“If I see somebody become famous, and they’ve got tremendously predominant mannerisms and they speak a certain way which is unusual, I go for it right away,” the veteran impressionist Mike Yarwood once said of the public figures he mimicked.
“You’ve got that younger audience, aged from 20 to 30, who don’t know who the BBC weather people are, and they won’t know who Monty Don is,” he said. “If I say ‘He’s a presenter on Gardeners’ World’, they’d say ‘What’s that?’. If I say ‘It’s a programme on BBC Two’, they’d say ‘What’s that?’” “We saw that when satellite TV was coming in, and there were concerns that it would make everything too fragmented. Of course the whole art of it became a different landscape to the way Yarwood did it in the 70s, but there was still plenty to go at. Things find their rhythms,” he said.
He said: “It’ll be the ones that make you laugh, or the ones who you think ‘they’ve got some character’, or ‘we can put a handle on to that’. Jordan Peterson was that for me, he’s always there with his advice.