WRITTEN IN THE STARS

Having been a master of mockumentaries, British comedy writer John Morton is now taking on a remake of the hit French behind-the-scenes showbiz series Call My Agent!

- RUSSELL BAILLIE

The first two decades of this century marked an explosion and eventual exhaustion of the mockumentary as a television comedy format. In the UK, that meant sending up an innate BBC-ness in shows pretending to film real life. The mock-doco era made big names of Ricky Gervais and Armando Iannucci, among others. But the best skewering of all things Beeb came from writer-director John Morton.

His late-90s first screen mockumentary People Like Us – developed from a BBC radio series that was his big break as a writer, having ditched a career as an English teacher – featured a deeply earnest narrator-interviewer following everyday Britons through a typical working day.

Morton’s mid-to-late 2010s show W1A went inside the BBC, mercilessly mocking the office politics of the public broadcaster. In W1A’s three seasons, Hugh Bonneville played mild-mannered executive Ian Fletcher, grappling with his role as head of values.

Fletcher had first appeared in the earlier Morton series Twenty Twelve, where he was head of deliverance for the fictional Olympic Deliverance Commission. Two seasons were made in the run-up to the 2012 London Olympics. It wasn’t the first show to mockument a games bureaucracy. The “marked conceptual similarities” to his own late-90s mockumentary The Games, in the lead-up to Sydney 2000, miffed comedian/writer John Clarke, who said he had been involved in almost four years of phone conferences and email exchanges with then-BBC comedy head Jon Plowman, who had brought Morton in as a writer, from 2006.