Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
Cast: Miles Jupp, Ingrid Oliver, Emma Sidi, Justin Edwards, Rosie Cavaliero, Adam Riches.
You may feel at times like a fish out of water, a nobody masquerading as a human being, attempting to be interesting, trying your best to get through life and not fouling up to the point where you become a social embarrassment, where everybody disowns you or finds ways to shout obscenities at you; even if you did your best to be liked, to be on the side of angels.
If an ordinary person can feel a failure with such issues weighing them down, then for a politician to go from public figure, perhaps even occupying the position of Prime Minister, to that of complete irrelevance, of not even being the butt of the joke anymore, then are we meant to feel sorry for them, to sympathise with them, even help them see the funny side; few would consider such a proposition, and yet in Paul Doolan’s and Jon Hunter’s Party’s Over, the sense of the boundless opportunities for former Prime Minister Henry Tobin to fall even further through his own sense of ineptness is one worth seeing the sunny side of.
Ousted by the party after losing a sizeable Government majority swept out of office by the electorate after faux pas, gaffs and mistakes that make our current incumbent seem as if he is the grand statesman he envisages in his dreams every day, Henry Tobin, played with brilliant dour optimism and regret by Miles Jupp, and his long suffering, but ultimately loyal wife Christine, captured superbly by Ingrid Oliver, is the man of the people who don’t know who he is, catapulted in to the history bin of inconsequence and triviality, and upon his return to the country after an extended period in India to write his memoirs, finds that even he can manage to foul up a book deal and have the gentle patrons of the Hay Book Festival booing him for his stupidity.
In what seems to have been a one-off pilot, Party’s Over deserves more than just a fleeting listen by the radio audience, for in a world where satire has become truth, good political comedy that could stand in the same way as Yes, Prime Minister, is few and far between.
If ever you feel inadequate then know there are political trivialities to whom the joke is not how they attained office, but how they managed to get through life without causing catastrophe in their wake; a lesson for all, for we receive the politicians we deserve, and in 21st Century Britain we must ask ourselves what it is we must have done wrong to reflect this state of affairs.
Ian D. Hall