And there are striking parallels to be drawn between then and now. TW3 was developed during the crumbling reign of a tired, discredited, ineptly led Conservative government with a new, younger, thrusting Labour Party waiting to take over. MacMillan's government gave satirists a big fat, soft target to aim at Ditto Major's. MacMillan's successor, Harold Wilson, soon provided satirists (and impressionists) with another easy target.

Likewise Blair.But there were key differences between then and now. In the early Sixties, political satire had never been seen on television before and TW3 was tapping into real social changes.John Fortune, whose satire CV runs from the TW3 gang through to Rory Bremner, says: "Right at the beginning, when we mentioned Harold Macmillan's name, there was a kind of intake of breath in the audience - a kind of ... gosh, you're not going to talk about him, are you? Because that's very shocking. And I remember that within six months of that, you only had to mention Harold Macmillan's name and people laughed immediately.

Now the problem is that you've got to kind of imbue politicians with some kind of dignity before you can take the piss out of them."So what's the point of attacking them? If it ain't hurting, is political satire working? What's more, bizarre mutation seems to have evolved: politicians who not only are immune to satirical attack, but even thrive on it.Jeremy Hardy says: "I talk to Labour MPs now and they're obsessed with the idea that comedy is the future of politics They all want to be funny. They think that TV programmes like Have I Got News For You are subversive. There's a sense now that if you can survive Ian Hislop being rude to you or Clive Anderson making a joke at your expense on telly then you're doing pretty well as a politician. It's clearly not subverting anything, because they want to take part."Jon Plowman, Head of Comedy Entertainment at the BBC, concurs with this view. "Whenever we've done things where we've asked MPs to appear on something mildly amusing, they're gagging to do it, because you're seen in company of people who make the public laugh, and by implication you're being seen as one of the good guys."But how politically motivated has satire on television ever been, anyway? Stuart Hood, BBC controller at the time of TW3, denies that the programme makers were ever really trying to change the world. "Yes they were radical and they knew the system was rotten in certain ways But they weren't going to change anything It was the boys getting back at the headmasters. It's a kind of high-class clowning, really."That "clowning" lives on in the smart and smug demeanour of Hislop, Deayton, Iannucci, et al.