Ronni Ancona: The Big Impression aired 25 years ago – it would never get on TV today

This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.

So much comedy has moved online in the past decade and in some ways that’s liberating. Short sketches flourish on YouTube, TikTok and Instagram. Comics can experiment without worrying about whether they’re perceived as past their sell-by date or still in favour with a TV commissioner.

Podcasts have created another outlet for comedy. In the podcast studio, you can jam together like musicians would. It can be more difficult to do that when creating a TV comedy because, in that arena, agents want to know, “Who wrote this?” and “Who has the intellectual property on that?”

In my new podcast, Hal & Ronni in Pieces, comedian Hal Cruttenden and I seek advice from comics like Jo Brand, Omid Djalili and Sally Phillips on how to cope with stress. It’s also a parody, at our expense, about two idiots attempting to make a podcast 10 years too late.

There’s much to celebrate. But the digital era has also been a challenge for comedy impressionism. In The Big Impression (which ran from 1999–2003), Alistair McGowan and I parodied the lives of David and Victoria Beckham, Catherine Zeta-Jones and Michael Douglas, Jerry Hall, Nigella Lawson, Gary Lineker and the royals.

With far fewer channels and no streaming platforms, we notched up millions of viewers on BBC One. We could imagine what the stars we played were like with a fly on the wall-style set-up, because their lives were shrouded in mystery. Before social media, we had no idea what their lifestyles were like, what they ate or where they went on holiday.

Take the late England football manager Sven-Göran Eriksson and his partner Nancy Dell’Olio. We could imagine a world where Nancy was a footballing genius and Sven didn’t understand football. We’d have him sweating over his homework, trying to understand the offside rule and what a holding midfielder is.

Today, any celebrity popular enough for us to satirise would already be on Instagram, showing us what they eat for breakfast, their gym workouts and their kitchen decor. There is less artistic licence to create comedic fantasies.

The Big Impression aired 25 years ago and caught the zeitgeist of celebrities as brand-builders. We reflected that by playing Posh and Becks sitting on thrones at either end of a long table, discussing their Isas and other financial investments. It was perhaps a sign of the times that in the first series we received complaints from celebrities we parodied. Then, in subsequent series, we fielded calls from agents asking why we weren’t satirising their clients!

This form of parody is more absent from our TV screens today. It’s not just social media that’s to blame. In the past, the impressionist Lewis MacLeod and I occasionally performed live as Trump and Melania. But even that is proving trickier, as many of our political and celebrity figures have become parodies of themselves as they attempt to be controversial, to be newsworthy and to stay in the public eye.

In comedy, it’s not just on screen but behind the scenes where we’ve seen change. When I first started out, I experienced shocking sexism. We’d come up with ideas in writers’ rooms and were told “That’s not funny,” before the joke would be credited to a male writer. Female characters, even in sitcoms, were always sensible protagonists – “Oh, Gary, put your trousers back on!” – and constantly feeding lines to the guys. One commissioner turned down a great script as “We’ve already got a female thing.”

There’s still work to do. There is a loyal TV audience out there, but they’re often patronised – that’s particularly the case with women of a certain age. Young people aren’t watching television, and perhaps that ship has sailed. We need to see more middle-aged women represented on screen in a funny, clever, pithy way.

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The Hal & Ronni in Pieces podcast is available now, with episodes dropping weekly until 19 December.

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