That was all right, wasn’t it?’” Both writers insist the show is no apologia for Blair, and more about the forces that created him. You shouldn’t memorialise someone like that.’ And I’m like: ‘Did you see the film Downfall? It’s about Hitler. “We’ve had all these idiot George Galloway followers online,” says Brown, “telling us, ‘It’s terrible! It should never be staged. But some people’s memories are yet to acquire a rosy tint. “Hold act two!”īy a happy coincidence, the show, long in gestation, premieres within a month of the 25th anniversary of New Labour’s landslide election to power. And now he’s in a situation where, if you bumped into him in the street, you wouldn’t necessarily want a selfie.” From messiah to pariah, I venture. He starts off as a peace-loving hippie in a rock band, then becomes enormously successful and we all turn to him as a beacon of hope. “I just think Tony Blair’s story,” he says, “is really operatic. Photograph: Mark Douetīut Hill stuck with the idea, drafting in Brown to develop it. ‘My wife refers to us as the Flop Twins’ … Harry Hill and co-writer Steve Brown. Turns out there’s only so much Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep a theatre audience can take. This concept got as far as a staged reading, reports Hill, but “after the third song, our ears were bleeding”. Their Tony Blair show, they tell me, started life as a spoof jukebox musical when Hill decided (as you do) to crowbar party hits from the compilation CD Vintage Cheese into a performed biography of the former member for Sedgefield. Brown is his composer and collaborator, a veteran of Spitting Image, bandleader for Alan Partridge and, incidentally, father of the standup Alfie Brown. Hill, of course, is standup and TV’s big-collared lord of misrule – though smaller of collar today. They’re quite the double act, bantering back and forth, sending themselves up. And it is satire – or a cross between satire and surrealism.” Pause for thought.
“I’m not a particular fan of musicals,” says Hill, cheerfully, “or politics.” Brown, who writes the songs, adds: “Harry’s not the person you first expect to write a satire. I arrived at today’s interview having Tony! (The Tony Blair Rock Opera) pegged as the year’s most surprising theatre package, and nothing I hear over an hour with its creators disabuses me of the notion. From messiah to pariah! Why didn’t I think of that? Hold act two!
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