Nigel Farage Gets His Life Back: Kevin Bishop admits he went extreme Method in preparing to play the part of the Farage

Comedian Kevin Bishop will bring a familiar figure to our screens on Sunday in BBC2’s highly entertaining new one-off comedy Nigel Farage Gets His Life Back. But Bishop’s take on the acting Ukip leader is merely the latest in a long and illustrious history of politicians being portrayed onscreen.

We have had serious performers such as Meryl Streep playing Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady, Michael Sheen performing as Tony Blair in The Deal, The Queen and The Special Relationship, Anthony Hopkins and Franklin Langella playing Richard Nixon in Nixon and Frost/Nixon respectively, Daniel Day Lewis portraying Abraham Lincoln in Lincoln, and Josh Brolin taking the role of a more recent US President, George W Bush, in W.

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But we have also been treated to more light-hearted representations, including Damian Lewis as the titular politician and author in Jeffrey Archer: The Truth, Robert Lindsay as the controversial Prime Minister in The Trial of Tony Blair, and Christian Brassington and Johnny Sweet as Boris Johnson and David Cameron in When Boris Met Dave.

The American satirical show Saturday Night Live has also offered us a host of memorable such portrayals, including Tina Fey as a cringe-inducing Sarah Palin, Amy Poehler as Hillary Clinton, Dana Carvey as George HW Bush and Will Ferrell as his son, George W Bush. And Alec Baldwin’s recent SNL take on Donald Trump has provoked guffaws and headlines around the world. (It must have hit home because Trump himself has complained about it)

Bishop says he went extreme Method in preparing to play the part of the Farage. The 36-year-old actor, who is well known for his brilliant impersonations on The Kevin Bishop Show and Star Stories, reveals that initially he just could not “get” Farage’s famously wheezy voice. “At first the producers told me, ‘Your voice just isn’t croaky enough.’ Then I realised that his croakiness comes from the fact that he smokes so much. So I started smoking 30 fags a day, and I soon developed the ‘Nigel Rasp’.”

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So does Bishop smoke in the rest of his life? “No, I did it purely for the role. I stopped on Saturday. It was not much fun, to be honest. It was just Method acting! I’d never advise someone to take up smoking just to play Farage, but it does work!”

The “Nigel rasp” is just one aspect of the politician that the actor nails. Bishop also captures exactly Farage’s bombastic, self-aggrandizing, quasi-1950s way of speaking – viz, “You’ll be waiting a very long time for Nigel Farage to apologise for speaking the truth.”

This fly-on-the-wall mockumentary written by Shaun Pye and Alan Connor (also responsible for the snooker comedy The Rack Pack) imagines what Farage gets up to after winning the EU referendum and then resigning, saying: “I’ve got my country back, now I want my life back.”

Nigel Farage Gets His Life Back, which goes out at 10pm on Sunday, shows the politician asserting that he doesn’t miss being in the spotlight at all, that he is far more content away from politics, and that he had no desire to become Prime Minister anyway.

The programme envisages him filling in his endless empty days by doing a huge jigsaw puzzle, shouting at Pointless on the telly, enjoying box sets of It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum while eating crisps, attempting to get his cricket team back together again, waiting in vain for his wife to come back in time for supper and becoming the pub bore in his local while sipping pints of “White Cliffs”, “Goose Green”, “Agincourt”, “Task Force” and “Magna Carta”.

At other times, Farage sits in his “man cave” fielding offers to appear in increasingly ridiculous reality TV shows. For instance, he is filmed declaring during one conversation with a producer, “Let me save you a bit of time. We don’t have any pets, which I would have thought is something of a requirement for involvement in Celebrity Pet Boot Camp. No, no, I do not want to be teamed up with a bulldog. That is, of course, unless you fancy popping a cheeky zero on the end of that fee.”

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Bishop, who plays Fletch’s criminal grandson – also called Nigel – in BBC1’s sequel to Porridge, which has just been commissioned for a full series after a successful pilot earlier this autumn, explains that, “In Nigel Farage Gets His Life Back, the main comic angle – and it works for a lot of comedy – is an extraordinary person doing ordinary things.”

Connor, who has also worked on Only Connect, Charlie Brooker’s Weekly Wipe and A Young Doctor’s Notebook, chips in: “I used to be a Westminster journalist, and I was always very interested in the poignant image of a politician who suddenly doesn’t have a job any more. Farage did his job 24/7 for 18 years. How do you go from that to someone who has to buy their own newspaper and try to get a cricket team together? It’s a difficult transition, and therein lies the comedy.”

With his relentless pints and cigarettes and old-fashioned hail-fellow-well-met bonhomie, Farage also has an innately comic side to him. As Bishop remarks: “He lends himself brilliantly to parody.”

Connor, 42, thinks that the politician makes such a good subject for comedy, “Because no one sits on the fence about him. You can guess what he thinks about anything. For instance, we know that he cannot bear the John Lennon song Imagine. He devotes a whole page in his autobiography to picking apart that song. The whole idea of imagining a world with no countries is something he’s been fighting his whole life.

“So we envisage a scene with him popping out to get some linseed oil for his cricket bat and hearing a busker singing Imagine. Because he’s Nigel Farage, he just can’t help himself. So he has to stop and tell the busker why she is misguided. I think the vote to leave the EU was at least partly based on huge amounts people saying, ‘I don’t like the way the modern world is’, and there is a lot of comedy in that.”

Nigel Farage Gets His Life Back also forms part of a grand television tradition of biting political satire. Many popular recent TV comedies have used ‎politics as a backdrop – think Veep and The Thick of It.

Bishop, whose recent memorable impressions include Barry Hearn in The Rack Pack and a Peter Andre tribute act in Benidorm, assesses just why comedy and politics make such good bedfellows. “Politics works so well as a setting for comedy because it’s a world that very few of us know anything about. We put an awful lot of trust in politicians. We think that their world is completely above our heads and that they’re much more intelligent than us. But they’re not.

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"In Veep, The Thick of It and Yes Prime Minister, you see that politicians are the same as you and I. They have exactly the same difficulty making decisions as we do. We may only be making decisions about the mortgage, while they’re making decisions about the country, but it’s the same process.”

The actor, who hails from Orpington, near where Farage now lives, also thinks that comedy can refresh the parts of the audience that factual programmes cannot reach. “I know very intelligent people who won’t watch Newsnight, but are more than happy to sit down in front of The Thick of It. When I was growing up, I used to get most of my politics from Have I Got News For You and Spitting Image. I believe political satire has a very important place in the education of our nation. Without it, a huge part of the population would be lost.”

Bishop closes by revealing that others have already been suggesting his next career move to him. “People have been saying to me, ‘Now that you’ve done Nigel Farage, aren’t you going to do Jeremy Corbyn or Theresa May?’” Wouldn’t you just love to see those comedies too?

‘Nigel Farage Gets His Life Back’ is on BBC2 at 10pm on Sunday