The Stage

Robert Newman: Apocalypso Now

Published Wednesday 24 August 2005 at 13:35 by Nick Awde

A few years ago, Robert Newman decided to branch out on his own and plough a solitary socio-economic-political furrow in British comedy. Well, it is not that solitary - if Mark Thomas is our home affairs comic minister, then Newman is surely our foreign secretary.

The thread of Apocalypso Now is currently the Iraq war. Oh no, not that again, come the groans, but Newman makes this a subject all his own thanks to painstaking research, old and new, added to which is the assembly of disparate but crucially linked facts. He starts off with the theory that the cause of the First World War as the death of Arch-Duke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo is simply a convenient fabrication to make history neat and tidy. In fact the real spark was the Allies moving to block the Germans from building pipelines to the Iraqi oilfields.

The chain of thought to the present day, including a devasting impression of Blair lying as only our prime minister can, is a provocative one, broken up by ditties on the ukelele that may or may not have anything to do with anything. The hint of irregular rhythm in the delivery merely belies Newman’s ability to sneak up on you and hit you with the punchline just when you thought he had forgotten the joke. And such is the absurdity of politics he serves up, you cannot help but laugh.