There’s no getting round it: Andy Zaltzmann and John Oliver’s much-vaunted satirical “audio newspaper for a visual world” The Bugle is a Times Online podcast. Luckily, all suspicions of partiality are easily refuted if the pod itself is up to snuff, which The Bugle is.

Consisting of news items off which Zaltzmann and Oliver riff, rather like The News Quiz but without Sandy Toksvig always interrupting, there have been 29 of them so far, each clocking in at more than 30 minutes. As you’d expect from two political satirists who first came to public gaze as part of the much-loved The Department, the repartee is swift and cunningly scripted to appear spontaneous. These days Oliver is a top writer for the fabled The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and lives in New York, so it’s nice that he hasn’t forgotten his roots and can still get down with the little people.

The show attempts to be weekly, but the latest at the time of writing was that for May 19, so it can be a bit of a reach, in this madcap world where news is constantly new, to reach back and recall some of the stories current at the time but now lost in antiquity.

Luckily Zimbabwe is still au courant, so even if the topic at the time was the country’s inflation rate of 165,000 per cent – “they must be looking at Britain with its 3.7 per cent and laughing in total derision” – there was state-sponsored violence to decry, just as there is now. The man beaten up by Mugabe’s goons and then given a certificate to show that he had been, in case anyone else felt like having a go, is as relevant now as he was then. Interesting observation: Oliver pronounces “furore” as “fuhrer”, which may be deliberate in this context.

My favourite segment, though, is the one in which Oliver actually pretends to be an American, in an accent so awful that it’s a mirror image of Dick Van Dyke’s “Cockney” in Mary Poppins. Stung by the criticism, Oliver establishes his bona fides: “Waddaya mean?” he says in his normal voice. “I left my apartment, and went down to my automobile, which was parked by the sidewalk. I opened the trunk, and found it full of potato chips.” It’s uncannily authentic.

www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/audio_video/podcasts/the_bugle/

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