Can serious journalists have fun with Brexit? As long as the facts stand up

You probably think you’ve heard rather a lot already about the UK’s decision to leave the European Union. But there’s plenty more to come: we haven’t even started negotiating our departure yet.

It’s the biggest political issue of our time - and all of us will be affected by it in one way or another. But it’s also incredibly complicated, and many of the details are bafflingly technical.

So BBC Radio 4 wanted a series on Brexit that sounded a little different, in both tone and style. That’s what prompted us to come up with the idea for Brexit: A Guide for the Perplexed - a ten part series of short programmes. 

The premise was to mix humour, music and sound-effects with genuine expertise across a range of topics, to try to present hard facts and analysis in a rather different way.

It’s a difficult balance to strike, but we’re going to be covering Brexit and its aftermath for years to come, and we need to find new ways of telling stories that people want to know more about.

So we set out to raise a smile while dealing with some of the most serious issues of the day. It’s certainly not satire, but it’s not straight news coverage either.

The most important thing about trying to have a bit of fun with a weighty subject is that you should never forget that you have to get the journalism right first.

A less serious tone should not mean that less attention gets paid to the facts. That sounds like a statement of the obvious, but sometimes it does get forgotten. And it is even more difficult to get the balance right when so much of the information surrounding Brexit is bitterly disputed.

We set out to address one basic question in each programme. Who are we negotiating with? How much will the divorce cost? What’s all this about a cliff edge? And so on.

Some of the practical questions that people want an answer to are more difficult to address. How might the NHS be affected? How will it affect the pound in my pocket? What might happen to university research grants?

Well, it depends. And one obvious conclusion of our series is that so much depends on what the government can negotiate in the months and years to come.

When we didn’t know something we said so - using a ‘Brexit Perplexit’ gong to emphasise the point. 

We deliberately avoided big interviews with politicians, simply because there are so many of those on Radio 4 already. We wanted to talk to people who could tell us things that many of us didn’t know. Whisper it softly, but they were experts in their field.

We persuaded a leading divorce lawyer to talk about the tensions which arise when a squabbling couple split (“Who’s going to get the plastic loo brush?”), and a high-brow analyst who has written numerous books on finance to talk about the City of London through the medium of fairy tales.

Other devices used during the series included the classic British film The Italian Job and the legendary BBC radio series The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (or to Brexit in our case). There were also honourable mentions for, among others, the Thunderbirds, Henry VIII and the Sex Pistols.

The style of the programmes was never going to be everyone’s cup of tea. It was always likely to divide opinion a little among what can be a quite conservative Radio 4 audience.

So some people loved it, and we got a lot of good feedback. Others were less keen. A reviewer in The Guardian said it was just a bit too “cheesy”.

Well it was cheesy at times. That was part of the point. At least it wasn’t crackers.

Please have a listen and tell us what you think.

Chris Morris has recently returned from a five year stint reporting for the BBC in Brussels. Brexit: A Guide for the Perplexed was produced by Shabnam Grewal and Chris Bowlby and the editor was Hugh Levinson. The series is available on BBC iPlayer or to download as a podcast.

Reporting on Brexit (and Trump): Political journalists take stock

What has 2016 taught you as a journalist?

James Naughtie: Trump, Brexit and life after Today

The Academy guide to reporting UK politics