Ian Hislop is good at letting the self-important make fools of themselves. His writing with Nick Newman finds humour in historical voices, though The Wipers Times also shows a fondness for its characters that makes wartime look too tidy.
Fi1m perspective
In The Wipers Times (2013), General Mitford’s exchange with a pompous officer turns on the distance between the officer’s importance and what he actually has to say. Ian Hislop and Nick Newman understand that the joke needs the man to remain entirely serious. We laughed because Michael Palin makes the officer’s pomposity seem so needless. The writing gives Palin something precise to work with, without requiring the other character to recognise his own absurdity.
His early television writing included Spitting Image (1984), alongside Newman and others, before the partnership moved into longer stories. Their screenplay for A Bunch of Amateurs (2008) puts a fading Hollywood star among amateur theatre-makers, a premise that offers another opportunity to examine self-importance. Historical comedy has become a recurring interest, with The Wipers Times drawing on a real First World War trench newspaper. The later stage play Spike (2022) concerns Spike Milligan and the early years of The Goon Show.
Hislop and Newman’s use of original satirical material matters in The Wipers Times. Their research gives the humour voices from the time, rather than leaving everything to a present-day writer’s idea of what soldiers might find funny. Andy De Emmony’s film is warm and dry, and Ben Chaplin and Palin give it welcome ease. It is worth an evening for those pleasures, particularly when the dialogue trusts us to hear how little substance there is beneath an inflated military voice.
The weakness is the film’s affection for its characters, which makes wartime feel rather too tidy. Wanting these newspaper-makers to be good company is understandable, but the warmth leaves too little room for discomfort. Hislop’s ear for a pompous sentence is more convincing here than the film’s account of the soldiers’ circumstances. Start with The Wipers Times for a soldiers’ comedy, rather than for a searching account of the trenches.
Biography
Ian Hislop is a British writer, journalist and broadcaster. He is editor of the satirical magazine Private Eye and has co-written several television programmes and films with his long-term collaborator Nick Newman.
Hislop co-wrote the BBC factual drama The Wipers Times (2013), which dramatised the story of a satirical trench newspaper produced during the First World War. He has been a team captain on the BBC quiz show Have I Got News for You since its launch in 1990.
