Comedy revolution: political pranksters at large

The cheerful mood quickly changes as we hop out of the people carrier, parked in the shadow of Westminster Abbey. Producer Tom Harris explains why: ‘This is battlefield mode when we don’t do any f***ing around.’ Jolyon Rubinstein (above right) and Heydon Prowse (above left), the 32-year-old TV pranksters whose BAFTA-winning show The Revolution Will Be Televised has turned f***ing around into a ratings-grabbing art form, are meticulous about planning and don’t like leaving anything to chance. They pull their specially printed 6ft x 4ft sign out of the back of the car, give the coat-hanger hooks and cable ties a final check and head briskly towards the Palace of Westminster, with our photo-grapher ahead of them. They usher me to walk between them on the other side of the sign, so that its satirical lettering is less visible, and as we round the Abbey they point out the huddles of policemen guarding Parliament.

The objective is to put a massive For Sale sign on the Commons before the hundreds of coppers lining the gate can step in — a mini protest against Westminster’s periodically exposed problem with cash-for-influence. One of the pair’s biggest concerns is the role of money in politics, and they gleefully list half a dozen recent stories of cash for peerages, donations for dinners and advice for hire.

All morning has been spent trying to ensure that they won’t be apprehended. Rubinstein and Prowse are doing this stunt to show me how it works, and that starts two hours earlier in the Camden office of their production company, weighing up the relative merits of cable ties and bent coat hangers. They are looking at a Google street view image of Parliament, trying to work out the thickness of the top rung of the fencing in the target area. They test the chosen fastening mechanism on an iron gate outside the office, speculate nervously about what will happen if it takes too long to attach and then sit around a table inside with Tom and the photographer for a final briefing.

Prowse did something like this a few years ago for Don’t Panic, the online magazine where he made his name when he dug a pound sign-shaped flowerbed in Tory shadow minister Alan Duncan’s garden during the expenses scandal and then recorded the MP saying his colleagues live on ‘rations’ during a follow-up meeting. The sting ended Duncan’s frontline political career and launched Prowse’s comedic one.

Rubinstein and Prowse have known each other since school — the independent King Alfred School in Hampstead, or ‘a school in North London’ as Rubinstein puts it when I ask. They seem sensitive about their middle-classdom, bristling at a suggestion — which I cannot find anywhere in print but has presumably been made to them online — that they are ‘class traitors’ for attacking and ridiculing the Establishment. Both attended Sussex University: Rubinstein reading politics and international relations, and Prowse philo-sophy and cognitive science. They grew up in the same North London circles as Ms Dynamite and Rudimental, and say there is now a ‘little crew of politically or socially aware comedian-type people’ — such as the prankster Nimrod Kämer — with whom they work and socialise.

A few hours after I part company with them, Rubinstein is off to do an Oxfam telethon with Stephen Merchant, Jamie Oliver and Lisa Snowden, and after the BAFTAs earlier this year (at which the show won Best Comedy) the pair — both of whom are single — got ‘very drunk’ with Idris Elba and Damian Lewis and ended up losing their award.

Rubinstein describes what they do as ‘a sort of art form of political activism meets citizen journalism meets comedy’. They first realised it could find a mainstream audience when one of their prank videos went viral on YouTube. In the first series of The Revolution Will Be Televised they delivered a stained-glass window of Tony Blair as a saint to his London home and tricked the armed guard into letting them bring it in and try it for size. In this series they persuade the Saudi Arabian embassy to let them in to install a glass pane ‘to protect women from their aspirations’ and hand David Cameron what they call a Bullingdon Club compilation album. ‘In the second series the production team are a bunch of ninjas who know exactly what they’re doing and know exactly how to get into anywhere and they’ve got balls of steel,’ says Rubinstein as we make the final preparations for our assignment.

They put their success, waltzing into politicians’ houses, party conferences and highly secure embassies, down to supreme confidence and — often — the unthinkingness of people in authority. And Rubinstein believes they will still be able to pull it off as they become better known: ‘I’ve spoken to Adam Boulton [the political editor of Sky News] while I’m in character in both series and he hasn’t recognised me,’ he boasts. ‘There’s plenty of people out there still to get.’ If money was no object, he says he would put a burka on the Statue of Liberty, and a niqab on Big Ben for good measure. Prowse says he’d like to sunbathe on Richard Branson’s Necker Island, taking advantage of a local law that all beaches are publicly owned.

Amazingly, they have never actually been arrested, often weaselling their way out of police questioning with their mischievous charm, aided, says Rubinstein, by the fact that they are ‘middle class and white’. Their hairiest moment was when Prowse was held for two and a half hours at the International Criminal Court, with various lawyers from their production company making nervous calls to secure his release.

As the people carrier travels towards Westminster Bridge, I tell the boys they seem much more political in person than on screen. ‘We give a shit about this stuff, every sketch comes from that,’ says Rubinstein. ‘Because we do care about stuff, we do sometimes think up sketches and then think, maybe that is a bit pious, that isn’t funny,’ admits Prowse. He says he thinks too much comedy doesn’t have a point but desperately tries to squeeze the last bit of humour out of social situations: ‘There’s so much fertile comedic ground in politics, it is naturally funny because it is just completely ridiculous what’s happening.’