Honest Johns

John Bird and John Fortune, old hands in the satire game, have recently achieved star status in their own right with their fictional political interviews on Rory Bremner's show. James Rampton fires the questions

As John Bird (right) and John Fortune sit down next to each other for our interview, Fortune hands Bird a well-thumbed copy of Juvenal's The Sixteen Satires he's brought along for his amusement. It's just the sort of book you'd expect these two to be exchanging.

Bird and Fortune have been at the forefront of British satire since they founded the Establishment Club with Peter Cook in 1962. In the 1960s and 1970s they worked together on sketch shows such as The Late Show, BBC3 and Well, Anyway. After a quiet period in the 1980s, their latest satirical sally is the improvised head-to-head conversations they have been conducting about a topical news item on Rory Bremner - Who Else? for the past three years. With the revolutionary concept of impersonating public figures not being economical with the truth, they expose the sham of most political dialogue. From next week, Channel 4 is running the uncut versions of these exchanges as The Long Johns (Wed 12.15am).

We are sitting in Channel 4's delightfully airy canteen (it's good to know the channel's not spending all its money on Michael Grade's salary). Bird and Fortune lounge in capacious armchairs sipping coffee, and every now and then leaping up to act out some anecdote about Cook or Barry Humphries. They are clearly enjoying their rediscovered status among the big hitters of satire. Their new-found comedy cred secured them a double-act slot on Have I Got News For You?, which they stormed. Still, they fight shy of the S-word. "I have problems with the word satire," Fortune reflects. "At Cambridge, we were both taught by Leavis that it is about moral judgements, and I'm such a frivolous person. We were taught that people like Swift and Juvenal were stern moralists, but we just have too much of a good time." Bird takes upthe baton. (Like Little and Large - only funny - they anticipate and complete each other's thoughts.) "I'm more of a satirist than a window-cleaner. But satire has literary connotations which are rather grand. Being asked if you're a satirist is like being asked if you think of yourself as saintly or handsome."

The idea for The Long Johns came from Bremner's producer Geoff Atkinson, who had heard two Australian comedians doing something similar. "What was good about it was they told the truth," Bird remembers. "One would say, 'So, Paul Keating, you're the Finance Minister, what do you think of your last budget?'. And the other one would reply, 'It was a complete disaster. I was half-pissed at the time'." In one of the head-to-heads, Bird interviews a brilliantly deadpan Fortune as the head of the Post Office, who contends that the Germans want to annexe his organisation. "I can't quite see how that would work," muses Bird. "You are saying that a postman in Frankfurt, say, would wake up one morning and say, 'I've got to go off on my postal round in Surbiton'." "These foreigners will do anything," Fortune replies, with an immaculately straight face.

Whether sending up a senior figure at the Ministry of Defence or the Chief Executive of an NHS Health Care Trust, Bird and Fortune have captured the zeitgeist. These days many viewers tend to watch public figures with Jeremy Paxman's famous quotation echoing in their mind: "Why is this lying bastard lying to me?". In polls about the most respected professions, politicians are languishing at the bottom of the table somewhere between journalists and estate agents. "These conversations wouldn't have had the same response if they weren't true. There is something in the air," Bird reckons. "People do understand they're being taken for a ride. They are at the mercy of these powerful, yet unaccountable figures. People now know that when a company talks about making itself more competitive, that means that 1,500 middle-class middle managers will end up on the scrapheap. Politicians pretend to be able to do things that they can't, and people realise that politics is being conducted in a way that is contemptuous of them. When this Government says, 'We've got low inflation, why aren't people dancing in the streets and voting for us?', they don't see that it's because nobody benefits except a very small group of people."

Fortune eagerly takes up the theme. "During the Conservative leadership campaign, I heard someone from the Major camp on the Today programme saying, 'My job is to talk to backbenchers and make a judgement about how many are telling lies. It's relatively easy because most of them are telling lies all the time. If they tell you the time, you have to check it by Big Ben.' And he was talking about people on the same side!" So as they prepare for a new series of Rory Bremner in October, Bird and Fortune should only have one worry: that politicians are going to make satirists redundant.

Correction: a fortnight ago, Paul Stump, in his article 'Tricky Wickets', delivered a no ball in crediting Transworld International with responsibility for providing BBC cricket coverage. In fact, the BBC produces its own live coverage, while Transworld International is contracted to package the evening highlights programme