Alan B'Stard is back - and this time he is teaming up with Tony Blair. The obnoxious politician, played by Rik Mayall, is returning to the public eye after a break of 15 years.
His television series, The New Statesman, has been turned into a stage play which opens next month in Brighton and in June comes to the Edinburgh Playhouse and the King's Theatre Glasgow.
B'Stard has switched allegiance from the Tories to New Labour, becoming the Prime Minister's right-hand man, in charge of the "Price for Peerages" programme. The satire pokes fun at the Blair government and its fruitless search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
Explaining B'Stard's defection to Labour, Mayall explained: "They are young, they are sexy and they are much more right-wing than the Conservative Party."
Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran, the original writers, have teamed up again to script the play.