It’s Drop The Dead Donkey for tabloids — and it’s hilarious
TWO big names, Greg Hicks and Clare Higgins, are appearing in a debut stage play at North London’s fringey Arcola theatre. Evidence of an unusually sparky script? Indeed. Mark Jagasia has written a satire about a mad Fleet Street tabloid which is obsessed with the weather, immigration and horoscopes and whose editor has such a Julius Caesar complex he keeps a Roman helmet on his desk.
This piercing and often funny play does to newspapers what Drop The Dead Donkey did to TV news.
Audiences may watch its bizarre antics and suppose it an exaggeration. Some Fleet Street journos may regard it more as a documentary.
The Clarion newspaper is a popular title with offices overlooking the Thames. Its owner, who lives in Monaco, has made his money from a chain of topless hamburger restaurants called Piggy Honkers.
Editor Morris Honeyspoon is not quite the unchallenged boss. His rival is a management executive called Clive (Peter Bourke).
Miss Higgins plays a ginny-voiced, veteran foreign correspondent who has bedded endless men and drinks from dawn.
She is given a document which could end the editor’s career. Will she give it to the Left- wing Sentinel newspaper? If she does, who will be hurt?
Some of the wider plot (a story about a Ukip- style terrorist) is a bit undercooked but the great success of this show is the character of editor Morris, played at a frenzy by Mr Hicks. He rages against everything from Brussels to bisexuals, from Glastonbury to lattes.
London’s Hampstead Heath is dismissed as ‘a homosexual wilderness surrounded by Keynesians and men hiding in poofta bushes’.
Britain is in such a mess, he’s amazed ‘so many bastards want to come here — you’d think they’d be swimming the Channel in the opposite f*****g direction!’
That may give you a taste of the pace and merciless tone of the humour. Yet what is refreshing about this play is that it does not conform to some liberal wish-fulfilment in which the wicked tabloid types ( who include Jim Bywater doing a marvellous cameo as a news editor) are entirely wrong — or entirely upended. The show even imagines the liberal Sentinel going bust. However would the British Establishment — and the BBC — survive such a blow?