Weeks before Britain held an election this summer, around four million TV viewers tuned in to the season finale of “Have I Got News for You,” a long-running BBC panel show.
For any lawmakers watching, it would have been uncomfortable viewing.
That week’s host and four panelists made absurd jokes while answering questions about the news, first mocking the Conservative Party’s chances of winning the coming election, then poking fun at Keir Starmer, the leader of the opposition Labour Party, for constantly mentioning in speeches that his father was a toolmaker. (The comedian Jack Dee teased that Starmer’s father had made at least one tool: his son.)
Filled with snarky humor, the episode was typical of a show that, since launching in 1990, has skewered Britain’s politicians — often to their faces. Lawmakers, including former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, have been regular guests.
Now, in the middle of a different election cycle, CNN will on Saturday debut a U.S. version of “Have I Got News for You” — hosted by the comedian Roy Wood Jr. — in hopes that the network’s viewers have an appetite for something irreverent amid its serious news coverage.
Despite the show’s popularity in Britain, CNN’s choice to premiere the satirical show during an election year comes with an obvious risk: If viewers perceive the jokes as favoring either the Democrat or Republican parties, it could damage the network’s attempts to position itself as the most centrist of the U.S. cable news networks — an effort that is already under attack from former President Donald Trump, who has repeatedly accused CNN of bias.
David D’Alessio, a professor of communication at the University of Connecticut, said it was a “crazy decision” to launch the show this fall, when both parties were looking for opportunities to portray themselves as under attack from major news outlets. “Has someone at CNN lost their mind?” D’Alessio wondered.
In its British format, “Have I Got News for You,” is pretty simple. Each episode sees two team captains — Paul Merton, a comedian, and Ian Hislop, the editor of the satirical and investigative magazine Private Eye — make wisecracks about the news, with the help of guests, who often include politicians or media figures. A guest host awards the points.
Johnson, the former prime minister, hosted regularly until he became mayor of London, in 2008, and several of his biographers have noted how he used the show to hone his bumbling public persona. More recently, Jess Phillips, a left-wing lawmaker, and Baroness Warsi, a Conservative, have been regular guests, winning fans by joking about their own parties as much as their opponents.
The first CNN show won’t include any politicians, though Wood, who will host all the U.S. episodes, said by phone that he hoped they would join eventually. (His wish list included Nikki Haley, Ted Cruz and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, he said.) British politicians were “more open to being lampooned” than their American counterparts, he said.
Instead, the comedians Amber Ruffin and Michael Ian Black will join Wood as team captains, and Robin Thede, an actor and comedian, and Matt Welch, a libertarian pundit, will appear as guests.
Wood said the tone would be less “righteous” than political satire on late night TV. “The show is set up as a game show,” he said: “It is serious, but let’s deliver a format that has a bit of lightness to it.”
Hit British TV shows are often quickly remade for U.S. networks, but it has taken 34 years for “Have I Got News for You” to cross the Atlantic. Jimmy Mulville, the co-founder of Hat Trick, the British production company behind the series, said that he had come close to selling a U.S. version before, even making pilots for Bravo, NBC and CBS, but none of those networks went on to commission the show.
In the end, it took a British expatriate to secure the show’s American transfer. Mulville said that, at the start of this year, he pitched the idea to Mark Thompson, CNN’s British-born chairman and a former BBC executive. (Between stints at the BBC and CNN, Thompson was the chief executive of The New York Times Company.) Mulville said the idea “immediately landed” with Thompson, especially the potential for launching in the lead-up to the election. (A spokesman for Thompson declined an interview request.)
During British elections, “Have I Got News for You” has to comply with strict impartiality legislation that sets conditions on who can appear on TV and what they can talk about. American broadcasters don’t have to deal with such rules, but Mulville said the show was best when it was nonpartisan.
In a recent run through, Mulville said, the teams joked about the Democratic Convention and Robert F. Kennedy’s endorsement of Trump. He expected Saturday’s debut show to include jokes about this week’s presidential debate, he added.
He knew the show’s British version was on the right track when social media complaints came “equally from the right and left,” Mulville said. A show like “Have I Got News for You,” he added, “has to be equally abusive to all comers.”
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