebekah Wade, the former editor
of the News Of The World and the Sun, is having a baby.
But it's through a surrogate, and she's asked for privacy.
That's correct, she's expecting a baby
via a surrogate mother, or as the Sun might have put it...
There's a real...
SHE GASPS
..factor, which this show still has after decades.
They know they're reading someone else's lines
if they're presenting, so that's absolutely fine.
And yet there's the idea that they have to kind of riff
or be interesting outside the framework,
and that, I think, terrifies them.
What have Ed Balls and Ed Miliband been hinting at?
Been hinting at?Yeah.
What have they been hinting at? Don't know.So posh!
You're wearing a suit. I can afford it.
That's cos you don't pay any tax.
BOOING
Oh! Aw!
You come in and you're excited. It's a great opportunity.
But then you're going to be alongside people
who actually do comedy for real.
This is the triumph of The Foxes, Leicester City.
They might get relegated next year. That'd be funny, wouldn't it?
What, of course, you don't know is what direction
you're going to be led in.
The Labour Party, they have houses which they put themselves in,
and the Lib Dems have houses which they put their children in,
and the Tories have houses which they put their ducks in.
And they start talking about something that is on
sort of the sixth little card of notes you've got in front of you,
and you're thinking, "Erm... Right... Oh, God, erm...
"Yes, and what did Council Leader So-and-So have to say about that?
"Yes, hm!"
And it seems to go too quick and the cards...
I'm getting muddled and my glasses are on and off,
and now I'm starting to have a nervous breakdown.
And then Paul's suddenly gone off on some fantastic sort of...
His synapses have just gone "Fyo-yon-yon-yong", like they do...
How would you advise having sex with Mike Tyson?
You go in understanding full well it may not go the way you planned.
..and you've got to try and bring it back.
What has Ann Widdecombe...
New subject! She had sex with Mike Tyson?!
And so this is basically the job.
What has Ann Widdecombe offered to do if it would help?
And it's not to do with Mike Tyson.
GARY: When you get that first laugh, the first laugh,
it's like, "Oh! That's all right."
And following the arrest of several senior officials,
Fifa bring in a new face to help eradicate the culture of greed.
LAUGHTER
Well, there was an amazing surprise, which, I guess, was Bruce Forsyth.
MUSIC: The Generation Game Theme
CHEERING
There we are. Thank you!
Oh! Thank you so much.
Whoa, thank you!
They can't all be wrong, can they?
Anyway, good evening. Yes, the papers weren't lying. It is me.
But don't worry - there'll be no gimmicks, no catchphrases.
So welcome to Have I Got News For You, for you have I got...
AUDIENCE: News!
He was actually quite nervous just before going on, just backstage.
He was a bit nervous, which surprised me, but he said,
"I don't know what they're going to be like, whether they're going to like me or not."
He said, "I don't know what this sort of audience is."
But that was really good to see cos it showed he was caring.
He really wanted this to work.
And as soon as he walked out through the glittery curtains
and the audience erupted...
It's definitely time for...
MUSIC: Play Your Cards Right Theme
It is that feeling of witnessing something.
I have to say, the Iraqi Play Your Cards Right -
about the rewards being offered on various Iraqi war criminals -
you just thought, "Well, that's utterly bonkers."
Now, these are the cards that the Americans... Please!
This is satire!
LAUGHTER
That's about as bad taste as anything
that has ever been on television, and it was Bruce Forsyth doing it.
Thank you, Bruce!
It's the king of clubs, RCC vice chairman Izzat Ibrahim.
Now, then, it's a high card...
LAUGHTER
..so...
Think about this. The audience will help you.
Do you think it's higher or lower?
ALL: Lower!
COMPETING AUDIENCE CHANTS
I'm not sure this programme can go much lower.
I remember watching that and thinking,
"This is fantastic television," cos it was like a planetary collision,
but hugely entertaining. And there was a lot of love in it as well.
Tony Blair insists that weapons of mass destruction
will eventually be found in Iraq.
Well, it would be nice to see them, to see them...
ALL: Nice!
The Bruce Forsyth show, I think, is Paul's favourite show.
And part of that is because he thinks I hated it
and had no idea what was going on.
I've been waiting 14 years for the show to be like this.
I'm having the time of my life!
It's undoubtedly partly because he was on Have I Got News For You
that we ended up casting him as the host of Strictly Come Dancing.
Bruce, it's a new first for television - invisible tap dancing.
LAUGHTER
I think one of the big things we can say about the show
is that it's one of the few comedy programmes,
if not the only comedy programme,
who has really delivered us a Prime Minister.
And with Paul Merton tonight is a Daily Telegraph journalist
who last year took a month off to spend some time on his own.
He stood as a Conservative candidate in Wales, Boris Johnson.
I remember ringing Ian to say, "Oh, we've got this journalist
"who seems pretty funny, Boris Johnson, doing it."
And Ian said, "Ah, the jackal!"
And you go, "What?"
And so Ian told us about this phone call that
Boris had been involved in, which I must admit I didn't know about.
The conversation was along the lines of "Da-rye-us",
or Darius - I never went to school with anybody called that -
a conversation about whether Boris could get a journalist beaten up
for some story that Mr Guppy didn't like.
We constructed an Odd One Out about taped phone conversations,
to give Ian the opportunity to just bring up the subject.
I'm surprised you gave me this one. Why?
Cos Boris was caught on tape as well. Ha-ha-ha! Richly comic, yes...
HE TRAILS OFF, LAUGHTER
Sorry, what was that? I said..."Good point."
He said, "Ha-ha-ha! Richly comic," which it jolly well was.
What were you recorded saying? Honestly, I don't remember. I do!
LAUGHTER
Boris was on tape talking to Darius Guppy... A very great man.
I don't want to be totally stitched up here.
What you want and what you don't want...
I'm way out of my depth here. I've been totally stitched up.
I want it on the record that I walked straight into
a massive elephant trap. I should've spotted it.
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
Boris was completely furious.
He was always cross. He always thought that
I in particular was out to get him, which, you know, is fair enough.
Now, now, now, now, now...
He's stuck. Give him a nudge, will you, Ian?
I have to say, very early on, from when we were trying to book
guest hosts, Boris was kind of the one I really wanted to do it.
Hello. Good evening and welcome to Have I Got News For You.
In the news this week, undiscovered footage
from William Hague's schooldays supports his claims
that he used to drink 14 pints a night.
I think the narrative that Have I Got News For You
made Boris is just a total misreading of what happened.
The joke about Boris was, "This man can't even run a panel show."
He literally couldn't get the cards in order,
he had no idea who anything was or who anyone was.
He was a joke.
Paul. Paul. No, Paul!
LAUGHTER
I wanted Basil Brush!
I did! I wanted Basil Brush.
I'm not sure we haven't got him.
He was so funny. I think he was actually funnier on it than I was.
Absolutely right. Give that man a coconut.
Give that man what?A coconut. Or whatever the prize is...
I don't want a coconut!
Have a point. Have a point. Have several points.
I've changed my mind, Boris. I will have a coconut.
We'll have to get the catering people... I bet I end up with less coconuts.
Boris hasn't really changed his act
since he was presenting Have I Got News For You, to be fair.
Whether or not we can supply a coconut or not, I don't know...
So, hang on a minute. You're offering coconuts,
and yet...there's no facility to give me a coconut.
You're promising something you can't deliver,
which is what you accuse the Labour Party of!
You look at these broadcasts that he does with the two team captains
at either side of him - it's exactly the same thing, on the virus!
Boris was a star.
He wasn't a particularly well-known politician,
but he was a personality, he was a character.
From the party that keeps its promises...
LAUGHTER
There's a lot about Boris which makes him
a really good comedy entertainer.
That is the job he should have been employed to do.
They are...
..Boris Johnson for Have I Got News For You.
People are surprised when I tell them one year, he was nominated
for a Bafta for Best Performance in an Entertainment Programme.
And you could see he was very keen to win the award.
..Jonathan Ross for Friday Night with Jonathan Ross!
When Boris became Prime Minister, I think there was sort of...
..some journalistic outlets who were desperately trying
to turn this into the story of
"Have I Got News For You has made Boris Johnson Prime Minister."
If you look at the history of the show, nearly everybody
who's been on more times than Boris became Prime Minister.
Ken Livingstone? Yeah. Charles Kennedy? Yeah, absolutely.
If you're going to blame someone, you can blame the voters -
which I do - or you can blame the system.
I mean, I didn't vote Boris in.
I thought he was absolutely unsuitable and unfit for any office.
The whole of London, Europe's biggest electorate,
votes Boris in twice, so don't blame us.
The broadcast can finish of an episode -
and about the very same episode, one bunch of people will scream,
"Typical right-wing establishment crap,"
the other side will say, "Typical BBC leftie nonsense."
The government essentially has done a U-turn
on a number of things which the public don't agree with.
You know, and that's not government as you know, Alastair.
A million people march past, saying, "We don't want the war,"
you don't LISTEN to them! For God's sake!
Do you know what Tommy Robinson does for a living?
He used to run a tanning shop. Exactly right, yes.
What, changing the colour of people's skin?Yeah.
So your customer comes in, "Come in, Madam."
Half an hour later, "You can get out!"
It's the very fact that this show can still trouble
and infuriate such a wide range of people that makes it great.
Well, I'll tell you other things you've said about him is he is...
Correct.
LAUGHTER
It is quite blokey, I think we can be perfectly honest about this.
It is quite blokey. Erm... Or at least it was when I started.
I bet Chris Evans is ringing him even now, don't you think?
Go on, Jeremy, punch him.
You can have a go if you want!
I mean, the whole thing is ruthless.
It's the Roman arena, with mangled corpses in all directions.
What I actually said was that women who are self-destructive,
in particular those women whose self-image is so low
that they cannot appear in public without their hair bird's-nested
all over the place, three inches of exposed cleavage and fuck-me shoes.
I didn't actually name anybody!
This was in a piece about Suzanne Moore, though, wasn't it?
Why would shoes want to be fucked anyway?
The thing you have to do is, you have to step up to the plate.
You can't just sit there and simper.
What sort of shoes are you wearing, Germaine?
Don't-fuck-me shoes.
Leave-me-alone shoes or I'll-kick-you-in-the-face shoes.
I thought it was frightening, and I was scared
that I wouldn't be able to think of funny things to say.
But I really felt it was important because there were so few women
to actually go on and kind of, you know, suffer it, if you like.
That's Terry Wogan paying Cher an awful lot of money, 20 grand -
a pound for every year of her life - to come on his show.
You know, she got 20 grand, right? I got 800.
She got a new bum and I went down Kwik-Fit
and had one of my blackheads squeezed.
I remember being on the show with Jo Brand,
probably she was hosting and I was a guest,
and she made a joke about eating a strawberry ice cream
that was so filthy, I was literally helpless.
A group of Finnish lawyers has suggested new EU
sexual harassment laws should cover women eating ice creams
provocatively in front of male colleagues.
I wouldn't do that.
I always make sure I'm alone before I open my Mivvi.
LAUGHTER
There are good hosts and then there are just crazy hosts,
who are just... You know, the Brian Blesseds. Mm!
I can't even remember when the camera was turned on
and it didn't matter. He's the same, isn't he? Yes.
You know, from the moment he comes in the room
to when his taxi goes again.
Good evening and welcome to Have I Got News For You.
I'm Brian Blessed!
CHEERING
I am! It's me, look...
I think the original motivation may have been...
Cos I think we were at the time when Gordon Brown
was either Chancellor or briefly Prime Minister,
they just wanted Brian Blessed to shout "Gordon's alive!"
I think that was it.
Now, in the news this week, the polls continue to slide
for Gordon Brown. And some people are saying he's dead and buried.
But I think the opposite.
I say, Gordon's alive!
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
Yes! My darlings!
When someone like him is hosting it,
you kind of just have to lash yourself to the mast
and get through it, because he's not going to...
Nuance isn't going to necessarily creep into it,
so you have to kind of get in where you can.
I suppose you are the only gay Tory, aren't you?
Actually, there are...Are you gay?!
LAUGHTER
Brian, you'd never guess you were an actor.
There are very few people in my life
that I've been able to impress my sister with. And...
You know, I ring up and say, "Ooh, I've met Nelson Mandela,"
and she goes, "Oh, yeah, yeah."
But I finally got to ring her up and say,
"You have no idea who I'm having dinner with."
And she said, "Yeah, who?"
DOORS WHOOSH
And I said, "William Shatner." And that was it. Finally, a win.
William Shatner was on the show!
William Shatner hosted Have I Got News For You.
I mean, that's extraordinary, isn't it?
Good evening to you and welcome to Have I Got News For You.
I'm not sure he really understood what the show was.
He didn't know who any of the public figures
we were doing jokes about were.
He didn't know that Ilfracombe was a town.
This is the Olympic torch which is boldly going
where no Olympic torch has gone before, namely...
GROANING
Yes, I agree with you.
..namely Truro and "Ilfra-cooom".
Sounds deeply sexual.
Have you been to Ilfracombe? I have.
The place is laced with prostitution.
He got about a third of the way into the show,
and then the kind of madness of it started to take over.
MUSIC: God Save The Queen by the Sex Pistols
# God save the Queen
# The fascist regime
# They made you a moron A potential H bomb... #
He kept looking at me, and he would wink at me.
Quite a few times, he winked at me, which was...
..slightly unsettling, in a way.
# Oh, no, no, no, no
# I'm a rocket man. #
APPLAUSE
I'm just overwhelmed by this.
They have to reinvent the wheel each week, don't they?
That's why the writers are so good,
because those writers have to write jokes that are going to be said
by completely different people every week.
BIG BEN CHIMES, LAUGHTER
And outside Westminster planning department,
there are suspicions that developers are attempting
to bribe John Prescott.
LAUGHTER
The website went on to say...
..although if you're not keen on that, get Cook to wear an apron.
Time now for the Missing Words Round, which this week features
as its guest publication The Powerful Owl newsletter,
which, obviously, they got because of my association with owls.
I once killed an owl with a shovel.
No, sorry! It was the Harry Potter thing.
There's so many various elements that make up the show.
You've got the news itself,
you have the guests, you have me and Ian
and you have the person who's hosting it.
When the news is really good -
and by good, I don't mean necessarily uplifting,
I mean richly comic and full of potential -
it can really take off.
Ah, the start of the Great North Run, London to Durham.
And there's that eye test.
"Ah, Mr Cummings, can you see why everyone's so angry with you
"and think you should resign, you complete and utter fraud?"
Dominic Cummings' visit to the Castle
happened at the end of our last series,
which was filmed in lockdown,
so each one of us was in our own individual cells.
That was a very strong show.
Ian was particularly...exhilarated
to be talking about it on British television.
He gave the impression in pieces in The Spectator,
and he got his wife to write pieces, suggesting he was in London,
which he wasn't.
This man has become the centre of the story. And I just...
I cannot understand why he hasn't resigned.
THEY LAUGH
Paul, maverick genius?
Thank you very much. That's very kind of you.
I didn't realise I'd be getting an award this evening,
but I'd just like to say this award isn't just for me,
it's for everybody, for those people behind-the-scenes...
I was furious, you know, for personal reasons,
because of care homes and obeying the rules then and,
like lots of people, being unable to say goodbye to loved ones
and all that stuff.
Mark Sedwill had coronavirus, Boris had it, Matt Hancock had it.
In fact, the whole government had it.
And you know why that is, Janet?
Because the virus targets low-skill workers.
THEY LAUGH
The world, even at its blackest, is quite a comic place.
And it's almost never true that there is nothing funny,
or nothing certainly bleakly comic, about what's going on.
Oscar Pistorius has been sent to a prison in Pretoria, where...
You have to be particularly careful in the showers
because Oscar Pistorius might shoot you through the door.
VICTORIA: The more difficult it gets to make edgy jokes,
the more people scream and roar and say you shouldn't make it,
the more it's a sort of moral imperative to keep doing it.
I was just going to say that, also, by funding Islamic fundamentalism,
it pays off the guilt the Saudis feel for their lives of luxury -
a bit like Jimmy Savile's charity work.
AUDIENCE GROANS
Oh, come on! Grow up!
The fact that they're still there, they're still entertaining you
and they're still in the midst of this extraordinary chaotic world
which we now inhabit... We need shows like Have I Got News For You.
Doctors injected Trump with a potentially lethal cocktail
of experimental and untested drugs,
but somehow he pulled through.
Who do you think's going to get it next?
PAUL LAUGHS
In the US sort of presidential world.
Oh, I see, not Mrs Watkins at Number 23...
LAUGHTER
Who's closest to Trump? Oh, Putin!
Looking back over 500 shows and goodness knows how many guests,
it's pretty extraordinary.
I can't quite get my head around it.
Did Ian say nice things about me when you interviewed him?
He didn't, did he?
INTERVIEWER: I don't think he mentioned you.
LAUGHTER
My feelings on Paul?
Oh, right, yes. Paul Merton?
Yes, he's still on it, isn't he?
Paul, could you ever find it in your heart to put your bitter rivalry
to one side and form a coalition with Ian?
Yeah, all right.Go on, then.
If you switched on and Ian or Paul wasn't there,
it's like the ravens leaving the Tower of London.
I mean, it would spook people.
It's almost a matter of national duty that they would be there,
where people expect to see them.
I've got a feeling you're going to win this week!
LAUGHTER