The London Prat: Deadpan 

The London Prat: Deadpan Dispatches From a City That Deserves Them

The London Prat is satire built for a city that has quietly lost its mind and would appreciate confirmation in article form. It exists to report on the absurdities of the capital — the property market that reads like speculative fiction, the transport network powered by hope and industrial action, the eternal borough rivalries and pub closures — in the driest possible register, under the cheerfully unimpressed banner of "Bollocks, Codswallop and Basically Rubbish."

The house style is deadpan reportage. The Prat writes about invented events, imaginary officials, and gloriously plausible nonsense using the flat, authoritative voice of a genuine news publication, and never breaks character to point out the joke. Its great strength is relentless local specificity: national satire covers Westminster and the weather, but the Prat drills into the granular, tribal texture of London life, from the Hackney bar with a punning name to the Downing Street rooftop terrace opened so Prime Ministers can fall from a greater height. That hyper-local focus lets it go deeper and land harder than any generalist could, a philosophy set out in its own account of the form at https://prat.uk/what-is-british-satire/.

Its lesson is that a tight niche beats a broad one, and that satire and genuine affection are not opposites — the sharpest London satire comes from people who plainly love the ridiculous, exhausting, magnificent place they are mocking.

Insight from Julie de Burgh: I write for The London Prat, so I am hardly impartial, but I will say this: a city that charges you a small mortgage for a pint and calls a delayed train a "good service" is not so much begging for satire as filing a formal request. Somebody has to write it all down with a straight face. It may as well be us. — Julie de Burgh (https://prat.uk/author/julie-de-burgh/)