Waaah! Booo! BOOOOOORING! The MPs expenses scandal? Dull rubbish that told us what we already knew – that politicians are snakes. They’re based in human reality about as much as a withered, ageing asp too. Anyway, there’s no way a drama about the expenses scandal was going to be much fun was there? Wrong. Totally wrong. Step forward On Expenses (BBC Four, Tuesday, 23 February, 9pm).

Before the show even kicked off proper, we were given fair warning of something.

“Some scenes have been imagined, some scenes have been compressed. But mostly you couldn’t make it up”.

Essentially, it transpired that this meant that all the boring bits of the political world had been taken out in favour of the fun, gnarly bits… the sharp tongued nasty bits… the acidic humour of the darkened halls of power.

Brian Cox played Commons Speaker Michael Martin. If you’re thinking ‘Who?’, then you might remember him as the tubby Scottish fella who got heckled in Parliament and said “O-order, o-order” in a funny little voice.

He was the foil of journalist Heather Brooke (played wonderfully by Anna Maxwell Martin) who railed against the fact that we, as those that pay for politicians to do what they do, could see what they were spending their money on. It was a Freedom of Information rant.

She… and we… knew damn well that MPs were spending their money on daft stuff. Sadly, the scandal didn’t deliver news that someone had been putting claims on rent boys or elephant corpses. Basically, there was nothing too weird, but there was stuff to be indignant about like one chump who used our money to clean out his moat. Yep, in touch with the common man there.

All of this could have been bogged down in rubbish legal gubbins and all that stuff that is tied up in jargon that 99% of us don’t have a hope of ever understanding… but it wasn’t!

Instead, we got swift, bite-sized segments that rammed the point home… from the weaselling of the politicians to the complete head-wreckery of the journo trying to wade through the red-tape and, well, bullshit.

Basically, this show summed up the whole thing for people who didn’t understand the whole thing properly and, for those that did, they got a few laughs and thrilled at the perverse glee of the way in which the journalists unearthed each morsel of trash on the MPs.

A charming little black comedy that deserves a viewing on iPlayer if you missed it.