Review of the perpetually furious character's latest political show

Jonathan Pie has been invited to speak at an AI symposium. The only rules: no swearing or politics. That doesn’t leave much in his repertoire.

The conceit of the first half is that – oh, irony – the tech has failed for the planned introductory video. Hence an unprepared Pie is dragged out of the dressing room to fill time. But given that – like fellow divorced dad Alan Partridge – this fictional news reporter has always wanted to give stand-up a try, why not seize the day?

The result is a rather wobbly routine with creator Tom Walker talking in character about the process of stand-up, confessing he’s not an actual comedian while raising hack topics such as making odd noises when he rises from his chair in middle age and the annoyance of people playing music out loud on public transport. However the latter routine does earn the first applause break of the night as the one topic guaranteed to unite a nation, or at least the non-cunty part of it.

The premise that he’s not a great stand-up is not enough to cover the writing’s weaknesses with knowingness… but, as ever with Pie, the performance is unrivalled. And – wouldn’t you know it? – it’s when he unleashes one of his trademark florid rants that things pick up, even though some of the content, such as the poison of phone addiction, is rather too earnest.

He is on firmer, more familiar ground in the second half, packed with astute, astringent and legitimate rage at the state of the world in general and politics in particular.

And what a grim place we are in. The days of hapless David Cameron, Theresa May and Boris Johnson and their incompetent self-serving Cabinets, when Pie first came to prominence, now really do seem like sunlit uplands in comparison to the toxic bad faith polluting the current landscape.

The fury in this show is directed at the global cabal of psychopathic billionaires and the divisive far-right media and political mouthpieces they fund to amplify hatred and destabilise societies – all accelerated by the seismic changes the tech titans’ unregulated AI will wreak.

It’s not exactly the sort of jolly ‘isn’t Trump a petulant orange-skinned idiot?’ badinage that makes up so much other supposed satire, and Walker’s ambition is to be applauded. But sometimes it’s hard to laugh – even bitterly – at such a bleak appraisal. There is a simplicity to Pie just mentioning Liz Truss’s name to hoots of derision, which still works here; the laughs come harder with the dystopian vision he now projects.

Walker is very well informed, every scandal that graces the pages of Private Eye seems to find its way into his set, deservedly spreading the news to a wider audience. Anything that further exposes Restore Britain’s Rupert Lowe for the vile creature he is, is a righteous cause. 

Though he is a devoted centrist – earning him online opprobrium from both sides convinced he is a shill for the other – Pie’s main targets are the far right. That content  includes an enlightening history of the St George’s flag which is not what those who slavishly rally behind it would want to hear.

But he does take on the other side, too, tackling the woke overreach where every minor transgression from the highest progressive standards is grounds for ostracism – an atmosphere that seems to be receding as the Overton Window of acceptably expressed opinions (a concept Pie explains a bit professorially) shifts rightward.

A key artifice here is that he’s got an AI co-host, a hot Australian avatar called Audrey, supposedly to provide context and to hold him to that ‘no swearing, no politics’ contract - a fool’s errand if ever there was one. The joke is that she ‘takes the air out of’ every diatribe just as it starts to crescendo – but you wonder why Walker would want to do undercut his rants, given that such uncontrolled fury is his trademark.

However, it is a neat turnaround when the bot morphs into Pie and turns the tables, fiercely roasting him about creative stagnation and waning relevance – concerns, it seems, that prey on Walker’s mind.

Yet a strong voice from the centre seems more needed the more society divides. His robust defence of London as a success of multiculturalism that’s statistically less dangerous that most comparable metropolises, whatever right-wing shit-stirrers want their followers to believe, fair brings a lump of pride to the throats of those of us who live there. 

Is it comedy? Not always - but often enough. More crucially, it seems important.

Review date: 4 Oct 2026
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Reading Hexagon