This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.
It was the great Tom Lehrer who said, when Henry Kissinger was awarded the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize, that “satire was dead”. This era’s professional wags were similarly minded to put down their pens after US President Donald Trump was given the inaugural Fifa Peace Prize ahead of this year’s World Cup.
There is a lot that is wrong with this year’s tournament and the US’s co-hosting of it (I seem to remember writing a similar sentence in 2022 about Qatar), and I’m wary of wringing too much joy from the absurdities that have already abounded, such as US “star striker” Patrick Agyemang being ruled out through injury after pulling a hamstring for Derby County against Stoke City or, even more brow-raisingly, the nominated “Gay Pride match” being that between Iran and Egypt. What is there left for satirists to do?
The answer, it transpires, is to insert some singularly British idiocy into the mix. Fourteen long years ago, in simpler days on the eve of the London Olympics, we were introduced to Ian Fletcher, the Games’ “head of deliverance,” in Twenty Twelve.
Alongside Jessica Hynes’s smiling assassin – aka PR company marketing guru Siobhan Sharpe – he was paid to choose between Gok Wan or Peter Andre as torchbearers, and decide whether the official countdown clock should go backwards or forwards – all the big decisions.
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Writer John Morton repeated the trick in 2014 with his even more fully realised W1A. The BBC’s deliberate hamming up of itself lampooned creative liberal love-ins, typified by the sight of Alan Yentob and Salman Rushdie arm-wrestling, and endless meetings full of jargon, punctuated by Simon Harwood’s (Jason Watkins) all-purpose “Brilliant!”, while Fletcher, now the Beeb’s “head of values”, continued to furrow his brow and struggled to fold up his Brompton bike.
I’m not sure what it says about senior management personnel the world over that the same Ian Fletcher is entirely believable in his new posting, as a deliberately unnamed football organisation’s “director of integrity” in Twenty Twenty Six. Despite the deeper pockets and Pepsification of the US World Cup, the hapless Brit fits right in.
New delights offered by the Miami setting include misunderstandings between two nations divided by a common language – “Shall we make a start?” “Oh, so British” – as well as swiftly established sores about Canada and Mexico being co-hosts, even while the Yanks casually push them off the map. The “social media architects” have come up with their own digital channel, shouting: “Congratulations, you’re on Far Corner!” much to the confusion of guests not au fait with “soccer”.
However, Twenty Twenty Six’s most enjoyable aspects remain those nonsenses of bureaucracy that have travelled effortlessly from their previous London offices: the fact that the higher up the ladder you go, the less work you have to do; that the number of words spoken in a meeting is in inverse proportion to the number of decisions made; that self-belief needn’t require skill or knowledge; and, of course, the politics of a PA delivering a mid-meeting coffee.
Plus, there is a familiar angel in our midst – Hugh Skinner’s gormless, guileless masterpiece of a minion Will Humphries, whose only mission is to accidentally save the day with a hard blink and a “Yeah, no, cool, yeah, no worries, say again”.
What will Ian Fletcher do next? He could trade in his Brompton for a Vespa and head off to Italy to manage the national men’s football team, who have somehow failed to qualify for their third World Cup in a row after victory in 2006. After all, as he says, “Problems are just solutions waiting to happen.” So that’s all good.
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Twenty Twenty Six is available now on BBC iPlayer and continues at 10pm on BBC Two on Wednesday 15 April.
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