W1A fans applaud BBC self-parody’s ‘frighteningly accurate’ and ‘brilliant’ lockdown reunion

Hugh Bonneville led the BBC employees in a Zoom meeting about how the corporation hopes to ‘bounce back’ from the pandemic

The cast of W1A reunited for a lockdown special, and it’s gone down extremely well with fans of the BBC’s self-parody.

W1A is a spoof documentary about BBC employees, taking aim at everything from their fold-up bicycles to their corporate jargon.

The reunion video, titled “Initial Lockdown Meeting”, appeared on a never-used-before YouTube channel on Wednesday night (20 May), with a nod to the show’s hapless intern character in its description box: “Will, when you upload this remember to click ‘Private’.”

Hugh Bonneville, Sarah Parish, Jason Watkins, Monica Dolan and David Westhead all participated in the comedy special, which sees the team figuring out how on earth they are going to fill the TV schedules this summer, what with sporting events cancelled because of the coronavirus pandemic.

“Welcome everybody to the first ever lockdown meeting of the BBC Covid-19 Bounce Back group,” announces Bonneville’s Head of Values.

In a typically baffling manner, he adds: “The remit couldn’t be more exciting – to try to imagine what the new normal will look like and to begin to plot a path towards it from wherever it is we are now.”

Dolan’s Senior Communications Officer worries, at one point, what the broadcaster will do when it runs out of repeats, to which David Westhead’s Controller of News and Current Affairs replies: “Well, we repeat them again, for f***’s sake. That’s how repeats work.”

Fans praised the “frighteningly accurate” show on Twitter, with many quipping “yes, no, brilliant” in reference to the characters’ bizarre diction.

W1A ran for three seasons until 2017, with creator John Morton announcing at the time: “This is probably going to be its final [series]. It was written to a conclusion and with that I mind I thought, ‘This has got to be good.’”

The show’s title is a reference to the central London postcode of the BBC’s head office, Broadcasting House. It was created as a follow-up series to the BBC’s popular Olympics parody Twenty Twelve.