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This Thursday night, there is a real alternative to Dimblebys, pundits and the swingometer: the team that brought you The Friday NightArmistice are launching their own satirical gloss on the election. James Rampton sits in on an ideas meeting
The trestle-table in the cavernous assembly-room at Acton Town Hall in west London is strewn with the usual comedy-writers' debris: half- finished scripts, chewed pencils, crumpled newspapers, dreg-filled styrofoam teacups, empty fizzy-drinks cans, screwed-up crisp-packets and semi-munched apples. It all says: "We're tortured artists in mid-brainstorm, far too preoccupied to worry about mess."
A couple of weeks before polling-day, the Friday Night Armistice team of Armando Iannucci, David Schneider and Peter Baynham, and their producer, Sarah Smith, are hunched over notepads on the table, workshopping ideas for an election-night special, three hours-plus of topical comedy due to go out live on Thursday night - and it's a demanding process.
Playing on the notion of the defeated Tory party as a drowning man who sees images from the past 18 years flashing before his eyes, Iannucci unleashes phrases like semi-automatic fire: "The green shoots of recovery . . . Unemployment is a price worth paying . . . There is no such thing as society . . . Everyone needs their Willy." "It sounds like the end of The Generation Game," Schneider chips in. "Yes, if you can come up with 25 bizarre phrases from Mrs Thatcher, you win a kettle," Iannucci replies.
They bat around the possibility of Labour repeating the ill-fated Sheffield "rock star" rally of the 1992 campaign. "Tony Blair will go up to the podium and say `Alright!'," Iannucci speculates, "and then Peter Mandelson will rush on to explain that what Tony is trying to say is `It looks like nice weather'. Or what about Martin Bell? He's ahead in the polls, and then, just before the election, he holds a rally where he goes, `This is Martin Bell. Tatton, alright! - oh sorry.'"
"Because our economic policy is completely in Tatton," Baynham adds. Fizzing around the table at a bewildering speed, new ideas emerge from the comedians with a good deal more regularity than they do from the politicians they are satirising.
Comedians have come to love general elections even more...