Bird of Prey

Fanning out across England, a group of Mao-minded revolutionaries tries to seize control of the communication centers. When one of them invades a radio station, an obliging engineer advises that the first air time available is three weeks from Monday. Another rebel bursts into the House of Commons gallery, but his fiery oration is drowned out by a weary debate taking place on the floor. Finally, Prime Minister Harold Wilson gets wind of the revolution and goes on TV.

"I don't think," he says, "it's going to affect me much, er, personally. It's me and my colleagues that've got to be left with the job of governing the country. Decisions have got to be made, perhaps unpopular, but we shall make them. The more unpopular they are, the more we shall make. At last we know where we are going and can see the end of the road." With that, the scene shifts to a car trundling down a beach and plopping ignominiously into the water.

That spoof recently made a big splash on A Series of Birds, the boldest, brashest and most controversial new show on British TV. The star, director, writer and most of the cast are John Bird, 30, whose devastating mimicry of Wilson and other world leaders made him the terror of the telly a few years ago on That Was the Week That Was. But unlike TW3, which confined its satire to a string of short, disconnected vignettes, Bird's new show preys on a wide range of subjects in one continuous 25-minute sketch.

Violence for Peace. It is not so much what Bird says but who he is when he says it. To polish his metallic-voiced, dandruff-flecked,chipmunk-cheeked impersonation of Harold Wilson, he spends hours studying the Prime Minister's "Brechtian performances" on TV, which he likens to "a political guerrilla fight: always backing off, always in retreat, but always seeming to attack."

With a quick change of hair style, posture and camera angle, he turns into a fire-breathing Jomo Kenyatta, a smug Queen Victoria or a lurching Foreign Secretary George Brown, sputtering: "I'm having to solve the Viet Nam war, and you don't see pictures of me doing that, do you? No! You see pictures of me doing the hokey-pokey!" In a recent takeoff on BBC documentaries, he played a mustachioed producer, a brandy-guzzling announcer, an unemployed lathe operator--and the entire British Cabinet. In last week's skit, Bird was a lisping Field Marshal Montgomery who passes up a "Violence for Peace" demonstration to go to Viet Nam and take lessons from a U.S. officer who trained at the "Massachusetts Institute of Guerrilla Warfare" and who wears a counterinsurgency kimono designed by Pucci.

Automatic Shutoff. A graduate of Cambridge, Bird sharpened his claws in The Establishment, a satirical revue, and this year played character roles in three films. Off-camera, the short, puffy satirist is a disheveled and slightly laconic chap who retreats into the ranks of the anonymous. "He doesn't exist," says one of his few close friends, "except in his characters." He lives a secluded life in suburban Chiswick with his wife Anne, the daughter of former U.S. Ambassador to Ireland Grant Stockdale, reads highbrow literary criticism and, he says, sits pondering for hours over his electric typewriter that automatically shuts off whenever he hits on an idea.

If the copy that does get through Bird's typewriter lacks a strong point of view, it is because he has no burning cause except to burn causes. The head-on ideological attacks of The Establishment and TW3, he explains, "became impossible for me because I just didn't know, really, what I thought about so many things, or I thought too many contradictory things. This new show is by no means perfect, but it gives me the opportunity of being more incoherent."

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