Tony Hendra on the Essentiality of Satire

a powerhouse of hilarious, cutting edge social commentary. Before that, Hendra had been part of a comedy team with Nick Cullett, performing live across the US, but the election of Richard Nixon was a turning point for Hendra and the work he wanted to create. After helping shape The Lampoon, Hendra took his fearless wit on the road, writing and ucing TV shows, acting in movies, and producing albums, one of

which propelled John Belushi to fame, still writing today. He reunited with the Lampoon last year to write a new album titled Are There Any Triggers Here Tonight? For Tony Hendra, the Trump administration has only made his work more relevant. There are times, especially now, when there is an essentiality of sata and it's important. I mean, even if you don't get rid of the enemy, the enemy triumphs in

some curious way. It is a kind of civic obligation almost, you know, to to be taking on power, especially when it's already corrupted power in this case. Do you feel during the course of your career that was a part

of it, the essentiality of satire? Well, yes, I obviously it's self seeking to to say that, But but I must say, when after the after the election, my my little cost I have a cost of a radio show I do called The Final Adition Radio and there's a cast in New York and a cast in l a And everyone obviously was very cast down, as we all were. They were asking questions like that, like, what's the point. You know, we did all this satire all this year and didn't have any effect on anything, um and um.

I and I wrote them a sort of letter to

sort of cheer up letter. But the core of it was that actually, after I got over the shock of the fact that he had actually been elected, I found that I had a little buzz, a little buzz not a excitement exactly, but a buzz is kind of connection, which I was trying to remember when I last felt it, and I remembered that it was actually the same at the same time of day when I heard that Nixon and ag Knew had been elected, and they were just as much a horror show for for the left at

that point, and that just as much of a surprise, in fact, even more so because Nexton had been completely written off, and it was that actually at that point, it was like in that that moment in sixty eight, then I actually thought to myself, Okay, where were you

in sixty eight? At sixty eight, I was half of a comedy team with Nick with Nick, yeah exactly, called Hendra, and if if I was giving the interview, if he was giving the interviews, Hendra, but Hendra, And it was slightly easier to say, but but we've been we've been working since sixty four when we first came to these shores, and we were really at that point in quite successful

in a kind of official way. We we were doing the really awful variety shows of the sixties, you know, like Hollywood Palace and the Perry Como Show and and

all that kind of thing. Uh and so so so in terms of comedy, then there were television programs that really were craving acts to come on, and there was work to be done for you and all it well, there was work, but the strictures on the work who were very frustrating because you know, because we were well, I mean certainly for me anyway, because I was I was very politically sort of anxious and aware. But you couldn't talk on television about any of the stuff that

was going on outside the studio doors. I mean, you couldn't talk about the war, You couldn't have talked about the various forms of liberation. You can talk about drugs, You couldn't even talk about rock and roll unless you were making fun of it. And so it was very frustrating.

But certainly we found that what we were doing, which I would describe as bargain basement beyond the fringe at the time, was not was not something that most American audiences had much interest in, except in New York, where they understood what it was. An indicious casting directors and producers who took a chance, how did you get the jobs?

And we had a very powerful manager called Robert chart Off, and we had yeah, that Bob Chatter, and we had a good friend in Jackie Mason, who was his premium client. In fact, Jackie Mason signed the application for my green card, oh, which is kind of funny. Yeah. And anyway, so we've gone through all the sort of storm and dragon fire and ice of of being a comedian in sixties, like doing the cats Skills, for example, which was unbelievable and

I could write an entire book about. But that we had emerged from the other end as a kind of the English comedy group. You know, there was the Italian comedy groups and comedy team, and there was an Irish comedy team, and lots of Jewish comedy teams and and and there was us. We got that little slot to ourselves, but it didn't make any difference. We couldn't really do

anything very you know, very sort of cutting. I mean, I think the most cutting joke we ever did was was one about General the Gold being seriously injured this morning during his morning walk. He was hit by a motor boat. And that was like Meggie Sata Verry Como drawing his finger across the throat behind your back foot again exactly. So it was that kind of thing. And above all that, the sort of pinnacle of this dreadful

television was was the Edge Solomon Show. I mean, it was the thing everybody had to get on if they wanted to succeed. Yeah, I think it was five or six times. Ed had a very ethnic point of view on comedy. I mean he had to have you had

to have one of everything. And so I mean George Carlin was his favorite Irish comic coman in Pat Cooper was his favorite Italian comedian, you know, and we were we actually beat out Mr Pastry more of a you know, more popular than Mr Pastry with but but it was but it was a really difficult show to get last on and it was well known. All comedians used to bitterly complain about it being this kind of mausoleum. And our own private name for the show was a Night

of the Living head. What do you think it was that had them call you back again and again? We actually, I guess got good ratings or something or but but I mean, obviously, as I said, we were, we were in good shape by virtue of being Ed's favorite British comedians. Um, and then what changed well, what change was was was this moment actually when when I mean, at that point, I was basically doing the kind of jokes I've been telling you, jokes like about how bad British teetha you know.

But it was really in that moment I was describing earlier, when when I realized that Nixon and Agne were actually going to be running the country for the next four years. Then I decided I've really got started getting serious about being funny. And it was actually at that point where I sort of began to break up the act because I really wanted to do I really wanted to do much tougher stuff and and and much more. I mean, George had a wonderful George Carlin had a wonderful comment

about that time. He said, you know, when I did shows like that, me and he had Sullivan Show, and he did all the same shows, it was like being a traitor to my generation. So you shared that view with Carlin, Yes, very much. So. I didn't know enough yet about what what I wanted to make fun about. But but I mean, for example, I had a piece um which I was trying to sell to ramparts at

the time, remember ramparts, and and it was. It was I thought a very funny piece about Gomer Pyle in Vietnam and killed me some good storge, you know that kind of stuff. And and that was that, as I said, that was where I really began to think, well, I'd much rather be doing this, but I have to find a forum to do it. I have to find somewhere

somehow to do it either by myself. I wasn't going to convince Nick because he really wasn't that political, and part ways with him then, not immediately, but but gradually, you know, I sort of we broke up actually in the next year. Was he happy to continue going along and just wanted to work. And yeah, but that was the point, wh as I say, really in which I began to look around for other other ways. And very

soon the National Lampoon started. You don't start the National No, no no no, But those who started they find you. How there was a kind of grape vine for alternate comedy. Did the grom Pile piece appear in ramparts? No a calling card for you in that kind of no. Unfortunately, Walter Kin, it was a great editor called you from lampo in no sense of humor. Nobody called me from Lampoon.

I was told that it was starting up about four or five months before it started up by by a friend of mine who had also been part of a comedy team. And but as soon as I as soon as I read the first issue, even though it was a very ugly and weird issue, I realized that I had found somewhere that I definitely wanted to write for and and I in fact started writing for them within

the next couple of issues. So I started. I was first published in them, I think April April of the nine and I've been sort of making friends and and you know, especially in Los Angeles, were as learning at the time, and uh, there was much a much better kind of underground in San Francisco and Los Angeles for comedy than there was in New York. So that also

helped to sort of mature me in that direction. And for people who don't know Lampoon was, Lampoon was Henry Beard and Doug Kenny and uh, and they both were from the Harvard Lampers described them well. Doug was a very strange character, very good looking, like a real college joe good looks, you know, blue eyes and and shell theer length hair, and and and but but curiously unsure of himself, and he was a terrible editor. He would say things like this sucks, but I don't know why,

which is really helpful. But he but he was also brilliant. I mean, the first time I met Doug, he told me that the British humor wasn't funny. It was like the first thing that started off the interview, but then somehow it's um it moped very quickly into him doing a parody of a novelist called Mrs Gaskell, who was the nineteenth century novelist, and and doing it brilliantly, so sort of the words just came out of him, and then you know, ten seconds later he was showing me

he could put his entire fist into his mouth. Was his background. He came from Ohio. His dad was a tennis coach. He'd been a real star. No, not at all, not at all. And Henry was like the other end of the spectrum. Henry. Henry was like very academic looking with with sort of informous amounts of spiky hair, and smoked a pipe incessantly even in bed, it seemed, and and just a brilliant intellectual dissector of things, and when

did you start writing with them? Um. The first piece that really got me on the map actually was a piece called with with Them. I did it with Henry and it was called nine Days that Shook Woke, Iowa. And it was about the assassination or attempted assassionate assassination of Spiro agnew Um with with somebody had put an ice pick in his head in Woke, Iowa during campaign stop. And the difficulty with it was not whether this was an assassination, but how many people claimed to have been

the assassin I was. I was terrified. I thought I was going to be deported immediately. I wouldn't even put my name on it. I called back then that was entirely possible. You want to believe absolutely. It would keep warning me now that it may be impossible again if I don't stop with some of my current that the Attorney General then John Mitchell was was was actively talking about suspending the First Amendment because administrations and so on,

so um so on that. But that really got me sort of set and then and then I then I was sort of in the groove then because that that was really kind of what I did at the Lampoon how long did you do that at the Lampoon for to run. I was there until seventy eight, so for eight years. Yeah, we know. During that time, obviously, you know, comedy and not not just satire, for comedy in general

goes through this tremendous expansion. You know, Saturday Night Live comes one five and you know, Lauren is always quick to point out that when Saturday Night Live debut in nineteen seventy five, there might have been fourteen comedy clubs in the entire country, and now there's four hundred comedy clubs in the country. So um, back then, from seventy to seventy eight, was there a thought on your partner, did you actually go out and write films and TV shows?

You ever want to become a TV writer or a movie screenplay right, The last thing I wanted to do is go back into television at that point. I'm really that that that was I how lucrative it might be absolute how did you avoid that trap? The Lampoon took a stance very early on that that it was kind of an alternative to television. In fact, we never did anything about television. It was very interesting. It didn't occur to us it was just like it was an alternate

reality that wasn't our reality. Our reality had much more to do with campus and what people were worrying about on campus. And I think really it's it's true to say that for those four or five years seventy two two, S n L and a little bit and and we went on afterwards, but we really had that, we really had the landscape to ourselves. Is the Lampoon still being published now and it stopped when it really gave up the ghost in the at the end of the nineties,

And what do you think changed to contribute them? Just a natural attrition or there were other things replacing in terms of set times yees. So well, there was several issues. One one was that everything has ever every comedy enterprise has a kind of five year initial curves, and SNL had two uh and um and that then that was very apparent when especially in seventy five when the founders actually got brought out, So that that was one one aspect to it. Then the other was obviously that once SNL.

SNL basically took our cast, i mean the cost of a review that we were doing at the time and put it and made it the SNL cast. I mean Pelluci and and Guilda and Bill Murray, we're all working for the National Input. At that point, what were they doing. They were doing the radio show they find the National Lampoon Radio Radio, and um then they also did a review, which is where Lawn saw them. Actually they had come

or they were Chicago, Chicago and Canada, not Tonoranto. So those who were interested in doing television sort of decamped to SNL. And although SNL did have censorship issues, they certainly couldn't do what the Lampoon did on a monthly basis. So I guess they saw us. They sort of took all the oxygen out of our particular rock. So I guess it. Beard and yourself and Kenny, if I follow, you did not have an appetite for working in television. You didn't want to go back to a television show.

But other people that work that were performers certainly didn't

mind being on television. Yes, precisely. The magazine began to go into sort of slight decline, but I kept it alive for a couple more years, and UM, well then I then I quit, and um almost immediately did not The New York Times um, which was this huge parody of the New York Times, and that sort of put me on the map as as a person who could do parodies and everyone at times respond to you in as agnew esque away as I might imagine, were they just as actually um no, actually a Brosenthal said, we

acknowledged that the people who did this parody must love the New York Times, which was shrewd shrewd um and But what he never said, what he never said was anything about was the fact that was then, like McCarthy, I, you know, investigations into the into the Times staff to see who, if anybody had collaborated, and I actually were a couple of key people who had so. But anyway,

that kind of put me on the map. And I did a lot of parodies after that, and did some projects with Chris stuff, and one of them was a book called the Eighties look Back, which we published on January the thirty one nine and um and was a big bestseller and really was a kind of extension of what the Lampoon used to do, but in a in a slightly more commercial format, and it was brought by some studio as the movie rights were brought by some studio and they wanted to make a movie of this book,

sort of futuristic comedy. So that was the first time that movies really appeared on my on my personal horizon. But by then The Lampoon already done, Animal House and Caddyshack by then coming up. Tony Hendra discusses the Benedictine Monk, who became like a father to him as Hendra left the Poon in the late nineteen seventies to pursue his own projects. Another genius of wit, Molly Ringwald, was just getting her start, the definitive it girl of the nineteen

eighties who inspired John Hughes films like Sixteen Candles. Ringwald helped shape a generation. I just trusted him, and I've really never felt this since. I mean, John actually had less experience than I had at that point. I mean, sixteen Candles was his directorial debut, So it was really like we were kids in that way together, and he was really like a like a confidante. You could say. It kind of seems weird, you know, I heard how well. I mean, I'm older than than he was when we met.

But when I was thirty six years old, like I didn't want to talk to people who were fifteen. I didn't. Why do you think he did? I don't know. Take a listen to my conversation with Molly Ringwald at Here's the Thing dot Org. This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing. After performing on The Ed Sullivan Show, editing the National Lampoon and successfully parodying the most popular newspaper in the world, Tony Hendra could have

retired at thirty seven. Instead, the English born writer, comedian and actor kept reaching new heights, acting in a Rob Reiner mockumentary, creating a successful British TV series called Spitting Image, and writing a bestseller on a monk who saved his soul. But despite his ability to capture viewers attention, the seventies six year old was never much of a TV fan himself. I certainly didn't do any appointment viewing, you know, and I would never stay up to catch a show. So

you've never taped, recorded, you never follow. There's no television drama or comedy that you've absolutely none No none, I mean I I to this day, I don't watch a lot of television. I mean it's partly partly upbringing We didn't have a television when I was kid. Um and was you know, still very early days in England for television and and and and but I just was just I don't have that ingrained habit of turning on the television for the news. For example, I read a paper.

And to this day, I mean now I watch a lot of Netflix and stuff like that because it's such a great series. Yeah, but I'm usual something that you that you like, what something you recommend. Okay, I liked very much show called Catastrophe, which is you Have the Baby. Yeah, exactly, very funny and very well written. Um And I don't know, I can't think of anything. It's already gone out of

my mind. Um. But but but that's that. The only time I watched television really is is late at night when i'm you know, having my cheese and cheese and wine or whatever it is. And um. But but it's it's just not a habit I've ever had. I must say, it's it's it's very interesting you should say that. Well. I used to watch Will and Grace. I love Will and Grace because well because I had partly because I had two children who watched it. Um, and I must

say you have how many kids? I have three by this marriage, and you have some previous you have two, and then three is five? Yes, okay? And and the ones who watch Will and Grace were this current batch Will and Grace fan and there are other great shows thirty Rock. They were just taste, very good taste. But but but only because they watched watched these shows. Would you know, Di Di? Did I watch them? Up to that point? I can't tell you. I mean, I get

my decades mixed up. I couldn't tell you if The Day After and Roots were in the same decade, which actually they were, but Winds of War, but I wouldn't be able to tell you right off the hat off the back, you know, any of that stuff rich Man, poor Man and Wins of War, which one was Robert mitchum in. Yeah, I remember, Yeah, it's all a blur to me now. I remember. I was on nots Landing,

which was the more kind of working man's version. There was Falcon Crest and Dynasty and Dallas and those were all the Quotinian concerns of rich people, and not Slanding was there were normal people, the raverage people. So I was on I was on Miami Vice A couple of times? Would you play continuing character? I played a wicked recording executive who killed who killed? What's his name? What? What's the what's don? Don Johnson? Don Johnson's What's what was

his character's name? Sonny Crockett? Yes, And I knew nothing at all about show. I'd never watched Miami Vice, and it flew me down to Miami and I had to do the show. And it was pleasant, it was, it was all right, It was, it was, it was. It treats you well. They certainly treated me well. The Cubans were very friendly. Sure. But the the only thing I remember from it is that I, you know, by then I've done a few movies, was that Don Johnson obviously

captures me. There's a bit of a foot chase, and he knocks me down, and the script said and they roll over and over on the grass. And the director said it took me aside and said, Okay, I know it says you roll over and over, but somehow you've got to roll over and over. But never get on top of dawn. You'll go crazy. Never make pelvis to

pelvis contact or you'll go crazy. Pelvis. So what happened. Basically, what happened was that I had to roll over, and then he would chase after me, and then I'd roll over some more and he chase after me, and then he'd roll over, and then I would chase after him. But I never got appendently rolling down the hill after I mean, very stupid rock executive. Obviously we didn't just get up and run away, but it was very strange. And I've got to go back and get a copy

of that show see that. I want to see this that scene um so a career as an actor. That was none of the cars either. It wasn't really I must say here, you didn't You weren't seduced by that at all. No, by at that point, I was so taken with the whole idea of being a writer that that it just wasn't that. That's what you plus, rolling down the hill wasn't enough of that. It's a good story. I'd rather write the story than do it again, you know what I mean. Now I want to ask you

when did you write Father Joe? What you did that come out two thousand four? And this is a relationship with a Catholic priest. No, actually it's a Benedictine Monk. Well, I met him when I was I was having, um, what I thought was a passionate love affair with with another another man's wife who was told I'm fourteen or fifteen between fourteen fifteen in love with a man's wife.

Grown I wasn't in love, but I was having I thought I was in love, but I was having an affair with this, with this rather sad woman actually, who was married to a quite tyrannical husband. You were literally having an affair with her. Oh yeah, okay, well actually, well that's the point. No, it was an affair by then prevailing British standards, which meant, um, you know that I got the first space. But nonetheless, just this court caused obviously when when the husband found out about it,

it caused a big comfuffle and he came upon us. Um, you came upon us actually, uh, going a little further than first space, and yeah, pretty much whatever whatever we were calling it. But but in any in any event, it's um, she had a top off and and they lived in a trailer, and so it wasn't difficult for him to see that that was the case. But he was a very uptight British guy, you know, and he's old. He was very religious. He was he would have been twenty six. She said she was twenty two, but she

was probably a few years. What do you think it was about you and your fourteen year old iteration that she was just yeah, you're gorgeous, funny? Well I wasn't actually particularly funny, but I think she I think she was a bit poetic in those days. And him, yeah, right exactly, And and yeah, I was very much the obvious. He was a mathematician, physicist, worked on sort of nuclear

bomb somewhere over who who knew what he was doing. Um, But he was passionate convert and you know, unture me, having been brought up a Catholic, Converts are more Catholic than the pope, and he was. He was just fanatic. But he was also giving me religious instruction because I was going to a school that didn't that there was a Protestant school and mixed marriage agreements said that the um that the child, all the children had to be

raised Catholics. You know, you know, there's giving Catholic instruction. So he was giving me religious instruction. And that's how all this began. UM And when he found out, he insisted that he and I go to a monastery on the Isle of Wight, an island off the coast of England, where he knew a monk who would take care of this. As he put it, and um, was he ever articulated what he believed needed to be taken care of. No, he said, he said, the crisis has arisen, you know,

in our marriage. And and and as he put it, we men, it's it's we men have an obligation to take care of it. That was the immediate reason for my going in total terror and fear, because the whole whole idea of monks, you know, people in cows, going down dark corridors and flogging people and flogging themselves, just nothing more horrible and and and but when I got there, I found this incredibly wonderful guy, very funny, immensely wise guy who was about mid forties. And he had a

kind of very English. He had a kind of he had he had an English word saying, viva are like you know transor that they transer he should transfer things pair pair, and and and and and he was just he was just enchanting for character, quite the opposite to what I expected, and he threw he threw this guy out, He threw out the husband and said, Tony and I want to talk. You must go. And and then we had this. One part of taking care of this was

getting back on the boat done. And so I went to a very odd confession, like unlike anyone had had before, where you know, I knelt beside an armchair, and he listened to everything and said, you haven't done anything really very serious except as you put it. He said, you've done nothing truly evil, Tony, except committing the sin of selfishness. And that was all he had to say about it, and and anywhere, but that this this blossom very quickly into a into a real friendship. That that I mean.

I just adored this guy. He was He was someone you could turn to would practically any kind of problem. And men was also very learned in his way, you know. And and monastery was gorgeous, and the music was the Congorian chant was gorgeous. The book came out when he came out in two thousand and four. So you so, so you come back to this, Yeah, how many years later, I mean decades later, that literally decade. Why well, I sort of see what do you all your life? Yes,

we we maintained a relationship all all all his life. Yes, oh absolutely. I mean I never lost time, did you mean? I mean I lost my faith? I went come to come to come to America. I became a you know, a satirist. I committed many acts of official blass for me, um, you know, and and and and so on, and but I never quite lost touch with father Joe. And eventually, I mean I I hit my own personal bottom at a certain point and came back to him. What was

your bottom? Well, my bottom was mostly drugs, mostly to me too, And we're kidney spirits. Well he should have met Joe, but but but he was. He was just the same, and and and he it was. It was kind of like a partical son, you know, coming home to his father. It really was that kind of story. Now, um, final edition radio hour or something you're working on now you still do it? Oh yeah? Sure? How did that start?

Leaving a lot long way ahead here? Obviously, But but the I had not been doing anything with comedy very much. I was doing a lot of writing. Give me some examples of that period. I used to write for a lot of magazines in the nineties, Harper's, g Q, and Vanity Fair and I mean all all the all the sort of obvious magazines. Um, and I would do things like one of the pieces I did with for Harper's was about the grandson of Antonio or Done, who was

a bullfighter. I know you probably hate this, but that he was a bullfighter of extraordinary talent um and he was only like eighteen. And I covered his first Temporado, which had been season um and went to all his fights and wrote wrote, I found that I was really writing about Spain and how much I love Spain's much as anything. And I have to say, George Clinton said it was the best piece of writing about bull fighting that he'd read since anyway, fantastic, So that was great.

So stuff like that, and that's seductive once you start doing that. And when you know the crash happened and all that happened, it just was so outrageous and so ridiculous that I, you know, my my satire buds began to prick again. And um, I had been writing for the Huff Post. I've been I've been writing sort of sadoirical pieces of well, but they were more like commentary

than actual satire. Um. So then Murdoch bought the Wall Street Journal in November I guess of two thousand seven, and he was he announced that he was going to change it. So a group of us very quickly got together, led by me, and said, we will put out the Wall Street Journal as it will look when Murdoch has screwed it up, um and turned it into the New

York Post basically and m and so we did. We did a parody of the Wall Street Journal called My Wall Street Journal with rouping on the cover going my Wall Street Channel, you know, um and um. And it did quite well actually, And has the Wall Street Journal gotten closer to what you envisioned it would be under Murdoch's ownership, Well, I mean certainly graphically, yeah, I mean we you know, we put it with all color and there's much shorter pieces and graphics all over the most

change and absolutely, I mean. But what most importantly it was a platform for really getting into the financial community and how they had completely looted the country. So it gave us a platform to do all that stuff. And all the ads you know, were about Lehman brothers and bear Sterns and all that. Each one of those was

a jam of one kind or another. But the Best Stones ad was a typical sort of kind of ad where all it was just a beautiful woman's ass and bere sterne, right, I mean, and uh and that and that's how they thought they would get your sympathy back, you know, by by putting a beautiful, beautiful woman on

the Yeah, that kind of stuff. So anyway, that got me started and uh, and that very quickly led to doing another parody a couple of years later, which was supposed to be the final edition of the New York Times. This is when the New York Times, like two thousand and ten, two thousand and eleven, everyone thought it's going to go under. So he thought, what the hell, We'll do the final edition of The York Times. And that started the Final Edition and we kept that going as

a website and then spun off a radio show. And I'm wondering, what you is your final edition? Media? Are you looking forward to a trove of material to satire

with where we're at now? Well, it's it's interesting you should say that, because it's um because that really was what I was talking about earlier when we were talking about the buzz that I got kind of the challenge, a buzz of challenge, if you like, when Nixon and Agney were elected, because you know, a couple of less than a couple of years after that, I was with the National Lampoon, and a couple of years after that we we had seventy two election, right, but by then

the magazine was really thundering along, I mean, the circulator rising all time, and we started a group called there was a new pack called Satirists for Nixon Agnew keep them in office and us in business, you know. And two years after that he was gone, and I couldn't possibly say that that's uh, that that was our doing, although Carl Bernstein did once say to me that I think half joking, Lee, but the other half wasn't joking.

That if it hadn't been to the National Lampoon, Nixon wouldn't have resigned, because we were helping to create an atmosphere where it was impossible possible for him to stay in office. So there is hope, you know. And then I must say all my crew were very taken with that story of that process, that it is always possible, and you've always got to keep trying, because if you don't then it will be absolutely as bad as you think.

And it's a great parallel. Six eight was a very bad Yeah, nothing nothing as bad as that has happened to us well as I as I struggle to put on that wig every Saturday, I'm gonna remember your words. And when we stopped doing that, yeah, we we we allow for something else. Perhaps, well, there's many many lines are forced to that, but one of them is that the worst thing that happens in situations like that is

that they turned the tables on you. Um. I did this show in England called Spitting Image, which was a huge, huge success. I only helped create it, but but it was It was a puppet show where the puppets were all these incredibly good grotesque caricatures and public figures, right and this was in the early eighties or mid ages, so the most popular of our puppets with Thatcher's Cabinet. And at the at first they were furious that that

we were doing this, totally furious. And then as the show but got began to find its feet and got more and more successful, and these puppets became an institution almost you know, the Leon Britton's the Chancellor of the Exchequer had this sort of puppet and I'd love to show that point in mid to late eighties, but my co creator told me that he knew that the show had failed all that it was at a highest success when Leon Britton called up and asked for his puppet.

When it wore up, he was going to put it in the corner and that would be dinner table conversation. So we have to be careful. I don't mean you have to be careful, but one has to be careful about about these people too much. Yes, indeed people, that's what it is. And it is great that he hates it. That's great. I mean, at least you got under a skin. As President Trump gives new urgency to satire, Tony Hendra and the Nash a lampoon or proof that political parody

done right stands the test of time. This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to here's the thing.