The Road to Brexit review: BBC comedy special is the best thing to come out of this whole mess

About 80 per cent of us think the Brexit negotiations have gone badly (you might think that number is actually surprisingly low, given everything). We’re in crisis. People are disgusted, terrified, confused. There are no solutions. We’re stockpiling body bags, the Queen is ready to be rushed to Windsor, and Theresa May is hunkered in a nuclear bunker, real and metaphorical, beneath Whitehall. We don’t know where we’ll be by the weekend. Beyond satire?

Not quite. An anxious nation should be grateful that it can, in this modern Dunkirk hour, draw upon the services of the preternaturally gifted Matt Berry and Arthur Mathews, performer and writer respectively in this one-off enterprise, the story of “the bloodiest battle since the Wars of the Roses”.

The Road to Brexit (BBC2) is easily the best thing to emerge from the whole brexit imbroglio. OK, not much competition, but still... Despite the po-faced title, you realise very quickly that it’s not yet another drama starring Benedict Cumberbatch or yet another attempt by Laura Kuenssberg to explain the inexplicable, or yet another show with the public arguing about stuff they don’t understand. Rather, it’s a very clever, very funny, very “different” parcel of bollocks to Brexit.

Berry is introduced to us as historian Michael Squeamish, author of “Fish and Chips and Frog’s Legs: Britain and Europe since the War”. He has a “lived-in” look, as if he has spent too much time on the port. He cuts an inelegant figure as he wanders around London in his slacks and tweed jacket, seemingly never too far away from a pub or British Eurovision-winning band. A spoof Tory MP nominating Anna Soubry, Chuka Umunna, Sarah Woolaston and Gavin Shuker to reform as Brotherhood of Man, because that name “sounds so pro-European”, was an especially inspired bit of detail.

And so we embark on a caricature journey around all the nonsense we’ve heard over the past three years or so, and indeed longer. The clips of Boris and Nigel about “taking back control” and “independence day” are played again, and we wonder what on earth happened to all that. The European Union, we are told, “was originally a chess club”; in the 1970s “everything was s***ty total chaos”; the EU emerged from the wreckage of “three world wars”; and “Theresa May” became our “first female prime minster” in 2016, despite being “an intensely shy person who had never spoken to another human being until she went to Oxford University”. Squeamish “reveals” that she once offered to play a game of mini snooker with some “random continentals” to decide Britain’s future, but “even this went tits up as the prime minister had never actually played mini snooker before in her life”.

Squeamish mostly tells the story of Britain with more-or-less random archive footage, the stock video every news and current affairs producer has to use to “paint over” abstract ideas and historical narrative. Thus we see some film of a Pyongyang military parade as we hear about sentiment among “Cameron’s Conservatives”, and the Mike Batt band dancing in Womble costumes over an explanation about the European Commission. Hitler, Euro ’96, Cliff Richard, Jeremy Corbyn, and The Paul Daniels Magic Show – it’s all here. As Squeamish explains, with bleak candour, Britain’s relationship with Europe is “often dictated by whatever stock footage is available” – justification enough for using archive film of Archbishop Makarios (President of Cyprus 1960 – 1977) instead of Iain Duncan Smith, and identifying Adam Ant as a symbol of the Tory party (his actual political affiliations have not yet been substantiated).

Every cliché is beaten senseless and every stereotype skewered. Refreshingly, compared to, say, the smug comedy output on BBC Radio 4, Squeamish also takes on a couple of arrogant Remainers, an archetypal Islington couple who claim that the Leave majority in 2016 was “What? About four votes”, and that when a majority is as small as four it is actually a minority. Squeamish also asks the (made up) Islington resident Jemima Codex-Forrester if she thinks there should be any limits on immigration – “a precise figure, please”: “I think half the world’s population could fit into Britain and we probably wouldn’t notice the difference.”

Despite his distinctive sonorous voice, as featured on the Absolute 80s radio channel and a brilliant turn as a useless actor in the superb Toast of London (Channel 4), the multi-talented Matt Berry has not yet received the mass acclamation he so richly deserves. If we ever do leave the EU, and things get a bit dark and dodgy, we will need him more than ever.