© Sam Delaney's News Thing/RTFormer Ukip leader Nigel Farage is ‘knighted’ by a little girl dressed as the Queen.
A few months into making my show Sam Delaney's News Thing, which I hosted for two-and-a-half years on RT UK (the channel formerly known as Russia Today), we made a sketch called Diana in Heaven. It featured the writer and broadcaster Andy Dawson dressed in a blond wig and pearls, giving celebrity gossip reports from the afterlife. Dawson is a middle-aged, overweight man from Sunderland. He delivered his (awful) impression of Diana in front of a shabby celestial backdrop, while swigging from a can of lager. The production team and I thought it was hilarious, but when the channel boss saw it he was unimpressed. "You cannot broadcast this sketch!" he told us in his firm Russian accent. "There are some things the British public just won't accept."
So we removed it. I mean, we liked it, but not enough to make a stand and fall out with the channel. We were surprised they took the memory of the Princess of Wales so seriously. After all, it was the first - and almost the last - time RT had interfered in any of our output. But in many ways, the incident embodied our relationship: fun, yes, but also a bit stressful and confusing.
I first entered RT's London studios in 2015, when I was promoting a book I had written about political advertising, Mad Men & Bad Men. I had never heard of RT, but my publisher told me it was a good place to sell books such as mine because it had a politically engaged audience.
I was interviewed by Afhsin Rattansi, the British journalist who now hosts RT's news show, Going Underground. Charming but provocative, Rattansi had previously worked on Radio 4's Today programme and CNN. The interview was surprisingly robust but I enjoyed myself.
On my way out, a producer told me he was in the market for a topical comedy show. At the time, I was still editor-in-chief at Comedy Central UK, and he thought I might have some ideas. I did. I had been developing a format with the producer Ben Rigden, who once ran The Big Breakfast and Richard & Judy, as well as devising Fighting Talk for BBC Radio 5 Live. Together, we came up with a show that featured me as host, plus a panel of guest comics and journalists, and a big political interview. It was anarchic and irreverent and frequently stupid. It was probably too daft to be described as proper satire; mostly, we were inspired by the spirit of Viz magazine.
But the channel seemed to like it. I was introduced to the boss, Nikolay Bogachihin (who remains the only Russian person I ever met there). He is a quietly spoken man in his late 30s whose deadpan persona, I learned, hid a very good sense of humour. I liked him a lot. He commissioned a pilot. The guests on our first, unaired episode were the comedians Sara Pascoe, Richard Herring and Des Clarke, alongside an interview with the former SNP leader Alex Salmond (this was years before RT gave him his own show). It went well enough for the channel to commission six months' worth of episodes.
I was, by then, aware of RT's reputation. The channel is part-funded by the Russian state and some of its coverage of the conflict with Ukraine had been criticised for extreme pro-Russian bias. Ofcom, the body that regulates every broadcast news outlet in the UK, had censured RT for its lack of impartiality, as well as for presenting misleading information over the BBC's coverage of a chemical weapons attack in Syria (RT claimed the BBC had staged the attack). Its discussion shows were frequently accused of giving platforms to screwballs and conspiracy theorists.
My own concerns were obvious: would the channel try to bend our daft entertainment to some sinister political agenda? My gut said it was unlikely. They already had enough angry content. I was confident they wanted an outsider who could lighten the mood a bit. Nevertheless, we decided to proceed with extreme caution.
I told Bogachihin that my production company would make the show independently and sell it to RT. We wanted to maintain stringent control - over everything from the guests we booked to the scripts we wrote. At the time, Going Underground and the channel's local news coverage were all produced by an in-house team; we were RT's first independent commission. Since then, there have been several more, including Alex Salmond's political discussion show.
During the week, we produced the show from our offices in Southwark, south London. On Fridays we went to RT's studios on the 16th floor of Millbank Tower in Westminster to record the show. From the offices, there are sweeping views across the river to the MI6 building and out to the Houses of Parliament. Our guests loved that.
In one of our first episodes to air, in November 2015, we covered the Russian Olympic doping scandal, and delivered what we thought was a provocative depiction of Russia as a nation of cheats. It was our way of testing the water. The channel checked it before it went out (a standard procedure for any broadcaster) and made no changes. We started to feel reassured.
As time went by, we were astounded by the freedom we were given. Some of the stuff we broadcast on News Thing was so juvenile, offensive and, sometimes, terrible that we expected to be kicked out at any moment. But we rarely saw the boss; we rarely had any interaction with the channel at all. That was almost suspicious in itself. Everyone on News Thing had worked for terrestrial channels for years; none of us had ever experienced such laissez-faire management.
For its first 18 months, the channel seemed to fly under the radar. Not many people paid attention, and the audience for News Thing was under 40,000 a week. But we attracted a big social media following, and made it our business to generate as much noise as we could. We booked high-profile political guests such as John Prescott, Alastair Campbell, Neil Kinnock and Vince Cable. Rising stars of the Tory party, including MPs James Cleverley, Johnny Mercer and Kwasi Kwarteng, also appeared. We booked columnists from all the main papers: Giles Coren, Andrew Pierce and Michael White, the Guardian's former political editor, were regulars on our panel.
We teased our guests, made them play silly games and encouraged them to muck about. Ken Livingstone sang a duet of the Phil Collins track Easy Lover with me to close an episode. Former Ukip leader Paul Nuttall was subjected to a phoney psychometric test while wearing a colander on his head covered with wires. Prescott ate a platter of oranges sprinkled with Oxo cubes, a tribute to Cilla Black. Everyone seemed to enjoy themselves and most returned for more.
Our most famous prank was getting a little girl to dress up as the Queen and pretend to knight Nigel Farage. We had primed her to say: "My mummy says you hate foreigners." The clip went viral, with 4m views and made headlines around the world. George Osborne was one of the first to retweet it, along with the comment: "This deserves a wider audience." The comic Sarah Silverman shared it with her 10 million followers alongside the comment: "THIS IS THE GREATEST THING EVER!" For a while, the show felt like it was flying.
© YoutubeNeil Kinnock rates Jeremy Corbyn’s performance on News Thing.
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Conspiracy theorists - and even some mainstream journalists - began to accuse us of being part of what they called Putin's propaganda machine. This seemed laughable to us. For a start, we had complete editorial independence. Plus, everyone involved in making the show was essentially left of centre, your typical metropolitan liberal dickhead types (including me). Our output was often dumb and sweary, but usually balanced and pretty moderate in its views. We criticised Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn equally. The show was consistently pro-remain. The channel's marketing slogan was: "Question more". It was true that programmes such as Going Underground or George Galloway's weekly discussion show liked to challenge what they saw as the lazy bias of western neoliberals; by comparison, News Thing was positively wishy-washy and mainstream.
But RT didn't seem to care much about us. Even when our Farage stunt went global, Bogachihin just smirked and said: "Just the sort of thing that you liberals find funny, I suppose." I started to question what my role really was. "Useful idiot" is a term I learned from watching Homeland on Channel 4, a phrase used by Russian intelligence operatives to describe a seemingly benign court jester who provides handy distraction from the more sinister stuff. Was I RT's useful idiot?
Our content wasn't all daft. I would occasionally deliver fairly impassioned monologues on things I felt strongly about. I suggested that the Grenfell Tower fire was the consequence of a "systemic neglect of the poor and disenfranchised by the ugliest face of profiteering, turbo-capitalism". I said I thought Amber Rudd and Theresa May should resign in shame over the Windrush scandal. My guest on that show, the TV chef Rustie Lee, said that as a member of the Windrush generation she felt humiliated, and that the government should "stick [its] apology where the sun doesn't shine". It was a heartfelt rant that reached a big audience.
Interestingly, the RT social media team would seem particularly supportive of this sort of output, heavily retweeting the show - perhaps because these speeches were critical of the government and scornful of the state of British society. They paid far less attention when we were just being silly, or more mainstream in our views.
We spent just a few hours in the RT studio each week, and had little interaction with the channel's staff. But when the Daily Mail published an "inside report" of the newsroom in November last year, I had seen enough to know it was widely exaggerated. The article portrayed a sinister propaganda machine, with rows of journalists hunched over computers producing fake news. The truth, as far as I could see, was rather more mundane. Almost everyone who worked on RT's news team was British. They were mostly young journalists, many in their first jobs, gaining what looked like valuable experience in news reporting and television production. Most of them seemed bemused by the perception that they were employed as propagandists.
I remember the day Theresa May got up in the Commons to give her statement following the novichok poisoning of Sergei and Julia Skripal in Salisbury in March. I was told that, at Millbank, young RT journalists gathered around the TV nervously waiting to see if she would (as some MPs proposed) shut the channel down. They all had rent to pay and were scared about the fallout of being caught up in a geopolitical scandal.
The scene was very similar in our production offices. We knew the writing was on the wall. Overnight, the negativity surrounding the channel increased hugely, largely fed by RT's questioning of Russia's culpability in the poisoning. The show and everyone who worked on it was at risk of being stigmatised by association.
Our contract would come to an end in June, and we decided we would not renew. It was becoming harder and harder to book guests. The MPs who had become friends of the show told us, off the record, that they couldn't come on any more; their party chiefs had forbidden them from appearing.
In the end, the channel got there first. They told us that they expected to be shut down by Ofcom sooner or later, and had been ordered by Moscow to cut their independently made shows. I was called into Bogachihin's office as we prepared to record a show in late April. He was honest and frank about the decision, even joking that "now at least you won't have to listen to people saying you work for Putin". I got the sense that, if it had been down to him, Bogachihin would have kept the show going: the positive news we generated was a respite from all the criticism. But my overriding feeling was one of relief. I had enjoyed making News Thing, but the association with RT had become toxic, however sure I was of our own independence.
Oddly, other independent shows - Alex Salmond's, for one - have continued. Perhaps they were deemed more reliably anti-establishment. Hiring an extremely high-profile politician such as Salmond had been a real coup for RT, and certainly his chatshow was a better fit than my weekly output of profanity and pranks. Ultimately, News Thing didn't have enough impact on the channel's reputation one way or the other. In that sense, I was more of a useless idiot.
Were we naive in going to work for RT? I don't think so. In 2015, it was not particularly controversial. Yes, we knew there were Kremlin links; but we were satisfied by the channel's Ofcom-regulated status, as well as its pledge to allow us complete editorial independence.
We were also attracted by their risk-taking mentality. We had more creative freedom than any of us had had elsewhere, from the BBC, ITV, Sky, the Guardian and pretty much every other mainstream media outlet you might care to mention. And despite this, we were (slightly disappointingly) never once sanctioned by Ofcom ourselves.
The truth is, RT was the only channel that wanted us in 2015. Had the BBC or Channel 4 or anyone even a bit less controversial wanted to broadcast the show, we would have bitten their arm off. But I'm not sure we would have been afforded the same freedom.
In a news story about our 2017 Farage stunt, Buzzfeed's then political editor Jim Waterson (now the Guardian's media editor) wrote of News Thing: "Although RT has been repeatedly accused of being a propaganda front for the Kremlin's interests in the West, it is unclear how this show fits into that pattern." And he was right. We never knew how we fitted in, either.
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