Even though our lovely Anna has already reviewed The Trial of Tony Blair after seeing it on More4, after watching it last night in its terrestrial outing, I thought I’d give another angle on an unusual programme looking at our PM facing the dock.

This feature length drama came from the same hand as ‘A Very Social Secretary’ and the director of ‘The Queen’s Sister’. Basically, it was a satire set in a future where Tony Blair finds himself facing a war crimes trial. As neat as the idea is, I’m afraid it doesn’t really work.

First and foremost, The Trial of Tony Blair is a bit of a red herring. This overly long (90 minutes!) drama/comedy never once makes it to The Hague. So it’s not really the trial of Blair, more ‘The build up to the trial of Tony Blair which sees him getting stabbed in the back by all his previous Allies’. Of course, that is the least punchy title for a show ever, but alas, more accurate. If I stop being a moron for a second, perhaps a better title would have been ‘The Fall and Fall of Tony Blair’. Anyway, that aside, this drama/comedy (I’m still not sure what it was to be honest) featured a Tony Blair in the middle of a nervous breakdown. His power had gone (he stepped away from Number 10 in 2010), his friends vanished, his usefulness outworn and his brain set to self destruct. All this was shown by a series of hallucinations (one which saw Blair holding a dead Iraqi child in his arms) and asides from various politicians which included the US Embassy, David Cameron and his old chum Gordon Brown (who pretty much signed the letter to send Blair to answer his war crimes charge in an attempt to gain more popularity in the polls).

The plot was loose fitting and slow paced. It desperately cried out to be seen as a cutting edge programme that was controversial and cheeky, but really, the jokes/points made were lame squibs compared to the ones already made in The Thick of It, or even Time Trumpet (both Armando Iannucci for interests sake). We all know the caricatures of politicians, and this show didn’t offer any fresh light on the MPs featured. More importantly, each character was so loathsome and misguided, that you didn’t really care what happened to any of them. I guess that may be quite realistic in fairness.

It wasn’t a complete wash-out though. Robert Lindsay may well be able to make a career out of portraying a bumbling Blair as he was a lovely mix of nervous ticks, idiotic self assuredness and actually took our PMs voice off well enough without turning into (the ridiculous) Jon Culshaw. The same can’t be said for the rest of the cast. Gordon Brown looked like Steptoe, and worse still, sounded like Eddie Izzard’s impression of Sean Connery. Cameron was played by Alexander Armstrong (you may recall him from the Armstrong and Miller Show) who was far too ballsy and handsome to be the simpering slimy goon that leads the Tory party at present. The whole thing felt clunky and the graphics which superimposed Lindsay’s head onto various snaps of Blair with Bush and other dignitaries were poor photoshop efforts that could have been bettered by a toddler with scissors, Pritt-Stick and a stack of tabloids. Bless this programme for trying, but like MPs when they try to be funny, the whole thing felt wooden and flaccid. [Mof Gimmers]