Thread by @chrismorrisbits

Remember when Michael Gove tried his hand at satire and compared Prince Charles to Adolf Hitler?

Love the promotional image for this show - looks like if Baddiel and Gove decided to release a New Wave album

Against my better judgment, I'm sifting through A Stab in the Dark on All 4. Michael Gove's jokes fall flat. The awkwardness is palpable. This is within the first two minutes of the first episode. What were they thinking?

Five minutes into episode one and Michael Gove is sifting through Sting’s bin. I shit you not.

Gove on the Hitler/Prince Charles comparison: “There is one difference, however: when Adolf’s wife tried to commit suicide, she succeeded.”

Cue nervous laughter from the audience.

Tracey MacLeod on Princess Di’s battle with bulimia: "How clever of her to reinvent herself from the empty-headed walkman woman of the 80s to the most sparkling recruit to the new victim culture."

Michael Gove has an uncomfortable sit-down interview with Sir Peter Bottomley MP about Northern Ireland, who, irritated with Gove's repeated claims of the government making concessions to the IRA, says "I'm very tempted to kneecap you. Just kick you gently there”.

Michael Gove here, claiming that people seeking private healthcare to jump queues is unfair.

Some years later, he co-authored a book which suggested that the NHS should be replaced by an insurance system and called for the private sector to be brought in.

Michael Gove and David Baddiel, helpfully showing us where the clitoris is.

Gove on homosexuality in the Army: "It’s hard to conceive of an organisation more attractive to homosexuals than the Army, apart from the Navy.”

They… MUCK ABOUT.

Sit-down interview with General Sir Anthony Heritage Farrar-Hockley about gay soldiers, and I’m honestly not sure who comes off worse.

“Surely other soldiers wouldn’t want to attack homosexuals… they’d admire them, as they’re well turned out, physically fit, and they want to impress other men!”

“I think you’re being rather discriminating about homosexuals - they’re people like the rest of us"

For some reason they decided to induce nausea in the audience by filming this Gove segment on a moving platform?

Gove does a sit-down interview with a convicted armed robber, but instead of simply obscuring his face or using shadows/camera angles to hide it, the robber sits there in a suit and balaclava

Unsurprisingly, Michael Gove doesn't think polytechnics are universities. He went onto become education secretary. (Featuring more nausea-inducing camera work)

Gove interviews the late Tessa Jowell on maternity leave: “No-one forces women to have children, so why should they be subsidised to have babies and to take three months off? No-one would subsidise me if I took three months off to go on holiday."

Gove repeatedly asserts that nobody forces women to have children and wonders why the government subsidises maternity leave. Tessa Jowell calls his views ridiculous to unanimous applause from the audience.

He ends the interview there, presumably because he’s made himself out to be even more of a prick than he already is.

‘Why can’t they pay for it themselves?' asks Gove, who now owns two properties worth well over £1m, earns around £150k per year from government duties, and before entering government earned at least £70,000 a year on top of his MP’s salary from journalism and book-writing.

Gove interviews Lady Olga Maitland MP and suggests going to war with Liechtenstein to get back money stolen by Robert Maxwell.

In the same interview, he ponders if the royal family should be bugged in order to prevent more scandals like Charles and Diana.

I genuinely can’t tell if he’s joking or not.

Interview with Hugh Dykes MP in which he suggests that Britain merges with Germany. Lots of awkward silence from the audience. God bless him, he’s not a performer.

Michael Gove speaks to Jerry Hayes MP about sex education. Gove suggests doubling child benefits for teenagers who can wait until they’re 21 years old to have a kid, and then takes a swipe against Essex girls for some reason

Baddiel asks two members of the audience how much they’d have to be paid to sleep with Michael Gove. The first girl says she wouldn’t even for one hundred million pounds, but the second girl, without a moments hesitation, proudly answers ‘Nothing.'

Does anybody have access to episode 8 of A Stab In the Dark? I wondered why it was missing from All 4, but it turns out that it features none other than Jimmy Savile. I can’t find any other information about it.

Also featured in the episode with Savile were Jim Bowen and Diane Abbott. Information is very scarce...

This must exist somewhere. The episode with Max Clifford is still up on All 4, as is Rolf Harris’s appearance in Brass Eye, so I can’t help but wonder what happened with Savile on A Stab In the Dark to have it expunged entirely.

While I try and find more info, please enjoy this clip of Michael Gove rummaging through Richard Attenborough’s bin

*David Attenborough

Future education secretary Michael Gove suggests that reducing truancy is 'the nanny state dictating how individuals should lead their lives'

Gove on MPs wages: "Surely, far from equipping them to do their job better, earning so much must hinder them in representing their constituents. [It's] twice the average annual wage, so earning so much must insulate MPs from real life."

He goes on: "If MPs really want to do their job properly, why don't they take a pay cut now, and accept only the average working wage each year, showing solidarity to the average constituent?"

Alan Clark is interviewed by Gove and gets jeered by the audience after Clark suggests that none of them would be able to find East Timor on a map. Gove says: “If they are ignorant of its whereabouts that’s probably due to Conservative education policies”.

How prescient.

After Clark suggests that Iraq was ‘a friendly country until we went to war with it’, Gove holds up pictures to the camera of the lifeless bodies of Kurdish civilians who were gassed, with no word of warning.

There’s a child in one of the pictures, presumably dead. What the fucking fuck?

That’s easily the most disturbing thing I’ve seen so far. He just holds the photo up to the camera like it’s nothing.

Oh, going back to the missing episodes thing - episode 10 is also missing from All 4, as it features Michael Gove interviewing Max Clifford. Thankfully, this clip still exists...

Following a discussion about Antonia de Sancha, Michael Gove asks Max Clifford if young women in the audience have the potential to make money

Gove signs off the Clifford interview by saying "I'll find a beautiful and powerful woman and entice her into bed, [...] and I'll be on the phone to you afterwards, Max."

I think I'm done with this now. Sorry for clogging up your feeds all day, and if you want to see more of Michael Gove's biting satire on A Stab in the Dark, take a look at this video:

I promise I'll be done with Gove after this, but this monologue on the Scottish deserves to be seen.